Everything in its Right Place

I’m starting to think about my addiction in a different way than ever before. I’m only a couple of weeks away from three years off cocaine and every day is novel in that I have not ever been in a position to say that. This is the most success I’ve ever seen and, I believe, the clearest mind I’ve had.

Statistically speaking, people like me don’t get better. Addiction hasn’t got a known cure.

To manage the way my brain works, or rather the way it doesn’t work properly, I had to carve new neural pathways. That’s what makes recovery so difficult: we are literally rewiring patterns of behaviour.

Every time I was upset I would use. I had to remind myself time and time again that using was how I used to get through hard things but today I was doing something new.

I used cocaine to celebrate. I had to then actively remind myself that cocaine wasn’t a celebratory event for me. “That was how I used to live”, I would tell myself. “Today I choose a different way.”

I told myself cocaine would make me feel better despite there being no evidence of that being true. I had to work at challenging these europhic recalls with facts and evidence.

In the beginning it was a lot of work. Nothing came naturally to me because I had come to the understanding that my natural propensity is to opt out. If I wanted to live my life, for real, I had to reprogram myself away from the kind of things I did to aid in avoiding it.

What this did for me goes far deeper than just recovering from a debilitating drug addiction.

I gained the ability to change other problematic aspects of my behaviour. If I can slow down and choose to cope without calling the dealer, odds are good I can reprogram my responses in other ways.

It gave me hope, but more than that, I gained the knowledge that I can change the course when I’m unhappy with where I’m headed.

It was the beginning of my becoming.