Recovery Has No Prerequisites

A person sits in a window, looking out at a neighbor building and smoking.

By. A. R. Bekenstein

When I first got caught in the chaos of addiction, I found it easy to rationalize my behavior because no one had even heard of the drug I was using. It was so new and hardly researched that it didn’t even have a pronounceable name yet – it was still just identified by a series of abbreviated prefixes and numbers, and it wasn’t even a scheduled substance in the United States at the time. I convinced myself that if my drug of choice was truly that dangerous, people would know about it – there would be laws and fines and penalties attached to it.

And that was just the beginning of my defense. I used every excuse in the book to explain why I was compulsively using designer narcotics. Ultimately though, it all came down to the fact that I felt like my addiction was never “that bad” compared to other people and that I was invalid in my struggles.

For as long as I’ve dealt with mental illnesses, I’ve always had this narrative in my head that I wasn’t sick enough to deserve help. When I was first diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder in high school, I felt like a fraud: other people had it worse than me, and I thought I was just being dramatic and attention-seeking. I believed that I wasn’t worthy of support.

This mindset leaked into every facet of my mental health, especially when it came to substance abuse. I knew people who had been to rehab, people who had been to jail, people who had lost their jobs, people who had lost their kids, people who had been homeless – all because their drug use spiraled out of control. I had never really lost anything because of my addiction, so I took that as evidence that I didn’t really have a problem. I shrugged it off as me just being a little wild and reckless. Despite the fact that I needed to get high daily in order to feel marginally okay, I dismissed it as an acceptable way to live. I was miserable, and yet I continued to ignore how much of my life revolved around drugs because I was stuck in the comparison game.

Things went on like this for quite some time until my body started experiencing signs of physical damage.

I remember in the midst of a dismal relapse, following a night of heavy using, I woke up to a minor nosebleed. My nasal passages were all irritated and inflamed from the repeated insufflation, and while it wasn’t anything serious, it got me thinking about side effects… My dad is a physician, and he frequently treats patients who have had strokes or seizures as a result of illicit drug use. It’s something he sees very regularly with inpatients.

The thing is that strokes and seizures are very real and possible consequences of drug use. But in the midst of my addiction, when I thought about side effects for myself, I got convinced that none of it applied to me.

The reality, though, is that nosebleeds are only the start. Bloody tissue in my hand, I realized that I was slipping down a treacherous slope. Maybe at first it’s just nosebleeds, but then it snowballs into nasal perforation, pharyngeal ulcers, immunosuppression, respiratory infections, seizures, strokes, comas… All it takes it one milligram too much to overdose, go into hypoventilation, deprive your body of oxygen, and die.

I think we all have a tendency to believe we’re somewhat invincible. We downplay the seriousness of our problems. We minimize the severity of the risks.

I often wrestle with feeling like things have never been “that bad” and therefore I don’t really have an issue or deserve help. I sometimes feel invalid because I’ve never hit a rock bottom. But the thing is I don’t want to hit rock bottom. If I had stayed in the cycle long enough, my rock bottom would have been death. That’s just the harsh truth.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of comparing our battles with someone else’s. We get comfortable in our suffering and believe that if other people have faced more adversity, we aren’t worthy of healing.

But pain is not a competition. You don’t have to get worse before you can get better. There’s no prize for being sicker.

You deserve to reclaim your life right this very second. There’s so much hope and joy out there, and you deserve to experience it. Recovery has no prerequisites.

 A. R. Bekenstein is an undergraduate student at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and her poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in Columbia Journal, Constellations, and Awakened Voices, among others. She can be found on Instagram @allie_beks