10 Years Ago: This ‘ol Opiate Addict’s Rock Bottom

If you are an addict struggling with imagining what it would take to get clean, you’ve probably heard people talking about hitting rock bottom. I wanted to share with you the day that I consider to be my rock bottom because it was the moment in which I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt the sand in the hourglass of coping with addiction running out. So this is the story of my worst day as an addict. ⚠️ Trigger Warning ⚠️ This blog talks about suicide and drug abuse.

I couldn’t find any heroin or Oxy that day. I woke up and called around to everyone I knew looking for any kind of pills I could crush up or any dope to shoot and I drew a blank all day. By around 5 pm I was miserable and had given up hope of finding anything so I left the house and drove over to a shopping complex. I wanted to feel less alone and I felt so damn lonely. I had a couple tall cans of shitty Coors Light and a plethora of weed and I just sat in the shade of a maple tree drinking and smoking and watching people exist. I remember sweating out smelly detoxifying sweat. My skin was crawling and I cried and played loud and sad music.

I watched the cars shoot by my window at the edge of the parking lot. A semi crossed in front of me and I thought, if only that semi could veer out of the way of some rouge Honda and slam into my car, crushing me. I wanted to die but I didn’t want to kill myself and put my family through that kind of pain. I prayed for the universe to relieve me of this miserable existence and set me free without me having to create additional pain and suffering. Hours went by and I wrote a page in my journal that let others know I loved them and that I was sorry, just in case my prayers were answered. By dusk I gave up hope on God mercy killing me and made the conscious choice to give myself one last year to get my shit together. For many years I suffered through life and I would give it only one more year before giving up and taking the sleeping pills I collected just in case I needed a way out. So I opened my phone and set an alarm for one year later to “KILL YOURSELF”. I closed my phone, went home and took a sleeping pill and prayed Oxy or a baggie would find me in the morning.

The Letters I Couldn’t Write Myself

My mother was the one who suggested treatment to me only a week or so later. She saw me nodding off in a chair and thought I had smoked too much pot, unaware my addiction had become much more unmanagable. She asked me if I would be open to going into treatment for my bulimia (another deeply rooted problem I had) and I agreed that I would benefit from leaving my hometown and try to clean up for a bit. The place she found was in Arizona and it was holistic based and looked beautiful on the website.

I really must give my mother credit for setting up treatment with the insurance, collecting donations from other family members who could help, and paying thousands of dollars as a copayment to the insurance company. I know it would have taken so much longer had she not stepped up and taken charge of that. My one job was to get on the plane on the morning of March 30th, 2009 and take a flight from California to Tucson, Arizona.

The week before I left I begged every one of my friends to write me letters that I could open when I was in Arizona. Most of them didn’t really understand why I was going in the first place. The thing about the disease of addiction is that it wants to do everything it can to survive and so I remained incredibly secretive about my eating disorder and most of my drug use. The friends I used Oxy with had moved to Oregon to try to get a hold on their own addiction, but I still had a lot of friends who would smoke weed and drink, I called their household The Kids House. They had no idea I was doing much more than the occasional shroom trip/night drinking/bowl after bowl, so I came clean about the dabbling in pills and my trials in IV drug use. They were shocked but glad I was leaving to get help and wrote to me too. Amends to them were later made because of my choice to conceal the truth. Here’s another post about making amends in recovery to get an idea of the power of being accountable.

I asked everyone for letters, multiple letters, from any family or friends who would be willing to take the time to do it. Before leaving I managed to collect 60 letters from people (not including all the letters people wrote to me while I was there which was probably an additional 60). I was also given, maybe, 15 mix CDs of music from some of the people I was leaving behind.

I was afraid to go, too. The scariest part about leaving home for 40ish days was that I honestly thought in that short amount of time, everyone I knew would forget about me and I would come back and be alone. I thought that little of myself to believe relationships I’d created over 23 years would be over because I went away to take care of myself. When that morning to leave came, I got on the air-porter bus, cried as I put on one of those mix CDs, and left.

The letters people wrote me were heart filled and helped me get there and stay in treatment. But what I learned much later was that I was reading the words of encouragement and love I couldn’t give myself. I was reading a reflection of what others saw in me, that I was blind to seeing. The work I did on myself over the decade since has been the growing of self and the learning to love myself that I desperately needed to do. For the first 5 years after treatment, I treasured those letters like gold. If the house had caught fire, those letters would have been one of the few things to grab but as I learned who I really was I saw those letters as a symbol of the me I didn’t want to be anymore. I still have them but they certainly don’t hold the kind of value they did before, only because I grew the self love those letters held a space for.

My Fourth Step

About 10 months after leaving treatment I was in my bed at my mom’s house. It was raining outside, my favorite kind of weather for Northern California. I had some tea and was busy writing on my fourth step, in other words I was basically journaling about the resentments I still had over ways others had slighted and wronged me. My mind was busy bitching and complaining about small little “this” and “that” moments when suddenly an unusual beeping went off beside me. I look around, taken completely out of the moment, searching for the mystery beep. It was my old flip phone’s alarm feature, so I open it and read allowed, “KILL YOURSELF”.

How could I ever keep focus on writing petty resentments when my phone conveniently reminded me that one year ago was the worst day of my life? A little reminder that I had made it, beaten the odds and survived myself. Not only did I come back to the keen awareness that I had made it, but that I could never go back to that place inside, again.

As of this evening I have made it eight days shy of a decade without taking a drink or drug. The week before my annual sobriety birthday always reminds me of where I came from and what would happen if I ever went back to my old coping mechanisms and way of life. In eight more days I will be celebrating the moment I chose to love and care for myself. I will be celebrating 10 years! 🎉

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