jay

What was making life so unbearable

It didn’t even occur to me at the time that the answers to how I was feeling and what was making life so unbearable, were all within myself, and the way that I was seeing life and my understanding of it were changeable. It mostly started out with smoking pot with my new found mates who seemed to have the same understanding of life and where I was at. It was okay to be off my face with them, I felt like I could be accepted for the first time in my life and I didn’t even have to try that hard, all I had to do was smoke some grass and get off my face and not worry. Never even bothering to confront the reasons as to why I felt like I needed to be accepted in the first place. I never would have thought that all these things and the other thoughts and considerations I had would lead me down that twisted path.

Feeling like every time I moved onto a new substance was like an achievement

It soon changed at the age of 15 to the other harder substances like speed, meth, heroin, ecstasy, GBH, Ketamine, aerosols, alcohol and any thing that was classed as a substance that messed you up. Feeling like every time I moved onto a new substance was like an achievement or some form of accepted graduation with in a group and just knowing I had something. All of this was just layering band aid after band aid over those problems that I couldn’t quite put my finger on yet wasn’t willing to put my finger on, never wanting to confront it, always running. Then along came the intravenous drug use, going to any length possible to obtain a drug that I could put water with and fit into a syringe. I was committing acts and doing things to people, the type of things that I now hear about and say to my self “why would some one do that to another?”

I recall possibly one of the worst and alarming experiences involving drugs

I recall possibly one of the worst and alarming experiences involving drugs that I ever had was at the age of 20 years old. I had moved interstate after burning every single bridge that I ever had. This was at the stage where I had become the family member that was likely to kill some one or be killed, end up in jail or overdose. I had actually been able to stay clean for longer than 3 weeks, although at no time did I ever stop thinking about using, and I mean never, it was what I thought about when I woke up, when I was looking for work, when I was trying to get to sleep. I couldn’t even eat due to the thought of using a lot of the time. All I wanted to do was grab my spoon or my up side can, put in my speed, heroin or ice, squirt in the water, pull apart the syringe and use the plunger to mix it all up, maybe even put some heat to it just to make sure that I got every last bit, oh that smell, that blissful fragrance that made me gag with excitement and anxiety. Alright, time to load up my syringe, anxiously feeling the resistance as the pressure exchanged due to the cloudy, thick, life altering fluid filling my weapon of steel and plastic, tearing the swab to clean my scarred and tattered injection sites, the smell was enough to make me start to dry reach, my stomach turning in knots, pirouetting at the very thought of the self inflicted change in perception and the possibility of feeling something. Pushing the steel of my syringe into my skin until I felt the release of tension as it popped through the layers of skin and entered my vein. Taking my time to gently draw the plunger of the syringe back to allow my blood to partly fill my weapon, then driving my savior into my blood stream, that total body rush as it crept over my chest and up my neck finally finishing off as a taste in the back of my throat that I was willing to die for, feeling it reach the different parts of my body and allowing me to escape from all that was me and not me.

It was always more than a thought

This was torment, never being able to escape from this thought. It was always more than a thought, I had experienced and done this to my self so many times, this is what made it more than a thought. It made it a real experience every single time it entered my head, totally and utterly REAL. There is no other word for it, when I thought about it I was doing it, I was there, it was in me and it totally consumed me. I was never able to run away from this thing, I couldn’t just look at some thing and see it for what it was and enjoy it. It always resembled something else or caused my criminal thought pattern to take over, thinking and conspiring on how I could turn this object into money to get my next taste or how it reminded me of wanting to use or why I should use. This was what I had turned my environment into when it came to drugs, and I didn’t know how to escape from it, I couldn’t find the way.

I didn’t know how to escape from it, I couldn’t find the way

I went to one of my new found friends houses and got the address of one of their dealers, went to the dealers’ house where he resided with his girlfriend. He opened the door once I had knocked on it, I entered the house and got him into the lounge room and did what I did, took his drugs off him and left him unconscious on his couch. His girlfriend had just walked out of the bedroom and witnessed what I had done and just started screaming in fear; she was also standing in the front of the front door that I needed to use to get out of the house. I proceeded toward her and she ran to the bedroom and I left the house. It wasn’t until later that I found out that he had to be rushed to Hospital for emergency surgery in a coma. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized that I didn’t have any syringes and I also didn’t have any money to buy any. I remembered that I had a fresh one that I hadn’t opened in a syringe disposal container that I had thrown in the bin the day before when I had made the decision that I had had enough and was quitting, that long 18 hours ago. This was enough to give me the incentive to tear apart the large, green council bin that sat at the front of my unit and retrieve the container. I cut it open and found my little friend in his wrapper and started my little process. Do you know what the oddest thing about this whole sequence was for me? It was the fact that while all of this was going on, I was the calmest that I had been for the past 3 weeks, it was like I felt that it was all okay and that I had earned it.

