How Do You Live When the Thing You Want Most Is Destroying Your Life?
No matter what anyone tells you, living a life of addiction is hard. It’s a teeter-totter between regretting the past and worrying about the future. “How could I do that? When and how will I get my next fix?” The few moments of contentment are fleeting. The initial rush of getting high or experiencing that always sought-after buzz is often obsessed about, but gone in a flash. Experiencing the ups and downs of a brief high and painful withdrawal over and over again is not an easy way to live.
The people who love you the most don’t understand. You can feel their frustration that grows into anger. They want to know “Why don’t you just stop?! How can you be so weak?! Why don’t you love us enough to quit?!” It’s hard to explain that if it were that simple you would! You don’t want to live like this but you just don’t know how to go on without the very thing that is destroying your life.
To love something so much that you are willing to sacrifice just about anything to get it—despite the fact that it is tearing apart everything you hold dear—is a hard place to be. Unless you have been there, you cannot fully understand.
Living a life of lies and deceit is painful. Knowing that you are hurting the ones that you love but feeling the claws of addiction so deep in your soul that you continue your destructive ways anyways is the life of an addict.
When the only way to feel comfortable is by somehow ingesting some form of chemical, how do you truly enjoy life? How do you know freedom when you are a slave to a substance? The short answer is that living like this, you can’t. The only solution is to break free from it all.
How do you learn to move forward? How do you learn to be content being sober when you cannot even stand the thought of it? How can you confront the ever-growing pile of lies, hurt and wrongdoings that you have been running from all of these years?
“To no longer feel the constant need to
escape reality is the true meaning of freedom.”
Learning to slow down, to just breath, to be able to just be there is one of the biggest things that has helped me through my journey of addiction recovery.
Learning how to clear my mind and just be there and just exist; it may sound too simple but it has created a profound shift in my life. Confronting the past, learning from it and owning up to it is how you grow. That is how you get better. That is how you can finally stop dwelling on it.
Learning to plan for the future but to live in the moment. It may seem so easy to someone on the outside but if it were, everyone would already be doing it. Knowing when to ask for help and accepting it when it is given do not show signs of weakness, they show signs of maturity.
In order to fully experience life, we have to learn how to be fully aware of the moment we are in. To no longer feel the constant need to escape reality is the true meaning of freedom. When we learn how to confront ourselves we are able to confront our problems. A life of addiction recovery is not always easy but it is so much easier than the life of active addiction.
