Author: tearj3rker

Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2011 10:50 pm

I don’t really believe in the idea of "one rock bottom to end them all". After reading this thread, I see that some people have had this experience, but I don’t think it really applies to my addiction story.

Rather I had a few extremely low points of my addiction, the kind I cringed over for years. And interestingly enough, it wasn’t the times I had nowhere to live, was in trouble with the law, in debt etc. The lowest moment for me were after I did something really low. One of these "low" moments involved stealing from a good friend, a good "samaritan" who gave me a place to live in an hour of need. On the way to scoring, I remember waiting at the train station, and I realised for the first time I was a junkie. I was maybe 20. I’d done some quite bad things before then, but that was one of those "low" things.

I struggle with the idea of one "rock bottom" to end all bottoms, because the biggest revelation in my recovery, and the closest thing to "surrender", didn’t happen at a point where I had lost everything. It actually happened, I feel, on Suboxone, and quite recently. I’d just "sworn off" the heroin after a binge, while I was on Interferon treatment. I was quite "broken" though, sick from the using, and very crazy from the interferon. My girlfriend whispered some stuff to me before she went to sleep, and I stayed up all night thinking about my life. At about 3am, something in my head "clicked", and that’s the only way I can describe it. I knew something big had shifted. All I can say is that for the first time ever, since I was a child even, I felt like my life had some value. I haven’t really wanted to use since. This all happened while I had money, wasn’t homeless, hadn’t been doing crime, and only had a little bit of debt. Go figure?

My 2c.