Chapter 6 · A twisted love story

I want to help you understand how things really escalated between me and my addiction, so I am going to tell you a story about overwhelming obsession, confused-love and repetitive pain. A story of how drugs and I met, and how that relationship eventually ended.

This love story starts out where the last chapter left off, in Beverly High School at age fourteen. As I mentioned before we met in French class, my last class of the day. I asked her if she wanted to come hang out after school and to my surprise she did. We hung out like kids do and talked and laughed and then she was gone.

After that day, we reconnected and became really good friends in a short period of time, and come to find out we even had the some of the same friends. It seemed like our friendship was meant to be. I made a promise that we would always be together no matter what. You know how kids are, I couldn't even comprehend forever at the time, but it just felt right.

Fast forward to the young age of sixteen… We had been inseparable for the last two years, it seemed like we knew everything about each other. We had shared our most intimate secrets and when we were together I felt comfortable and more confident. It was like we protected each other from the harsh realities of the world. I was beginning to feel what I thought was love.

It was around this time that a series of events put my family between me and this budding new relationship. They did not like her but knew nothing about our relationship, and after all, didn't they want me to be happy? Now I have my license and boy what a relief. Now we can go out more, see each other more, and we don't have to be around the people who don't agree with our relationship.

Our network of friends has grown over time, and I have to tell you, my friends loved her! We were all so close and it just seemed like this could never fall apart. I had noticed that some of my friends had at this point taken their relationships to the next level and really committed themselves.

So, we started taking ours seriously, after all I didn't want to lose it just because my family didn't agree with it. We began getting close and our friendship eventually grew into love. Don't get me wrong I loved my family and I even cared about their opinions, but this was something different and I needed to protect it because it made me feel good, and safe.

After our relationship blossomed into a more committed one, we began to have the same problems that any other couple would have. We spent so much time together that we had been ignoring some of our other relationships. I no longer felt connected to my family, and it was starting to become an unhealthy obsession for me.

When she wasn't around I thought about her constantly, my goal everyday was to find a way for us to be together. I got so involved that it really started to have some negative effects on my life. By passionately defending this ongoing relationship, I had begun to alienate myself. I only fostered the relationships that supported my decision to stay together.

Now until this point, I had never even thought about breaking up. I really thought that everyone else was wrong, that there was no way they could understand what we had, how this relationship worked for me, what it provided for me deep down.

But I couldn't ignore some of the facts. I was almost eighteen now, I had dropped out of high school, I had been kicked out of my parents' house, and it was painfully clear that I wasn't going anywhere with my life.

Looking at my situation I tried to reflect back to the beginning of our relationship. A time when things weren't so hard. When we were happy, you know, before it started really breaking my life down. I wanted that back so bad. I just wanted things to go back the way they were between us.

I decided it was time to have a talk and make some changes, start things over. I agreed that I would try to work on my obsessive behavior, and try to slow things down in our relationship. Go back to how it was when I first fell in love.

It didn't work.

By age seventeen we were married! Who knew that this would end up being one of the most significant, and most destructive relationships I would ever be in? I didn't, that's for sure.

Next thing you know, I am eighteen years old, sitting behind a dumpster at Dunkin Donuts in Brunswick, Maine trying to sleep. It is freezing out and all I can think about is how selfish my father and his wife are for throwing me out and making me homeless.

I had moved to Maine to divorce my wife, get away from my relationship, and to try to do something positive with myself. The plan was to get a job, new friends, and live in a different environment in the hopes of preventing these problems from ruining my chance at life. Clearly that didn't happen.

When I got up to Maine everything seemed to start out fine, but eventually I started to fall right back into my relationship with drugs (my ex-wife), and this time I was aggressively pursuing a way for us to have a future together.

I got arrested for a variety of offenses and was forcefully removed from my living situation. Upon release, I moved out to Portland, due to a lack of other viable living options.

Being homeless in Portland was not as bad as I thought it would be, it did not deter me from enjoying the lifestyle. By that I mean, I hustled, I lied, I cheated, I stole, and generally raised a ruckus in that city without any real struggles, other than some cold and sleepless nights without shelter. These struggles were eased by the consolation of my relationship.

Eventually the city rejected me, and through a series of arrests and a little jail time, (my first real experience in jail) I ended up selling enough drugs to get back to MA. I was on the run. I had long stringy red hair down to the middle of my back now. At this point I no longer physically resembled the young confused teenager who had left to go to Maine.

Over the next year I had many odd jobs, none of which had any real direction and I even had some unhealthy relationships with women, one of whom I was now living with. She was an old friend, and we began a casual relationship alongside of our existing relationships with drugs. Heroin wasn't my drug at this point, but it quickly fell in my lap and I just couldn't help myself. I was working, selling drugs, living with my girlfriend, and life seemed ok for now. At the time, I felt like I had created a "good enough life". We worked, paid rent, sold drugs, had sex, smoked pot, and watched movies and the cartoon network; life was good.

