After a childhood of drug addiction on the streets of Bucharest, a former addict finds an alternative solution for users to recover

An English version of a confession published in DoR

Interview and editing by Michael Bird, and Ionut Dulamita. Illustrations by Ionut Dulamita

It is evening. I am in the room where every Monday and Friday myself and other recovering addicts hold a meeting. It has white tiles, clean floors, cupboards and an icon of the Virgin Mary on a small window ledge. By day, it serves as a clinic for a psychologist. On the walls are flyers which read: ‘Drug Problems? We can help you.’ 

Four of us gather here, and we greet each other with a hug. 

The meeting starts with a moment of silence for the people still suffering from addiction. 

Then, one by one, we speak. 

My mother was only 20 years old when she had me. Her parents rejected her when she found out she was pregnant, so she rejected them. She left her house in only her clothes. 

When I was growing up, I knew nothing of my real father⁠—he vanished before I was born. My mother could not support me. When I was three months old, she placed me in the care of a woman who worked at a crèche. 

I lived with her family. Her husband was a drinker. He drank until he lost his mind and fell asleep. Where he laid down, I used to pull his eyelids open and he would not wake up. 

I can’t even remember their names. 

When I was three years old, I used to play in the kitchen, and put little plastic soldiers up against the fire on the stove. I liked the way they melted. The woman who cared for me caught me. She put my hand on the stove. Held my palm over the burning gas. She tried to teach me a lesson.

There were two other boys in the house. One was 18 and the other 16. I shared a room with the younger boy. Sometimes, at night, the woman came into the room and fucked her son on his bed. I was aware that something was not right, but couldn’t explain what. I couldn’t understand what this was. They never touched me. 

The woman took care of me when I was sick. She tried to teach me poetry. She enjoyed me being there.

When I was almost five years old, my mother visited, and introduced a new man as my stepfather. They took me in. I don’t know why. Maybe because she had found money.

The place where we lived was small.

“The harder I screamed, the harder they beat me”

It was almost winter. My birthday was in November. I had a party. My family brought cakes for all the kids at the kindergarten. They gave me presents. For Christmas, they put up a tree and bought me a video recorder, games and a joystick. 

Then the problems started. When my grandfather visited, he always handed me a one leu note. My mother seized it from me, and put it in a jar. I was afraid to ask her to give it to me. One time, I took the money from the jar, and bought sweets for the other kids in our block.

My mother and stepfather discovered what happened and beat me. The harder I screamed, the harder they beat me. I had bruises all over my body. When I fell on the ground, they took me to the bathroom, washed my face in cold water, and beat me again. But they stopped when my nose began to bleed. They always stopped when my nose started bleeding. Whenever my stepfather was beating me, I prayed that my nose would bleed. 

If I wasn’t good, they threatened to send me to an orphanage. I made cards for them. Like birthday cards. On the front of the one for my mother, I drew flowers, and for my stepfather, I drew cars. On the inside of the cards, I wrote: ‘I will be a good boy. I will do whatever it takes. Please do not send me to the orphanage’.

“Something in me was sending messages to my real father”

Drawing came naturally to me. Usually I drew a lot of colour. I enjoyed the feel of felt-tip pens. At the age of five, I drew maps, spaceships and flags. I wrote that I am in Romania, and drew hearts. Something in me was sending messages to my real father.

When I was 11, my mother and stepfather asked me to come into the living room. They sat me down and told me that my real father was an artist, who went to Australia and had problems with drinking. 

I went outside and told a bunch of kids I played with that ‘my real father is dead’. This became my story. The kids asked me how he died. I told them he was a drug user. He kept cocaine under the bed, he killed someone and went to jail, where he died of an overdose.

“I drank until I was unconscious. The others didn’t do that. It was pretty amazing. I was a source of amusement for them”

I saw other kids smoking and quitting classes and wanted to be part of that. I stole cigarettes from home. I put one in my shirt pocket and went outside, thinking that I would meet the group of kids I wanted to be among. I was hurrying to light a cigarette, so they could see me doing it.

