Control

I didn’t choose to do drugs; depression and teen angst forced me to do drugs. It doesn’t matter who I am, or where I am from, because I am every deadbeat dad, every overworked pushover, and every lonely wife. I am the boy beaten up in the locker room, I am the girl laughed at in the lunchroom. I am everyone, yet I am no one. In the eyes of the nicely-suited business man, the conservative politician, I do not exist. In their youth they were blind to it, but now they just look away.1

My childhood was lost in a blur of distance and violence. I didn’t come from a broken home; I came across the wreckage in an uncalculated attack. It was somewhat of a collision. Perhaps an Apocalypse or catastrophe. I was a freak crime statistic that sent a man to jail for 10 years. What he did to me carried life sentences, but I don’t want to brag. The details don’t matter; it is the product that matters. It left me stumbling, unsure of which way was up or down.2

They say you learn faster on fire. I learned that when your name is run in all the newspapers, people look at you different. It was a sort of pity that made my skin crawl. I confused strength with numbness, but that only lasted so long. 3

At the tender age of 14, a screw came loose somewhere. I lost control. I spent each day on autopilot, adrift in a sea of discontentment. I had the uncanny ability to ruin anything I set hands on. Alcohol and I, well, we’d met. I felt it, I felt it all. The pillars of my life were crumbling around me, but the vodka made me blind to the whole process.4

Drugs were a different breed, an exotic allure that alcohol didn’t carry anymore. My patience with hangovers had run out, and I found it harder and harder to find happiness in those bottles. The drugs were more intense, they were a portal to a different world where my past didn’t exist. It was like an epiphany. 5

Maybe epiphany isn’t the right word. 6

My Friday nights were spent throwing money out the window on ways to change my mind set. Vicodin was too slow. Coke was too fast. We spent every single day and night trying to find the perfect mix of chemicals. This isn’t about my dark descent into sorrow, or how my life unraveled; this is about a night where I lost control. 7

Like my identity, her name doesn’t matter. What matters is, she had weed. We smoked, and my mind opened. It happened as quickly as glass shatters upon hitting the floor. We were behind a building downtown, it had to have been around 11pm. The first inhale of breath, the air became colored. Her voice was colored; everything was imprinted with this sort of rainbow. 8

The sound barriers of right and wrong were broken that night. I questioned where my life was and where it was going. I never imagined my wake-up call to be so violent and unforgiving, but I learned hard and fast. The men in my life who had let me down, it wasn’t their fault. A fictitious character in the sky, it wasn’t his fault. And I, passing judgment so quickly upon myself, it wasn’t my fault. When all is said and done, the universe aligned to deal me an awful hand, but nobody can be held accountable.9

That night, as the drugs coursed through my body, I wanted out. I was so sick of the swinging hammer, so sick of burying my idols. Every dream and goal falling by the wayside. 10

She was in full contentment with her altered state but I was screaming. Something was wrong with me, it wasn’t just the drugs. The paramedics were called and I was strapped to a stretcher. Riding in that ambulance, I realized my life of drugs, alcohol, and meaninglessness was wrong. 11

I was hooked to monitors as tests were done. A man in a white coat came to tell me that whatever I had taken was laced with LSD. It justified every thought and feeling.12

Maybe justify isn’t the right word.13

That night, I learned. I learned that you cannot blame anyone for events beyond the human ingredient. Sometimes, lives are just destined for distress and it can’t be said whose fault it is one way or the other. Everyone has felt it, the small grievances and bereavements, but we cannot put our bitterness onto anyone else.14

Who I am doesn’t matter, because I am you, I am me; I am someone who is seen but unseen. It is understandable to pretend this reality does not exist, but it doesn’t make the feeling vanish. The feeling of losing control.15