Then my friend Brian gave me a bag of heroin in return for a ride to Lynn to get drugs. I brought it home, brought it into the bathroom, and dumped it out onto a little mirror on the back of the toilet. I sniffed the whole $10 bag of brownish powder and hopped in the shower. After my shower, I immediately came out of the bathroom, threw up, and laid down on my bed.

Now I thought I was in love before… This topped anything I had ever tried. Soon my girlfriend and I were both hooked, and had a new drug to play with.

Love.

I keep using this word to describe how I felt about drugs. I think love is about being able to be yourself around someone, and have complete trust that they will always be there when you need them, and make you feel safe. I felt all of that and more for heroin. I had found my soulmate.

Now my girlfriend was pretty cool too, but really it was heroin I got up for every day, heroin that eased my mind, heroin that soothed my soul…

Nineteen years old now and I have just been arrested for my first of many significant drug related crimes.

The Salem police kicked down our door with a warrant and raided our disheveled three-bedroom apartment looking for drugs. Apparently, I had unknowingly sold some heroin to a customer working with an undercover detective so my time was up. I was escorted into the bathroom wearing sweatpants and a sleeveless shirt. I weighed about 135 lbs. soaking wet at 6' 3" and posed no real threat but I was still handcuffed to the toilet and got to watch from my bathroom for six hours while they searched my apartment for everything listed on the search warrant. They found everything I had, and set up most of my "friends" who were calling during the raid looking for drugs.

Eventually I was released from my temporary bathroom prison cell. At the end of the raid, they walked me out the front of my brick apartment building in Salem, and into a crowd of clapping neighbors. Clearly, I wasn't as popular as I thought I was in my own neighborhood. They were happy to see me go. I was transferred to a more traditional jail cell at the Salem police station for the weekend where I began my first "real" detox from heroin.

I spent the weekend physically withdrawing from heroin. This experience could only be described as having a severe case of the flu and food poisoning at the same time, with some sleepless nights on a steel bed frame. Eventually I was brought to court to face my charges. I got to see some old friends in the holding tank at court and we shared some uneasy and ignorant laughs about our situations. Upstairs in court I saw my family sitting in the audience with faces showing a mixture of anger and sadness.

They showed up, but no one was bailing me out. WTF… I couldn't believe that there was no lawyer, no bail, no nothing. Who do they think they are not helping me?

2-3 years upstate, plus 2 years on probation with 2 years of incarceration hanging over my head if I made any mistakes.

And this is where my ex-wife and I take some time off. Almost three years we didn't even speak to each other. Three years of no contact.

Why did I go back?

Well for the sake of not writing a full novel about this one topic, let's just say that this was a pattern for me. On again and off again. I went back for love. Love for the drugs, love for the lifestyle, love for the game, love for the lies that gave me comfort, love for the false sense of control that these things gave me.

I went back for love. Obsessive and compulsive love.

The kind that has you waking up angry at yourself next to someone you swore you would never ever go back to.

The kind of love that makes you ignore all the people who love you and have helped you break free from your relationship, because they wouldn't be able to understand why you have gone back. The kind of love that makes it impossible to have any other relationships in your life.

I started trying to find a way to mend and repair this relationship that has clearly become something that defined me in my life. I wanted things to be OK between us. I enjoyed the time we spent together, but hated the abuse.

I hate that I can't just be happy with the way things are. I hate that I always have to take it too far. I really believe that I can make it work. So, I try different things, like taking time off, trying different drugs like alcohol, smoking weed, or prescription meds so that I don't feel like such a drug addict.

Clearly it had become a problem at this point and wouldn't you know it, everyone except me can see it. At twenty-four years old, I got myself into a nice secondary relationship with the soon to be mother of my child. We did drugs together and everything was fun and fine until she got pregnant.

I was in no condition to raise a child or keep a family, and that became apparent to everyone real fast. Over and over we broke up and fought. Her and I, and me and my drugs. I kept "trying" to stop using drugs by coming up with master plans to do it on my own, and she just kept getting let down because, let's be honest, my plans sucked.

Detox after detox, incarceration after incarceration, had left me as a broken man until around age thirty, when I was sitting in Middleton jail for the last time. I had been arrested for the same charges I was already on probation for, and I was looking at another stretch, which unfortunately, I was prepared to do.

I was a veteran to this lifestyle, and jail had begun to feel more like home than my own home did. It felt safe, and by that, I mean I felt safe from myself. Other people were safe from me as well. While in jail I couldn't really make things worse for anybody. I had lost or given away everything that meant anything to me, and this was where I wanted it to end.

