You can’t sleep. It’s four o’ clock in the morning, but you just can’t sleep. Sweat rolls off of your forehead and makes it way to the bridge of your nose…it drips, and you can hear it hit the ground as you lay in your bed staring at the ceiling. Unfortunately, no one in your cell phone is answering. And those that are answering can’t help you. Your hands shake, and your stomach is rolling and knotting. Right about now, you envy the people who never touched it. You want it. You picture it, lines of it on your mirror in front of you and your twenty-dollar bill rolled up into a straw. You need it. You imagine it. You have to have it. Your nose is still numb from earlier, but that wasn’t enough. As your world seems to be crashing around you from your cocaine addiction, you find yourself drifting off into a very painful sleep. Your body hurts, and you know that if you could just get a 20 bag you would be just fine. A few hours go by, and you wake up. You wake up. You wake up. Do you really wake up? Waking up shouldn’t feel like this. You automatically reach for your cell phone, your wallet, and your car keys. You have to go get a fix. So there you go, out your front door to get your next fix. Your apartment is bare of furniture, you pawned it all for money that you needed in order to get high. Your bank statements are depressing and sad, you have overdraft fees that you can’t pay because your drug fix is so important. The power? It’s getting shut off because you’re three months behind in payments. Food is almost disgusting, so your cupboards are bare. All you feel that you need is a bag of coke, a pack of smokes, and money to pay for it all. Relationships are business only, and your family hasn’t seen you in months. Weight is coming off left and right because your so busy sweating and running around for the drug, and most of the time you’re too high to have any appetite. Your eyes start to sag. One morning, you look in the mirror and maybe you want to change. Months can go by wanting to change, but when you finally admit yourself to rehab, you realize how hard the sober life is. Bills? Friends? Family? Sobriety? It’s all new and so you spend some time learning how to cope with your new life. Weight starts to come on slowly, and you contact your family members and old friends. Your power gets turned back on. Your bank is slowly getting payed back for all the money you owed them, and you decide to hit the Goodwill for some furniture. Your skin clears up, your hair grows thicker, and you have more energy to do positive things. You go from being a nobody to a somebody. You go from being a coke addict to a work addict. That’s right, you got clean. You got a job. You have friends now. You go to family get-togethers. Your old pants fit you again. I bet you never thought you could do it! You did it.
Addiction is pretty sad, but every day there are people turning their lives around. I did. It’s hard and its one of the most dramatic changes a person can make. Once someone is an addict, they face that addiction everyday for the rest of their lives, but if they can steer clear of the drugs and the people who they used to use with, they can be in full recovery. If you know someone who is facing an addiction, don’t judge them or try to tell them they are wrong. They won’t listen, and you’ll just lose them even more than you already have. Just let them know you are there for them- that’s all an addict needs to turn their lives around. But remember one thing for yourself before you go try and be a hero…you can’t change an addict. No one can. An addict will never change unless they want to, and unless they are willing to give up anything and everything to get better and help themselves.