My Addiction Does Not Define Me

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There are a thousand voices screaming in my head telling me this is enough; telling me that this isn’t a life.

Every day is ordinary, I’m imprisoned, and all I want to do is scream at the top of my lungs telling them to stop torturing me
There’s another voice telling me to numb it all, to escape it all, to surrender to drugs.

The past three years of my life were mostly made up of blurry images, of not remembering exactly what happened, of waking up every day trying to recall the events of the night before.

Yes, I am not a saint; I make mistakes, lots of them. I lie when I am scared, I hide things to avoid drama, I act as if everything is fine even if I am falling apart, and I never consider the consequences of my actions.

However, I am just a girl with good intentions, looking for a normal life; but it was never like that for me. I watched my life being screwed and did nothing about it.

All I wanted was to be that strong girl that everyone knew would make it through the worst, to be that fearless girl, the one who would dare to do anything, to be that independent girl who didn’t need to rely on anyone but herself to make it, to be that girl who never backed down.

But the universe keeps shooting me down. The black cloud hasn’t’ left me since 2014.

Hurricane after a hurricane.

It sucks because I was always the happy girl, the independent girl, but it’s not like that anymore. I’m not like that anymore. Life has dragged me down.

It’s hard for me to talk about my issues with substance abuse. I don’t want my peers to have their perception of me now skewed by who I was then. I had a lot of issues, did a lot of questionable things, and was honestly just a lost girl drowning in the need to both connect with people and cope with intense emotions.

Using gave me both of those things – a peer group that had similar problems and a substance that masked a lot of the hurt I was feeling.

I’m much different now and I do not want to be defined by my addiction.