Recognizing I Was Not Alone
It was early 2024, just over 3 months before I got sober, when the beginning of the end of my addiction happened. I was sitting on my couch in an apartment that looked like a tornado had just ran through it. That tornado though, was just a blackout drunk Jason. To this day, I am not sure why I trashed my apartment that night. I actually vividly remember getting home, not in a blackout, after having a good night. That was the last thing I remember though. I woke up the next morning and my things were everywhere. It was a mess.
Instead of waking up to this disaster and deciding to clean up, I decided to continue drinking and doing cocaine. It had been a couple months at this point that I knew something was horribly wrong. Up to this point I had been in a cycle of trading one drug for another; weed and alcohol for just alcohol, then alcohol and Xanax, then back to just alcohol, then alcohol and cocaine.
This time though, I could not use alcohol to get off cocaine. I had tried. I had sworn off, telling myself I'd never do cocaine again on multiple occasions. It didn't work.
Through my cries for help, my father found somebody who could help me. For anonymity purposes, lets call him George. By the grace of God, I already had my first call set up with George that day. George had been in recovery from alcoholism at this point for over 6 years. He was the first person I had ever met who was sober and openly admitted that he had a problem with alcohol and other drugs.
That day, I sent him pictures of my room. I did this to show him just how far down the scale I had gone, I thought I was beyond the point of help. I felt so alone, like nobody understood me, like nobody had ever been through what I was going through. In the program, we call this "terminally unique" and I was suffering from it. Little did I know, lots of addicts thought they were terminally unique, or at least that was what George told me.
After I had sent him the pictures, he simply laughed. The laughter immediately emitted this feeling of lightness, like maybe my life wasn't over. When I had sent those photos to my father earlier in the day, the response I got was definitely not laughter. The response was utter horror. "Wow, this happened again, how are we ever going to get out of this?" I felt that. In that moment, I had no clue how I was going to get out of it.
George went on to explain that he was laughing because he had been where I was before, feeling helpless, unable to imagine a life without drugs and alcohol. He actually told me he had been in his apartment surrounded by a similar mess after a night of drinking. I didn't know it was possible for someone to go from where I was, in the depths of my addiction, to sobriety and actually enjoy their lives. But, there was living proof right in front of me.
I felt seen, for the first time in my life. I felt understood. I felt a little sliver of hope.
For some reason, I continued to reach out to George almost daily through the depths of my addiction, going in and out of psychosis, using cocaine every single day, not sleeping for five days on end. I realize now, the reason I continued to text him was because it was the first time in my whole life that I no longer felt alone. It seemed that he had the solution that I had been searching for my whole life.
Being able to identify with another addict made me feel like I was part of something, like I was no longer alone in this fight, but there were actually people out there who understood me.
