2nd Attachment

...I'll fix the formatting later.

The most impactful memories I have of realizing that I was no longer 'just having fun' but in fact developing a lifelong addiction:

1. My college boyfriend and I decided we needed to have a 'pill free week' because our bank accounts were getting dangerously low… we made it 3 days before mutually deciding that it just "wasn't necessary to go a full week." Yes, we were lying to ourselves about the reality that we needed them more than we cared to admit, but I still didn't fully grasp how much that decision to start using again so quickly would impact the rest of my life.

1. In regards to the bank accounts: paying $1 per mg when my use quickly escalated from it taking me 15mg to 60mg to truly get high.

1. I somehow convinced myself that as long as I didn't use money my parents gave me to buy the drugs then it was fine… even as I watched the savings/checking accounts I previously monitored like a hawk both dwindle to nothing with barely a care in the world. Getting high was all that mattered, because to me it was worth any amount of money to be "happy" … that's how I justified it, I was paying for happiness and since I wasn't stealing money or using any from my parents, it was somehow okay in my head.
2. My tolerance took a HUGE jump during an early period of time while using where Jill, my boyfriend, and I all would get these 80mg "non-abusable" pills (because they couldn't be crushed up - the memories of us trying to prove the pills wrong by microwaving them until they could be snorted make me cringe as I type this). I don't even know what they're called, I just know that we would swallow them and be gloriously high all day therefore somewhat saving me some money (although obviously not in the long run…)

1. I will never forget texting our friend/dealer from the 'trading room' at Bentley where I was working on a project after swallowing one of those big pills to ask if coffee would enhance the high or not. I had been expecting it to keep me high for the full day to complete the work I needed to do, but was upset to find the high fading sooner than I had anticipated. I'm not sure if this was a moment I realized the impact of my drug use turning away from recreational, but I always think of those pills when I think of "going up a level" with my usage.
2. The next 'big' one was October 2012 of my senior year when I flew to Chicago, where my ex-college boyfriend (same guy) was now living - I really don't think I cared to see him as much as I cared to have someone willing to pay for 20 pills for us both to use throughout my long weekend there. One night I recall thinking that I was breathing/my heart was beating both so slowly that I surely was going to fall asleep and never wake up. That thought should have been terrifying, yet the chemical numbness allowed me to just observe the thought without feeling - it was almost like I didn't even care if I died. Safe to say that when I woke up the next morning it was another clarifying moment that I had a problem to deal with… but I dealt with it by sniffing more blue powder up my nose.
3. Another senior year, but this time it was Spring Day at Bentley which meant "the best party day of the year" for most of the campus (myself included up until that year). The details are blurry, but all I know is that rather than join all my friends partying I slipped away and drove to get high at Wheaton College with a guy I had met as first just a dealer but he then became a friend of sorts. As I was driving there, I knew I was truly only leaving because I wanted to get high rather than drink/party with my friends - I somehow justified the sneaking around his girlfriend with the fact that we were just 'drug buddies', as if that was any better.* (see 2 side stories below related to Wheaton/Jill)
4. Again with senior year - after that trip to Chicago, I must have realized on some level that I was getting into more trouble than I could handle. I remember telling Jill I was going to get advice from the counseling services available at Bentley for the both of us (I think it helped me force myself to go if it was for her benefit too), and remarkably I did manage to make it there… maybe not remarkably, I'm sure it took getting high to go, but still I did make it. I was met by a counselor who looked my age and seemed baffled by everything I was telling her (which was that I was addicted to opiates but still functioning perfectly fine… yet I needed help stopping - except I'm sure I used way more words than that). Unfortunately, all I got out of that trip was a list of detox/rehab centers that I returned to Jill with and we decided (and this kills me to admit now) that we would rather "go to hell in a handbasket together" than rehab. That being said, I've thought about that conversation A LOT (naturally), and I truly think that we meant it more as in "we're being horrible humans and therefore could never get into heaven, just hell" - dying from our use hadn't even seemed like an option at that point. Plus, there were many times when we'd be getting more pills in the same day and after making the decision I'd say something about ending up in rehab after all this and she'd say "don't worry I'll be right there with you" which is what helps remind me that we did not willingly ever say we'd rather die than go to rehab, even if at times I know I thought it to myself (but 'why I was so against rehab' is a tangent for another day, yet can be summed up with just this: the stigma that rehab = people at rock bottom).
