Am I numb enough yet?

Recently, I’ve decided to give AA an actual try. I’ve been to meetings here and there over the last few years but I always had the mantra that it doesn’t work. I felt like I didn’t belong there. Well, that’s not true. I do belong there. I have a sponsor now and I am working the steps. I’ve gone to a meeting each morning for weeks now. As I work through it, I want to talk about addiction in a way I haven’t before- not the actual addiction but what is behind it. Because that’s the cause, right?

Saying I struggle with my mental health is honestly an understatement. For almost ten years, I’ve had severe mental health issues. It started off with a panic attack here and there, but it turned into going to the psych ward (at its worst). I remember my first depressive episode. I was dating some loser and he had cheated on me. It was my first year at college and I was heartbroken. But it went beyond that. I basically lived in bed, didn’t go to class, didn’t eat, and it was the first time I thought about actually harming myself. I thought it was situational, but looking back, I think that was my first severe episode. How did I get out of it? The only thing I remember next is binge drinking. 

I don’t remember having issues with depression after that, but I was also drinking every night. There wasn’t any room for it. I don’t want to skip over three years of binge drinking, but I’m going to. Because when I was a senior, and decided to stop drinking, the mental health issues came back. I wanted to move to England and start a graduate school program and I had to make a certain GPA to do it. So, obviously, drinking had to stop or at least dramatically slow down. It’s no coincidence that I started having panic attacks. I got on anti-depressents for the first time, and I really started to struggle. So, what did I do? You guessed it! Amphetamines. 

It worked for a while. I moved to England and started graduate school. How could amphetamines be bad if they caused such positive changes in my life? That would be my mantra for a long time. And again, I’m going to skip over years of use. Not because it isn’t relevant. It’s just not the part of addiction I’m speaking to at the moment. As always, the amphetamines stopped working at a certain point, and the mental health issues came back. It’s like I kept putting it off until I couldn’t anymore. It started slow but eventually led to a full blown mental breakdown.

You’d think that I’d stop taking pills, drinking, or smoking weed since it wasn’t working but that’s not the case. This is when addiction really begins. The substances don’t work but you go back day after day after day. As my mental health got worse, I took more and more. It made it so much worse, and it almost completely destroyed me. And then I would spend years trying to get sober and failing. I had no idea what you needed to do to get sober once you’re an addict.

I’d like to introduce the word recovery now. Not sober. Recovery is the process you enter to get better. I wasn’t in recovery. I was just trying to stop taking drugs. But the real problem wasn’t the drugs. It was what’s underneath it. I was seriously mentally ill, and when I started changing my life, sobriety seemed easier and easier. Each time I went to church or journaled my thoughts or exercised or went to an AA meeting, I was recovering. Every day, it got easier and easier. And that’s the point I’d like to make. If you’re struggling with sobriety, focus on other areas of your life and sobriety will come with it. It’s not easy, but it is rewarding. In the end, I don’t want to be numb anymore.