Before addiction became the thing that nearly destroyed my life, it gave me something I could not find anywhere else.
Relief.
I know that is probably not what most of us have been taught. We are taught that addiction is the problem. Something to fight. Something to get rid of before it ruins your life. Eventually, it did become the problem in my life, but if I begin there, I leave out the most honest part of the story.
The first time I used heroin, I did not feel reckless or excited. I felt relieved. For the first time in a very long time, my body became quiet. The shame was quiet. The fear was quiet. That constant feeling that there was something wrong with me finally stopped speaking.
I know now that it was not freedom. I had found a way to stop feeling myself for a while, and at that point in my life, that felt close enough.
I did not use heroin because I wanted to become an addict. I used it because it worked. It gave me something I did not know how to give myself. For a little while, I could rest inside my own body without wanting to escape it.
That is the part people do not always understand. When something touches pain you have carried for years, the relief does not feel small. It can feel as though your body has finally found the thing it has been waiting for. I remember that recognition. It was almost as if something inside me said, There you are. Where have you been?
But relief like that eventually begins asking for more.
At first, I reached for heroin because of what it gave me. Eventually, I reached for it because I could not bear what happened when it was gone. The thing that had quieted the pain began creating its own pain, and my entire life slowly started arranging itself around it.
It was true before it became a lie. That is still one of the hardest parts to explain. The warmth was real. The exhale was real. The relief was real. Then, little by little, heroin began taking more of my life while giving less and less back.
By then, I did not need anyone to tell me what I was doing to myself. I knew. I carried that knowledge everywhere, along with the shame of not being able to stop.
That shame never brought me closer to freedom. It drove me back toward the one place where I knew how to stop feeling ashamed. The worse I felt about myself, the more I needed to leave myself. Then I hated myself for leaving. That was the trap.
Years later, I heard Gabor Maté say, “The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain.” I am careful with any explanation that tries to make every person’s story the same. I cannot say that every addiction begins in the same place. I can only say that his question changed the way I saw my own life.
For years, I had asked myself, Why did you do this? Why did you throw so much away? Why couldn’t you stop?
I had never asked what heroin had given me that I had needed so desperately.
When I look back now, I do not see a woman who wanted to destroy herself. I see a woman who could no longer bear the way she felt inside herself. Heroin gave her somewhere to disappear. For a while, disappearing felt like peace.
I could not heal by continuing to hate her for reaching for that relief. She had already been hated enough, especially by me. I had to understand what she had been trying to escape and why being gone had felt safer than being here.
That was the harder question.
It was also the one that finally led me somewhere heroin never could.