5. All through college, I convinced myself that "my little drug habit" would stop once I graduated - truly, to the point where despite knowing I had someone in my hometown that sold pills (I had gotten them from him on many a winter/summer break from Bentley), I still was almost late to graduation because I rushed to meet up with another dealer that had some because I thought it would be my 'last time getting high' … In less than 24 hours after graduating and returning to CT I was already getting more from the guy in my town. My job didn't start until September, and Deloitte gave us the option of a 'stipend payment' taken out of our first few paychecks to get us through the summer - an offer I instantly took them up on while also working 2 summer jobs and having no rent to pay. That was my first 'extension' of my personal deadline for quitting drugs, because (I still can't believe I thought this, but I truly believed it) I thought for sure that once I started my 'real world' job there was no way I'd be able to continue getting high so often. That thought kept all the worries at bay while I enjoyed my last summer before moving to Boston in September.
6. Surprisingly enough (not), starting work only made me go from wanting to get high when I was bored to suddenly needing to get high to deal with the reality that I had chosen a soul-sucking career path without putting nearly enough thought into it… Bentley is a feeder school for 'the big 4 accounting groups' which means that despite telling a partner in my interview that my future career goal was to open an orphanage, I still got the job offer in OCTOBER of my senior year. It seemed too good to be true, which I should have taken as a sign that it was… but I did not, and therefore after that first weekend of training in NYC in September 2013, where I went with no pills on me, I realized that there was not going to be a magical sudden stop to my drug use.
7. Moving Jill out of her apartment on Brock Street with Alan was another time I realized how much trouble I was in, even though it was Jill being sent to rehab. I couldn’t even look her mom in the eye, because I knew she partially blamed me – I told Jill to tell her it was all my fault if it helped her situation at all, because I always hated seeing Jill upset and would have offered her anything to help the situation. That was one of the hardest nights of my life, with the only bright spot being meeting Alan well for the first time and realizing what a realistic and just overall great guy he was. I felt horrible that Jill was going through all of this while I still was hiding my addiction from the world – even our friends that knew we both did drugs seemed to see her as the addict and not me, which was so untrue. I just took the time to hide my addiction more than Jill did, because as she said “she liked enjoying the high and fuck what anyone thought” when I once told her that she was likely getting suspicious glances due to the interestingly high-pitched voice she used when high and other different mannerisms. Overall, it was just a horrific way to see my friend that I’d spent almost every day with for years be taken away, especially when compounded by the fact she of course couldn’t talk to me much at all after since I was part of what she associated with drugs. I was heartbroken.
8. Finally, without Jill by my side anymore, I was so lost and scared that I decided to see a doctor about this 'little problem of drug abuse' as I thought of it at the time (I think sarcastically but who knows)… except I still thought I could handle it all myself with just a little help in the form of a Xanax prescription to help me through the worst of the withdrawals. I went to Newton Wellesley Psychiatry and told the woman I met with that I was a recent college graduate and having more anxiety than ever before, plus panic attacks - all true, I just left out the key detail that the reasoning for this anxiety was that I was panicked about the realization that I was a drug addict. I left with not only a prescription for Klonopin, but also for Adderall (a huge win in my book), because she diagnosed me with ADD due to the fact I talk so fast. No tests, nothing - just a 20 minute appointment and I had been 'diagnosed' with ADD, anxiety, depression, and with the promise of potentially trying out bi-polar meds if we found that the pharmacy she was sending me home with didn't do the trick.
9. For a while after that, I deluded myself into thinking I was sober just because I wasn't taking painkillers (technically after the first month or so I was still getting a couple every few weeks, but I lied to myself about that so much that now I barely can even recall how often it was), when in reality I was just in a benzo/stimulant haze. This was another tough realization: not only had I not solved my original drug addiction, but I had added more addictive prescriptions to the mix. Once I called my psychiatrist and told her 5mg of Klonopin wasn't having any impact, she panicked and told me never to take that many and to see her immediately. This is where the timeline gets blurry - I'm not sure exactly when I stopped getting those prescriptions, but I was on a horrific client working 18 hour days in Hartford CT Monday-Thursday, and for a few months I was just a shell of a human kept outwardly alive and functioning via chemicals. I knew I was getting bad with the drug use - this is the time I recall the detoxes being horrible. My boyfriend at the time even got me suboxone from someone he worked with for a while, and I thought it had helped so much that when he stopped being able to get them I allowed myself to think maybe I was cured… until a few days after stopping taking them I got a terrible "flu." It took me months to learn that in reality I had been sick from the suboxone withdrawal, not a flu.