We were seven kids who tried to act like rebels. The first time I drank alcohol, I poured cognac into a glass, and cracked an egg inside. I don’t know why. Maybe the other kids saw it in a movie. I drank it up. After half an hour, I went to buy cigarettes, and I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I collapsed on the ground. I vomited for hours. 

People in the neighborhood explained to me how they saw me, changed my clothes and took me to some woman’s apartment. My parents picked me up later. 

For one month, whenever I smelt the plum brandy my stepfather was drinking, I felt like throwing up. 

I was 11 years old. 

I developed this attitude that I must do something so people could enjoy me. To impress the other kids, I punched myself and hit my head against the postboxes in the hall of the block. I drank until I was unconscious. I always liked hard drinks, the caramel taste of cheap cognac. The others didn’t do that. It was pretty amazing. I was a source of amusement for them. I was a part of something. 

I became more confident at home because of this role I was playing.

“Just hit me,” I told my stepfather. “Hit me motherfucker.” For him, this was scary. 

When I was 15 years old, a friend brought some hash. That was the first time I used drugs. One week later, we snorted ketamine. 

The gang I took ketamine with beat me with the hose from a vacuum cleaner for fun, to see my reaction. I lost consciousness. The next day I went to meet the same kids, and acted like nothing happened. I hoped we were going to do ketamine again, because it was fucking amazing. Starting with a sharp buzz in my brain, ketamine cancelled every controlling function I had. My senses and feelings went to sleep. My inner pain was no longer there. I used to buy it from La Motoare, a bar on the roof of the National Theatre.

Later, I dedicated a tattoo to ketamine: a voodoo doll with needles stuck into her body. This was me.

“I stopped being a buffoon. I developed another mask. I was a drug user”

I was sixteen years old when I first shot heroin. We were 12 boys using together. We never hung around watching movies, didn’t have any favorite bands or books. All we wanted was to experience life through substances.

It was frightening, because it involved syringes, lemon salt, and burning a vial. All of us injected, but we didn’t know that the next day we would meet again to shoot up. 

When heroin got me, it all changed. We cleaned our syringes by spitting in our hands and wiping the blood off the needle. When we injected, we pulled out the blood and reinjected, to give a better effect. A couple of doses warms the veins and organs. Heroin guides the mind, the body, and the spirit. I closed my eyes and I didn’t focus on the outside world. Pleasure in its purest form.  

I stopped being a buffoon. I developed another mask. I was a drug user, everything was about hustling. I had to deal and to fuck the system. 

In our block, we hid the syringe, vial and salt, and our stash behind the rubbish chute, or on the roof. We called the elevator, blocked it halfway between the floors, and hid our tools on the top of the cabin.

I used heroin every day for one year. I felt bad from not using, the dosages increased, so I needed more.

“This emptiness inside of me had to be filled with something outside of myself”

Gangs in our neighbourhood stayed on the streets until four in the morning, especially in the summer. People were socialising by sharing drugs.

I used to go to a pharmacy to buy Regenon pills for losing weight, which contained amphetamines. They were only available through prescription, but I could trick the pharmacists into giving them to me. When I used them for two weeks, I stopped eating, and could see my skeleton. I could not piss. I had no erection. My penis looked incredibly small. I became emotional and stupid on Regenon, I talked bullshit and could not stop. 

Drugs kept me calm. They made me feel complete. For five minutes, everything was okay. I had these feelings and had to hold on to them for as long as possible. I had this drive. This emptiness inside of me had to be filled with something outside of myself. 

I used to break windows and cut my arms and hit myself and others without feeling anything.

“People did not believe that someone like me could do what I was capable of doing”

After one year of using, I was without money or the chance of getting money. I got withdrawals. The first day is bad. The second is worse.

