So I've been in Portland for...well, not that long...and it already feels like I have a fuller, more interesting, and altogether more fulfilling life than I ever had before. I have tons of new friends, I go to interesting places and do interesting things, and I'm...get ready for it...F-ING SOBER! Holy Hell! Who would've thought a person could be happy & enjoy life without being high out of their flippin' mind pretty much 24/7?!
As it turns out, the world is not a cold dark place. There is so much more to this life than self-destruction and nihilism and dank, black and drear. Wow. Who-da-thunk, eh?
There is a big, wonderful world, just waiting to be discovered. I've heard it said many times before that the gates of Hell are wide open--most people just don't get up and walk out. My experience has proven this saying to be abundantly true. I wallowed in a morass of self-pity and self-imposed exile for years and years on end, never daring to turn my gaze upward to the sun. I shut the light out and decided I was to be a lost cause--and ya know what? Bullshit pretty much sums up that whole "way of life" (in truth it was a daily death)--it's callow, it's cowardly, it's hollow and it's pointless to languish in mediocrity and decay when there is a way. goddamn. out. of all that hideous morbid tripe.
I no longer have any justification to return to a daily dose of oblivion. I have no excuse. Yes, indeed, there has been trauma and hurt in my life, but it would be the ultimate cop-out to descend back into the old comfortable shoe of shoot-a-shot-and-become-the-dead. I walk down these city streets at night and see the hollow-eyed, meth &/or heroin-addicted zombies shuffling along in their dirt-caked jeans, lips all chapped with exposure and ruin, burrowing into their filthy blankets, souls afflicted with poison and dourness, "the buckling beams of [their] hopes & dreams" on excruciatingly public display...and I think to myself, "There but for the grace of God go I..."
I'm just a shot away from plummeting to the streets, myself. It is important for any addict to bear in mind that one little slip can send you a long damn way downhill, crashing through brambles to the muck of harsh reality. Addiction's not a comfy robe, some soft option--the so-called "normies" (i.e, the non-addicted) sometimes seem like they believe it's the "easy way out." I call bullshit on that line of illogic. There is nothing soft or easy about being a junky or a drunk. It is a hard, miserable life, fraught with peril, after a time lacking in any true escape. Yeah, it is, to paraphrase Elliott Smith, fighting problems with bigger problems, but after a certain point the drugs stop working.
I reached that point myself, and let me tell you, it is a terrible position to be in--too sad for sober, yet numb to every drug. There comes a jumping off point, a moment of clarity, when the utter unacceptability of what you're doing to yourself becomes agonizingly apparent, and the only thing left to do is--Whoops!--jump! Let go of the needle, put the plug in the jug, and at long last make an honest attempt at living a better life.
Free at last, indeed.
Love,
Rosswell
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