10. I don't know why I thought I was qualified for self-medicating, but I truly justified a lot of my non-prescribed medicines that way. It was as if that 1 psychiatrist  gave me the diagnoses I needed to hear to justify my self-medicating in my head with the adderall/xanax/kpins/etizolam (a drug similar to benzo's that you can order online since the legality of it is 'approved for chemical/lab use only, not human consumption' … I have the same ex-boyfriend who introduced me to painkillers to thank for that nugget of information). Finally my current boyfriend convinced me to go to a 'real' doctor and tell her the truth about everything: another time I realized/admitted I was an addict, even if I still didn't want to believe it myself fully. So I did, and I was banned from any addictive medicines, put on an SSRI, given lots of handouts about programs that I promptly threw away - except for one about an acupuncture program. $10 to sit in a room with needles stuck in my head that could potentially 'cure' my addiction? That was my kind of solution, and I kept it up pretty religiously until I moved out of Boston into Waltham at the end of 2014. I even tried to go to a program once in Brookline… but I walked in and then walked right back out before filling in any more than my name on the form. I couldn't handle the thought of being surrounded by all those other addicts that looked like the type of people ready to give up on life - I didn't want to admit I was anything like them, so I ran out the door without looking back.
11. My next solution? Run away. You would think that all the cliches about not being able to run from your problems would have sounded off some alarms in my head, but instead I felt sure that because I had always wanted to live in San Diego that sunshine and being in a new state across the country was the answer to all my problems. "How could I ever get bored or sad in a place that's 75 and sunny all year round!?" … Yes, it had been years since my first time getting high, but I was still that naïve. I moved there a couple weeks before my boyfriend (who followed me there, much to my original dismay followed by relief because I realized I needed him to afford rent - why he stayed with me so long is beyond me) and it did not take me long to justify a reasonable way to get my hands on pills again. I used Valentine's Day and the excuse of "missing you so much" to my boyfriend as a way to take a round trip cross country flight home for a weekend to "celebrate with him" … deep down I knew I just wanted his adderall and whatever else I could get my hands on while there. Despite never accessing painkillers in California (not for lack of trying- I wired away thousands of dollars without thinking, I was that desperate when the adderall/benzos weren't enough), I truly think of that year as my 'rock bottom': I got myself into so many messy situations, a bunch of debt, crashed my car twice, and just overall made horrible choices. Operating on high alert yet technically blackout thanks to the benzo/adderall combo (especially with a little booze mixed in) taught me that there is such thing as not having enough anxiety. I really did learn the meaning of that statement "wherever you go, there you are." It would be stuck in my head on weekends when I could see the sunlight streaming in but couldn’t handle getting out of bed because I had promised myself that weekends would be drug-free. Somehow I was still operating on all cylinders at work, probably because my job left me on my own a lot… and yet, in my anxiety free alert state I decided to quit my VERY well paying job that had taken me a year and a half to find from across the country for a job I met through a sketchy guy that turned out to be nothing like what he had promised. I ended up paying 2 rents because I broke up with my boyfriend and moved in with a friend, but barely ended up fully moving in because I hated being away from the dog I had adopted with my ex. Eventually I tried to quit all the drugs at once before starting my 'new job' … then I had a mini-seizure, mom flew up, I somehow fobbed off all the doctors at the hospital and my mom by blaming it on the fact I stopped taking my SSRI (true - but I left out that I had also suddenly stopped the other cocktail of drugs I had been taking), and finally waved my white flag of surrender to my ex. He got his way: us back together moving home with me finally dedicating my last 3 work-free weeks in California to staying sober/healthy in hopes of keeping my parents in the dark before I'd be moving in with them while finding a new job in Boston.