The horrible part was...

Now came the part for me that was my favorite, I was about to have my taste, but then something horrible happened. I had been using for so long that a lot of my veins had collapsed and I was unable to hit a vein, that’s not the horrible part. The horrible part was that I just kept trying and trying, again and again, each arm; in every spot I could see a vein until I finally got it in. Then looking at my arms all I could see was blood and holes, there were hundreds and that is no exaggeration, I had absolutely butchered myself, my mind and self were in total confusion, I had done this to myself whilst not even contemplating the final out come, I was just completely stuck on that final moment where I was able to achieve my idea of bliss.

Looking back now, it seems odd to see this as my most horrible drug experience considering I have had friends overdose and die in front of me, whilst I had my hands on them trying to help. But this was a time when it really hit home for me and I saw that I had a serious problem, I had actually mutilated my body in order to get this drug into my system. I saw myself as this big time, hard core junkie who would do what ever it took to get it done. But when it came to the time of having to be the one who could get it done to better my life, that was too hard, and I was a lot more inclined to be seen as the one who was drug dependent and the victim. I knew within myself that I was lacking things, I was missing tools, but I didn’t exactly know what they were and where to get them. This was all my own fault…finally there was no one else to blame.

For 8 years I corrupted myself, my family, my life and the lives of all I knew

This went on for what felt like a raging, irrational, upset, bloody, blurry decade. It felt like this because that is not that far from the truth. For 8 years I corrupted myself, my family, my life and the lives of all I knew. Shooting up mates because they didn’t know how and then watching them become addicted and start drowning, not even thinking of throwing them a life line. Any time that I would become aware of doing this to another, it just became another excuse to use; it just became act, excuse, use, act, excuse, use, day after day, and minute after minute. All I had was this total disgust for time and absolutely no willingness to experience it as I was or as I should have been. Constantly trying to escape it and not face, “why should I have to”. “This is me and this is how I was born, so now I am going to lie down and be this way for ever………..” I was always fighting change, I had something with me now that I could have, and at times, I thought would never change me or have to change. At the end, this thing that I had latched on to, (so I never had to change) ripped me and every area of my life into pieces and changed every thing into hell.

It stayed this way for a while longer and them my family got to a point, where having witnessed and experienced so much, that they threw out one of the many help lines that they had thrown over the years. The difference was that at this very stage, deep down, I was looking for it. Dad said to me he had a place that he wanted me to take a look at and that it was a place that could really help me. At this stage, although wanting help, I was still completely reactive and irrational and put up a fight, still playing the victim and trying to implement all of the little tricks and ways of manipulating situations, in an effort to fight change once again.

I had never related to any one on this level

In the past, out of all the Counselors and Drug and Alcohol workers, I could never find one that I could really click with. I was never able to relate to them and they never seemed to be able to relate to me. A lot of the time it seemed like they were referring every thing that I said to some thing they had studied in a text book or they had to try really hard to see things from the point where I was observing life. There was no stage where I went “Wow! This person really knows where I am at.” When coming up to Narconon, the place that my father had found, I had an interview with one of the Intake Counsellor’s and was in total shock. This person knew me, where I had been and it was pretty much like they knew what I was going to say next. I had never felt this way whilst I had been using drugs, I had never related to any one on this level about these things before. For the first time I actually had answers to my life. I could see that this person was totally able to acknowledge where I was at and I could see that they could feel it too. I had answers now and I was no longer in the place where I had been lost for so long. I felt my whole body say “I’m here.” It opened up a whole other realm or place that I could exist in, the ultimate achievement or standard of living just by seeing the out come of a program like this.