I stole from the supermarket Mega Image. I took cosmetics. One called Celine Dion. It had the singer’s face on it. I put them in two baskets and placed rolls of toilet paper over them. There was only one security guard. I walked slowly past him, and then ran with the baskets out of the store. I dumped the empty basket behind the building, and sold the perfume on the black market. I didn’t care. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t have the feeling something bad would happen. It was my right. I was entitled to steal.

I stole spare parts from auto service shops, by having a pair of trousers under my jeans, where I put the parts. I chose the most expensive pieces that could fit into my jeans. I never knew what they were. I tried to sell them to kiosks in the street. 

When I was part of a group and there was no money, we stole from our homes. I took money from my stepfather. A plumber came to the house once. He took off his jeans and put on his work clothes. I looked in his wallet and took out all the money he had: only eight lei. 

One day in Mega Image, I heard the employees say: ‘let’s wait until he does something’. I left the basket, put the toilet paper back on the shelf and they grabbed me, took me to the back of the store and smacked me. Everyone said: “Hit him, hit him”. The whole fucking store was hitting me. Even the cleaning woman was kicking me with her slippers.

The police took me to the station and asked me what the fuck I was doing. I told them I had an online business and that I wanted to buy Celine Dion cosmetics and sell them at higher prices, and did not have money that day. I was in a holding cell for two hours. But they believed me, and threw me out. I had this thing inside of me. People did not believe that someone like me could do what I was capable of doing. That was my superpower.

“I couldn’t have the responsibility of using and of life”

When I was seventeen, I met my real father. We went to a restaurant behind a church that served a nice chicken and egg yolk soup – rădăuțeană. The meeting was not sentimental. I never thought: ‘Oh my God, I am going to meet my father.’ I liked speaking to him. He told me he was in recovery. That evening, he gave me a bag of felt-tip pens and 100 lei. I was so happy that I had that 100 lei because I could get high. 

One night, I told my mother I was a heroin addict. I told her because I couldn’t find any money.  

She was pretty calm. We went to a doctor at Obregia hospital in Bucharest. There, my mother cried. My stepfather was numb. 

I stayed in a pavilion with 17 patients, including alcoholics. Two girls in the pavilion were heroin addicts. I heard them talking on the phone with their mother:

– Do you hear me ok? At four o’clock you will meet a guy who will give you something and you put it in a jar, and bring it to the hospital.

Their mother came with a jar of prune jam – and inside was a balloon of heroin. They injected a dose in the toilet, and afterwards shared some with me.

In the hospital, I was good at playing a part. I could make you believe there was nothing wrong with me, and that I was a model for what you are expecting me to be. I never thought I had problems with drugs. I was only in pain. 

I started drawing and painting. I wrote poems about experiences with LSD. 

One went like this:

the streets are filled with all kinds of curses, with bird voices

that sing their own amnesia…

children heal their weeping by sticking leaves onto their eyes,

becoming their mom and dad’s superheroes. they want to save us,

but they will not find salvation in the introduction to any book. the world

Could not be saved from our minds. there’s nothing to save here, 

on earth..

I stayed in Obregia for four weeks. My parents gave money to nurses to treat me the best they could.

During my exams in high school, I was in and out of my parents’ home, on the third floor of a Communist-era block. I left the house everytime we had a fight. They would say “fuck off and leave this home!” and I slept in the airing room near the roof of the block, on an armchair a neighbour had abandoned.

But I passed all the exams, except physics. Afterwards, I got this feeling that I could be a part of society and an addict. But I couldn’t do both.

My mother was worried because I started using again, and took me to the doctor at Obregia. I got a prescription for antipsychotic drugs. He told me I should take these drugs and go into the park every day and look at the people. 

I didn’t understand why I should have to go into a park and look at people.

“I never got to that perfect state of being always high”

I studied psychology for three years at the University of Bucharest. We had a seminar where we had to role play. A student was the therapist and I was the client, and she asked me a plain question, and I felt something. Afterwards, I asked the teacher: “Do you know someone who can help me?” I had all that stuff in me, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I never knew I had a problem.

