Recovery - slippery road to Hell&back

A good friend of mine recently told me his story...

He asked me:

˝What would you think about me if I told you I was a recovered drug addict?˝

Some of you would feel sorry for me. Others would say: ˝So, what?!? It was your decision; nobody forced those drugs down your throat. ˝ They would be right. It was me who brought all that misery upon myself. No one else to blame but me.

I know it sounds like I´m drowning in the self-pity, but I don´t. Not anymore. It took me close to 20 years to realize that. I can´t and mustn´t blame others for my decisions. Even though, the odds were not always in my favor (they rarely are), I had other options but chose to take shortcuts.
That hardly ever pays off. You know that, don´t you?

Poor decisions - weak actions - miserable life.

No matter how hard you try to mend things, you can´t do that if you start in the middle. You need to go to the very source of the problem. For me, that meant I needed to understand why I started using drugs.

I have been an average person for as long as I can remember. My whole life was all about mediocracy and observing others how they lived their lives, instead of living my own. I was always the one in the shadow of somebody else. Watching movies, listening to the songs, reading books about ˝heroes˝, success and importance. I felt like a tiny gray mouse glancing at life from under an old dusty cupboard.

Not a great life to live. My thoughts were ˝killing˝ me, as nobody knew I was even there. I felt hollow and irrelevant but just couldn´t do anything about it. The world was a bad place, and everyone I knew was against me. (Well, that wasn´t the case. I wasn´t unlucky, helpless guy. I was just weak.) When I started using drugs, everything changed. I didn´t care about the outside world anymore because I was too busy enjoying the rainbow within me. With drugs, I found a place where I belonged, I found ˝home˝.
Or at least I thought so.
You know very well this wasn´t a real home. It was more like cardboard in the alley behind the abandoned old theater.
It was only the matter of time before everything would collapse.
Of course, that was exactly what happened.
Everything fell apart, and I had two options; to follow the big white rabbit or to enter a rehab center. That was probably the first time I started seeing the bigger picture and stopped feeling sorry for myself.

Till this day I´m not sure where I found the strength, but I decided to go with the second possibility. Because of that decision, I´m still here today. If I had decided to follow the bunny I probably wouldn´t have been here to write about it today.
Feeling good about yourself has nothing to do with running away or hiding from anything. However, feeling healthy, happy and satisfied has everything to do with fighting for yourself. Don´t give up on your life by taking shortcuts. They usually end up as a long, long detour.

No chemical substance or virtual reality will ever come close to an early Tuesday morning, a cup of coffee, and a chilly breeze over your face, letting you know that you are still alive. It´s that simple. Use your senses to feel things. Choose to see the good things instead of bad ones, and take a long way over a shortcut.
My failure had begun long before the day I started using drugs.
It all started on a day when I gave up.
The moment you start feeling sorry for yourself, you are gone. Choose yourself, love yourself, but never feel sorry for yourself.

Self-pity is a dangerous road – try to avoid it, at any cause.