I soon got back into the old scene and hit it harder than ever

I then left from my interview in order to think about it and the idea became more and more appealing, but at the same stage not having the right skills or life tools to apply to life and being my old area, I soon got back into the old scene and hit it harder than ever, like a final good bye to the life I knew. In this time I nearly crippled myself with a mild stroke from Meth- amphetamines, lost the relationships of the only straight friend that I had, got one of my other close friends into using needles, severely injured and hurt peoples lives and nearly tore my family apart. It only occurred to me at this point that I had never actually met any one who had completely cleaned up off of everything. The people that I had known were ‘only smoking bongs now’ or ‘just hitting the piss’ and that was the standard that I set for myself. Never bothering to look at the ability I had within myself to change things just by taking a look within myself and taking responsibility for it all.

Having had my interview at Narconon, I now knew there was new hope for me. Fortunately enough, that life line from my parents didn’t break and with the amount of love that they had for me in their tired, almost broken hearts, they helped get me here. Trust me, it is not a good thing to look back and know that you have done this to your family or any other for that matter, but the difference is that I now own it, I am responsible for it and don’t run from it. The only way I was able to get over my past was to take total responsibility for it, no more blaming and looking for things that were wrong in others and making that the reason as to why I used. Having to find myself? I’d heard about it lots, it sounded like a good idea. All good in theory, is it hard? Is it real? Is it just an idea conjured up by some weirdo? These are all of things that I thought to myself when finding out that this was a possibility, and learning about all of the things that I would get out of the program at Narconon Melbourne

Looking back now

Looking back now, the hardest thing that I ever had to do on the program and what posed as the biggest challenge, was looking within me and facing what I had done and what I was doing. There was a lot of things there I had done, a lot of lies, pain, crimes of severity, torment, sorrow, death and heart ache. I had to peel all of these off layer by layer, look at them, address them and repair them. I had to make up the damage. I had hurt a lot of people and it was sort of like evening out the balance. I had let the scales tip so far to one side I had to make that up on the other side, even just to know that I had done it with in myself. That was what changed me and enabled me to know who I really was and it set me free to become who I was. I had made that up and it wasn’t who I was any more. I really had to dig deep into the pits of where all of these memories and dishonours lay and go back there and relive some of them again. Even the thought of doing this was horrifying, I had ran from it for so long, how could I bring this out and look at it, that would mean I have deal with it. That was the very key to getting out of the way that I had been existing for so long, I had to do it, I was not going back to that. I needed change.
One of the things that I chose to do was, I went back to where I use to live and cleaned up one of my mates that I got into using drugs. This took about a 30 days, he wasn’t able to access the program so I helped him. I ran him through a Drug Free Withdrawal as by this stage I had gained my qualifications to be Withdrawal Specialist for Narconon. I helped him to open his eyes to the different areas of life and how he could improve upon every part. Like myself he was finally able to gain the tools that he needed to be successful and take control. Since then he has moved interstate with family and has full time work and is taking massive steps to further his career and has also been clean for 14 months now. I was able to do this in an environment that was safe. I never needed to be worried about being alienated from where I had been or what I was doing. I was with a group of people who were all in the same boat, we all wanted to become ourselves. Knowing that I was working with people who had a total understanding of where I was and what I was doing and why I had been where I had really just put me at ease. I didn’t want or need to rush this, I knew humans and the world is not perfect but if I wanted to get as close as possible to perfection I was going to take my time to make it work.

I was willing to get in Narconon program and get it done

Having to stay at this “Narconon” place to get this done was not my most favored option, but I was willing to get in there and get it done. Once I had settled in and was on my way I found that it was no where near as bad. I made some really good friends, clean friends who wanted life and wanted me to have life. All of those little tricks and ways I had of manipulating situations to get my way came out, intimidation and everything like that and I was able to deal with it all. Nothing was missed, I dealt with everything. I learnt that I didn’t need to intimidate people to keep them down so they were no threat, I actually got to deal with the reasons as to why I saw them as a threat in the first place. I got to look at why I felt as though I needed to seek others approval and be accepted into a group, and I mean find the real reason.

At the end of the Narconon program I could not find one thing that had not been handled and I knew that I could deal with and handle what ever came up, I had those tools now, the ones that I never knew what they were or where to get them. Best of all I had become myself and no one could ever take that from me. I now not only have the tools that help me on this road called ‘Success’, I have all the tools I need to help others. I am a contributing member of society, who is working to create a drug free and crime free life for myself and every one else………… Yep that’s right! I am now an Intake Counsellor here at Narconon Melbourne, doing for others what was once done for me.

Pretty cool! Hey!

Thanks for your time.

Jay