* * *
Group therapy feels pretty useless today, because I don’t feel like I belong.
I sit back and observe, and listen to the other addicts share their issues, their triggers. None of it seems to apply to me. For years, I didn’t have the urge to use.
Talking about it though, with them, it makes me ache for the sting of the needle. It’s ironic. The very thing that is supposed to heal me, is making me want the poison all the more.
When it’s my turn, they wait for me to speak. I look around the circle, and they’re all waiting, and I have nothing to say.
“I’m Pax, and I’m an addict,” I say slowly. “I was held against my will, and forced to take drugs. The guy who arranged the whole thing wanted to take everything important in my life. My sobriety was just one of those things.”
I can tell that some don’t believe me. I get it. A lot of addicts make excuses and even make up stories to excuse their drug use. They don’t want to admit that they themselves are at fault, because then they themselves will have to fix it.
I understand.
That used to be me.
“Why do you want to get clean?” someone asks, and I know it’s an important question. You have to have a reason, in order to do it. That’s true of every goal in life. I shake my head.
“I’m tired of being chased by demons. I’m tired of being a danger to everyone around me. I’m a ticking time bomb.”
They accept that, and move on to the next person. I sit like a piece of wood for the rest of the meeting. I feel out of place here, and I don’t know why. I guess it’s because I don’t want to identify as an addict.
But it’s what I am.
* * *
“That’s normal,” my therapist tells me the next morning. “Your addiction is a part of you that you don’t completely understand. Let’s work through it together, shall we?”
I nod, and she continues.
“Your childhood. You’ve told me that you felt like your father didn’t like you.”
“I used to. When I was growing up. Now I know that he was just really struggling with my mother’s death.”
“That’s the fact of it,” she agrees. “But when you were a boy, you didn’t know that. You felt rejected, did you not? You felt like you couldn’t trust your own father to want you. Correct?”
I think on that, and then I nod. “Yeah. I guess I did.”
“And your mother left you. She couldn’t help it, but she did. And you felt extreme guilt because you knew that it was your hand that killed her. You felt so much guilt about that that you suppressed all memories of it.”
I nod. “Yes.”
“So, you were a very troubled little boy, and no one knew it.”
“I’ve got baggage,” I agree. “We know that. That’s why I’m here.”
“You expressed that baggage in your early twenties by using drugs and being sexually promiscuous. You went through women like water, using them and tossing them aside.”
That makes me cringe. It feels like someone else, not me, who did that. But it’s true. I did it. I nod.
“Where are you going with this?”
“You felt like you didn’t deserve something real,” she finally points out. “It was never about those women. It was about you, and how you felt about yourself.”
I think about that. “I always gravitated to the drug users,” I tell her. “I guess because they didn’t expect much from me. They wanted to use. I was able to give them that.”
“And in return, they slept with you,” she says, and it sounds so ugly out loud. “They gave you the façade of intimacy, the barest amount. Just enough to keep you functioning, pretending that your life was just how you wanted it.”