I came out of jail and of course, just because of who I am, I had to go back to her one last time to see if it was the same. I hated it. I hated her (heroin & drugs).

There was no more love, only disgust. It brought nothing but memories of pain, and guilt, of the many horrible things I had done, and the fun I had doing them. It was very confusing for me but it worked. I felt nothing for her anymore. Or so I thought…

It never really ends; she was my first great love, and we were together for about sixteen years. Although it was off and on she was there at all times, in my mind and in my heart. She was there when my son was born, she was there when I was enjoying my happiest moments, and during the sad ones.

I can never forget the time we shared and I will admit some of it was fun or I would have left years ago. This relationship turned out to be the most destructive and the most formative thing in my life, and I wouldn't be who I am without having survived it.

I have learned through all of this that it is important for me to have a healthy fear, as well as certain amount of respect for how powerful that addiction was for me, and to never forget what I have gone through.

Just like with any other relationship, you can keep choosing to go back for the same kind of abuse from the same kind of people if you forget how the previous relationships ended. If you forget about the pain and frustration you've felt and simply romance the idea of all the good, then you will either: never leave, or you will keep returning.

I keep that memory alive by talking about it, and you help me by reading about it… Thank you…

The relationship element

When it comes to addiction we are talking about so many different aspects of the illness. For instance, there is the chemical dependence aspect to addiction, which is often mistakenly identified as "the problem". Then we have the behaviors, actions, and attitudes related to addiction.

Recently, I found myself trying to explain the difference between the relationship with drugs and alcohol and the obsession with drugs and alcohol. The analogy I used was; do you have a friend or know someone who has been in an on again off again relationship? Have you yourself? If so then you will understand that when you're off of the relationship, even for a short time, you may feel stronger and more capable of staying away from it, even though you may still care about the person. You may speak to friends you haven't spoken to in a while, or family who were sick of hearing about your relationship. Maybe you will tell everyone that it's really over for good this time and look for their support in helping you move forward.

If any of this is starting to sound familiar, then you have a very basic understanding what an addict's or alcoholic's relationship with drugs and alcohol really looks like.

So, now what? Time heals all wounds, right? The more time you spend away from that relationship, focused on your life and moving forward, the better chance you have of not going back. Then something happens. You're out with some friends or walking down the street and there it is, you're face to face with your on-again, off-again relationship. All reason slips from your mind. All of the pain you experienced, the desperation you felt to get away in the first place, and the good advice you have been given about how to deal with this very situation, melts away.

Boom, you're back at it again. Relapse…

That boom, that is the part people can't understand when it comes to addiction. How can someone who is doing so well and looking so good, with so much to lose, throw it all away in one second? It is an obsession. This obsession has been described as: "…a persistent and recurring thought that does not respond to reason".

There really is an obsessive relationship that is built with the drugs, the alcohol, the life style, and the social elements related to addiction. It is a comfortable, safe and extremely familiar place to go, where you know how to "control" the way you feel, which can be very inviting.

So, which is worse? Which is the real problem? Is it the dependency or the relationship? Personally, I feel like the relationship is worse, because it transcends the physical lifestyle and the chemical dependency. It is such an unhealthy, codependent, and abusive relationship fueled by obsession, and I have found that the only real solution to this problem is to break up…

It's not you, it's me. I want to see other people. I'm just not ready for this kind of commitment. Whatever it takes, but a real break up and a direct path into recovery to heal. It's very true that breaking up is hard to do, but you cannot move forward in life if every time you see your ex you have to cross the street or leave the restaurant to keep yourself from re-engaging or doing something stupid. You can recover from this. This is the same thing you would tell any of your friends or loved ones coming out of a bad relationship. You can find happiness in your life once again, after the break up.

My point is this: it would be smart to treat your loved one's addiction like an unhealthy relationship. To see it almost like a person that your child or loved one is in a relationship with. If you are in a relationship with them, then you need to know that their relationship with drugs or alcohol comes first and you come second. That relationship, as unhealthy as it is, may be the most important thing going on in their life right now and the only thing that makes them feel OK inside.

Do you really think they care if you don't approve of the relationship they are in? Would you be receptive if someone in your family came to you and told you to leave the person you love, the only person that made you feel whole inside? I know I wouldn't. It takes much more than threats or rational conversation to get out of such an unhealthy relationship. For an individual struggling with addiction, it can take many months of treatment and peer support to break free from the grip of this obsessive and controlling relationship.

It is never easy to break up with someone that you love. It is never easy to get over them if all you do is sit and dream of being together. It takes more than just separating someone from the person they love to get them well.