10 years in the void
Hi everyone, my name is Bryce. I hope that my story will help the kids out there think about painful reality of drug addiction. Just remember this,it is not worth your life.
At age 7 my father died and later on in my life I would use this as a catalyst for my addiction. In school I knew that i was different than the other kids. I was shy and quiet and for these reasons I was an easy target.
In junior high I was introduced to pot and I fell in love with it. I started to hang out with the kids who I thought were cool because they got into trouble in school and with the law. I thought that there was something about them that I could identify with. I was no longer that shy kid who couldn’t stand up for himself. I soon began to challenge authority every chance that I got.
At age 14 I was vandalizing schools, breaking into homes and fighting. I relied on breaking the law to look cool to my pot smoking friends and I relied on stealing money from people to buy my pot.
I dropped out of high school at age 15 and at this point, I was drinking alcohol. Even by then I could already feel a hole inside of me that I needed to fill to hide what I already knew, my addiction.
At age 16 I was hanging out with people a lot older than me, people that once again, I thought I could identify with. They sold crack,smoked meth and sold many drugs and I thought this was cool but I wasn’t ready for these hard drugs yet.
I had heard before that if I drank a whole bottle of cough syrup, I could get high so I tried it and loved it. It numbed the pain inside of me and at the time, I felt that I needed it for that reason. I was stealing it from every store that I could. I would walk miles just to get that high.
Many times I would ride the city bus around my town while I was high on it. I puked on myself many times in front of whoever was there to see. I just didn’t care anymore. I had no self respect.
I was now 17,a high school dropout, and had no friends. I was putting my mother through hell but I didn’t care. I knew how bad off I was but my addiction was so strong that I didn’t care.
By this time my mother had found another man and he became my step father. He cared a lot about me but I didn’t know how to react to the love he had for me. My addiction was getting bad, I thought I was going nowhere in life so I took as many coricidin pills as I could wash down. I wanted to die. I was in the nut house for a week and when I got out, I was back to getting high. I had learned nothing and my trip to the hospital would be the first of many to come.
When my father died when I was 7, my mother had been granted a large sum of money and when I would be 18 I would get a part of it. At age 18 I had a 100 thousand dollars to my name and around this time I started to hang around the dope houses which I used to go to. I shot up my first shot of meth and became hooked. Shooting meth gave me a rush so strong that I thought I was god. I felt like I Needed this drug to hide away from my feelings.
Now I was a full blown drug addict and on top of that, I was addicted to the needle. I was now shooting up whatever I could get my hands on. Meth,coke,ketamine,and heroin. I was blowing all the money I had in the bank and I did not care. I had track marks up and down my arms and my mother and step father had kicked me out.
Heroin and other opiates became my drug of choice. I couldn’t get out of a bed unless I had my fix and I was going to dope houses and getting ripped off a lot of the time, but it didn’t matter that people would steal from me. I just didn’t want to be alone.
I was 19 years old now and out of money. I went back to my old ways of stealing again to support my addiction. I was using dirty needles and I never thought twice about it. I just needed that rush and that’s all that mattered.
One day I noticed an abscess on my arm and I was dope-sick and all I could think about was getting my fix. A few days went by and my arm was twice the size of my other arm and I was feeling like I could fall at any moment.I went to the hospital and the doctors said that I could die if I didn’t have surgery on my arm.
I woke up with bandages around my arm and when the nurse took off the bandages, I saw a hole that was more than an inch deep and more than an inch wide. Even through all this, I kept on shooting up in the other arm. I was powerless over my addiction and one of the people who I could relate with died from an overdose.
My step father died around this time from cancer and I resented myself for not reaching out to him. He loved me so much and I took it for granted. Over the course of the next three years, I worked at many jobs to support my addiction but I would always end up losing them. I tried to kill myself 7 more times and ended up in the nut-house many more times because I overdosed many times and was trying to end my life.
I ended up walking to the city from the town that I lived in which took me two days because I lived pretty far away. In the city, I was homeless and sold myself many times to get what I needed, my fix.
Later on, I returned to my hometown to find that two more friends of mine had died from their addiction and a third had been shot and killed in a bad drug deal. Death was all around me and I still coudn’t bring myself to put the needle down.
I hit my lowest point when I came to see that my addiction was far greater than I was and so I wanted to find an easy way out for the 7th time. I took 60 blood pressure pills, drank a half gallon of antifreeze and slit my throat. I was found in a bathroom, bleeding on the floor and I was rushed in an ambulance to the E.R.
I woke up to see a nurse standing over me and I’ll never forget what she said: young man, you have a purpose in this life, most people would have died from what you did.
It was then that I knew I had to recover. My addiction was killing me and it was time to change so I knew what I had to do. I had to go to rehab. I learned to accept the things that I couldn’t change. I found the willingness to surrender and say: I need help!
When I left rehab I started going to NA meetings. I could relate to the people in the fellowship and I began to make friends with other recovering addicts. I didn’t feel alone anymore and I knew I had to face my life on its own terms. Being able to feel my feelings again could be painful at times but I now understood that I had to feel pain to grow and be human again.
Today I live a new life and I thank my fellowship for being there when I need it. I was 24 when my life of addiction ended and after 10 years in my void I was set free. I have never used since.