12. That time post-California is the longest I was ever off painkillers until now… but I was miserable. SO miserable. In hindsight, I needed to be doing more than just "white knuckling" sobriety but after I tried out a few therapists I didn't like/half-heartedly attempted to find doctors again I ended up just "trying to do it myself." I can DISTINCTLY remember the moment I decided to say 'fuck it' and order the benzos online again since my boyfriend was still giving me his adderall occasionally (poor guy was trying to keep me off painkillers and really would do anything, yet now I clearly see that I just manipulated him and he enabled me to do so). I was taking a shower thinking about how I didn't feel too bad sober - and this is where the troublesome thought came: "see, I can handle life sober. I'm not dying, I'm just bored - that must mean I'm not an addict". I'll never forget that, because Jill had once told me she thought that the main reason I did drugs was to keep boredom away since drugs make everything fun. I was so much more interested in everything when I was high - it felt like I could do anything, and I missed feeling alive after so many months of just trying to not die of anxiety curled in my bed. I also was starting to realize that I needed to end things with my boyfriend, and there was no way I'd be able to stick to the breakup without getting high - he was a master at making me think I needed him/getting me to take him back, especially since we had gotten the dog together in California (I adored that dog with all my heart, if it hadn't been for the pup I never would have gotten back together with my ex in California). I knew I didn't want to marry him (or maybe anyone - marriage has never been high on my to-do list), and despite the fact that he claimed he knew that when I reminded him, I also knew that he was lying and just hoping I'd come around eventually. I had wasted enough of both of our time by allowing the relationship to continue - so I justified ending my "sobriety" (I had definitely still gotten high a handful of times - Christmas shopping sticks out in my mind as one of those times so I'm sure there were others) and using drugs again "just to get through the breakup and moving out from our shared apartment, then I'll stop."
13. I did not stop after the break-up and moving out. In fact, from that moment on I was in free-fall: single again for the first time in years, living with a random girl by Fenway, making new friends at a job I actually enjoyed (Wayfair, where I am now), and somehow managed to let myself think that my adderall/benzo/percocet use was "under control" or "something I'd eventually just stop doing." Yes, I still managed to convince myself of that despite ALL the previous times I had realized I was an addict - if anything, I just had to stay high so that I could forget I was an addict. By this time the year was 2016, and for 2 years I was just living with the ever-present terror that until I stopped using drugs I was a slave to them with no control over my own life - except when I was high, because every time I was high I thought for sure that I'd never need to be high again. The brain is a crazy thing. When Jill passed away in November of 2017, I found out while high and despised myself for it. I thought that something so horrible would make me see the need to stop, but if anything it motivated me to just numb myself even more. In therapy one of the first things we went into depth about was my “unresolved feelings about the loss of my friend” and I realized how true it was that I hadn’t really processed all of the guilt/shame/heartbreak associated with her passing. It wasn’t until I got lunch with Alan on the 2 years since her death date that I truly felt as though I was able to be more at peace with the fact that she was no longer here physically, because she was here spiritually.
14. Finally, in September 2018, I decided it was time to get real help. I had been talking to a therapist for a year via Talkspace and had made great progress in terms of my self-awareness, but not so great progress in terms of making my drug use decline. I was living with 2 of my guy friends that were supportive without being intrusive, which was important to me because after all the mayhem with my ex boyfriend I knew that getting sober was something I had to do for myself. I told my brother, and he was fully supportive (he had been kept somewhat in the loop of my drug concerns throughout the years), and after a tearful meeting with a new GP in which I told her everything, she set me up with a behavioral therapist who explained my options. I decided to take a week off work (yeah, because it would only take a week to undo years of damage… good one) and "deal with my problem" by following my GP's advice and going to get medical clearance at the ER due to the benzo usage and the potential of dying when stopping suddenly. Sitting in the ER feeling more worthless than I ever have just watching 'normal' people working and going about their days while I was on a bed that should have been used for someone that didn't inflict their illness on themselves was absolutely a pivotal moment in which I realized there was no denying it anymore - I was 100% an addict with all sorts of forms to prove it. The problem with this horrible plan was that I had nothing set up for after the ER… I don't know why I thought they would have time to take care of getting me set-up with a program, particularly since anytime I was sober (as I was then) I couldn't do much besides curl up in bed. The thought of calling all these places terrified me, so I met up with one of my only friends that really knew about my drug use and she offered to do the calling. I guess I took some reassurance from the fact she found it as frustrating as I did to try and get into any of these places - I'll never forget that one woman laughed out loud at the thought that I could get it all over within a week - she pointed out it would take anywhere from 2-6 weeks to even be through the worst of the benzo withdrawals. Naturally I was defeated at this point and decided to just spend the week detoxing in my room in hopes that it would mean a fresh start for me after.
15. Obviously, no fresh start. It wasn't until corona hit that a perfect storm of well-timed events allowed me to complete a program from my home with not only my bosses permission but his encouragement. My boss is someone I will always credit with saving my life, because despite only knowing I was struggling with mental health he still subtly pushed me to get the help without ever telling me what to do (because once someone tries telling me what to do it's like my brain decides that's exactly what I cannot do - another problem to work through with my therapist, as if that list isn't long enough…). I learned more than I ever thought possible from Woburn Wellness, and met 2 people that made all the difference in how much I took from the program. The day sessions I did while taking weeks off work helped me learn how to live again, the suboxone FINALLY freed me of the thoughts that had always been in the back of my mind since the first time I got high ("would this be better high? Maybe just one more time? I think it would help me get this project done then I'll never take one again"). Learning about the science behind addiction - and, most importantly, that all my bad habits that had turned into neural pathways in my brain were not permanent - was more helpful than I ever would have thought. The group sessions helped me dispel the absurd belief my addiction had led me to believe, that I couldn’t work/socialize/do anything without getting high first (I truly believed that thanks to my habit of utilizing my time high as productively as possible as a way of managing the guilt that came with it). I am an addict, but that doesn't mean it's the only trait that defines me: it's just something I have to deal with, and out of all the crosses to bare in the world there are worse ones than mental illness/addiction (at least I assume so, no matter how much it feels like my mental illnesses are life ruining at times). I obviously have a long road ahead, but I'm finally able to appreciate that being on the road is in itself a win.

*Jill and I spent many beautiful days walking around Wheaton's campus waiting for Will to get out of class and sell to us, and honestly as tainted as those memories are, I still hold on to them because there's "light within the dark" for lack of a better term. Yes, we were up to activities that ruined our lives eventually (taking hers completely and just overtaking mine in all living aspects), and yet remembering our talks about life while walking arm in arm admiring the pretty campus fills my heart in happy ways that remind me of her beautiful spirit that's always with me now.

*My friendship with the Wheaton guy (a star soccer player for the college before drugs took over) was odd/intermittent over the years due to a whole host of issues (his girlfriend, later his parents finding out, then I had a boyfriend who of course hated the mention of his name once he realized why I was talking to this 'random guy') but drugs have a way of making "friendships" last longer than they should. He's the only person I've ever watched shoot up heroin, and honestly I thank my lucky stars all the time for the fact that I didn't join him in it despite the offer. I must have been high already (maybe from snorting heroin or maybe just from pills, I'm not sure - I only snorted heroin a few times, in my opinion it's "dirty percs with a shittier high") and maybe my ex boyfriend's words of 'wisdom' from years earlier were ringing in my ears: "I always know I can never shoot heroin because I'd love it too much" but either way, it's one of the very few good choices I ever made when it came to opiate use. He moved to New Hampshire and I remember visiting him there a couple times and being worried about how depressed he seemed, but at that point (late 2013/early 2014) I was so caught up in the mess I had made of my own life that I couldn't handle trying to help someone that didn't want to be helped. Safe to say I regretted that when I learned in January of 2015 that he had passed away from a heroin overdose - ironically, I only found out because the friend I was living with at the time worked with his sister. My friend thought that the guy and I just knew each other from a co-ed soccer team (I assume that's from one of the many lies I told in the name of keeping my drug use secret, but honestly I don't even remember the 'why'), so he told me that Will's sister was out on bereavement leave and that he thought it was because of her brother. Sad to say this was the first but not the last time I had to google a friend's name followed by the word 'obituary' to find out that he was no longer here physically. I remember staying up all night the night I found out just watching episode after episode of House on repeat, barely taking anything in other than my numbness. I'm sure I was high - my boyfriend at the time (same one who hated him to start with) naturally had no sympathy for the situation so I was alone in my room with only the chemicals to keep the complete darkness of my thoughts/situation away.