In university, I was using ketamine, ephedrine, Regenon, Diazepam, heroin, mephedrone, and weed. I was replacing one drug with another. When Romania made ketamine illegal, three local dealers smuggled it from Spain. One of them brought it by bus, another by motorcycle, in two-litre Sprite bottles. It looked like water.

When heroin gets you it’s pretty bad, but nothing prepares you for mephedrone. It starts with heating the body, and is the most powerful feeling I got from any drug. An explosion. As high as it got me, as hard it got me down. Everyone was quitting other drugs and getting on mephedrone. But after the first time, I did not get that feeling of greatness again.

I injected it, and wanted to walk forward, but found myself going backwards. At a concert, I was so desperate for a fix, I drew water from the toilet into a syringe and combined it with powder, so I could melt it down and then inject it. I developed a bump on my chest. Even now I can feel the pressure on an artery near my heart. In recovery, after two months, I could smell mephedrone on my wallet. It made me shiver. 

At that time, I would wake up in the middle of the night and light a cigarette and say: “Where is my syringe?” 

My neighbours started to notice. One found me dangling over the edge of the staircase, after I had injected myself with ketamine. I used to throw the syringes out of the window of my block and into the garden. Another neighbour on the ground floor collected them all and crammed them in my postbox. 

I met my girlfriend in the first semester, and I was obsessed with her. People can fall in love with an addict, because we know what to do and what to say, for a person to give us full trust. After we get full trust, we know how to manipulate that. The other person gets co-addictive. She had a job, took out a loan from the bank, and stole from her parents, and all the money she gave to me. 

I did terrible things to her. Going on holiday to the seaside, I used a bottle of ketamine on the train. At the guest-house, I smoked all our weed. We went to a festival and used all the ecstasy we had. I called my mother because we ran out of money, and her friend at the seaside lent me some cash and we went to a legal high shop to buy mephedrone. I bought cookies to share them with others at the guest house, because when I was on mephedrone, I wanted to share my love. I cooked potatoes in silver foil on the grill for everyone. But I couldn’t eat them. 

All night, I was obsessed with a red light shining from a building opposite our room. We didn’t have curtains. I thought we were being filmed. I fought with my girlfriend. I was paranoid. I kicked her outside. I locked the door. She spent the night on the beach.

I tried to manipulate my parents. I stole a ring from my mother. I put it in a pawnshop. She asked me to bring her ring back. And I asked her to give me money for it. It cost 200 lei. I asked for 235 lei. That way I could buy cigarettes and something to drink. The rest I spent on drugs.

One night, I was on the streets of Bucharest with other users, searching for a fix until about six in the morning, and one guy I knew focused on my eyes and told me something like:

“Look around you, everyone is going crazy, man. You should stop and you should stop now.” 

I went home with this idea to give up drugs. I had developed a tolerance; regardless of how much I used, I never got satisfied. 

I never got to that perfect state of being always high.

“When I was using, I felt as bad as when I was not using”

My girlfriend never asked me to quit. Instead, she said: “Don’t stay with other people, just use soft drugs and manage them”. She bought me one gram of grass every day, and I stopped using heroin. 

When I used a little hash or another drug, I got paranoid, I had breathing problems. When colleagues came to talk to me, I was talking with them only in my mind. Everything was happening inside.

When I was using, I felt as bad as when I was not using. 

I started to wash myself, brush my teeth, put on good clothes and go to university. On the way to college, I said to myself: just walk, count the light bulbs on the subway ceiling, and on the lines on the walls, stay focused, move forward, and come home as fast as possible. 

I started to read out loud. The first book was Dostoevksy’s ‘Crime and Punishment’.

This gave me thoughts about guilt and killing and how another person is going to kill me, or that I had killed someone. But I kept going, because I did not know what the fuck else to do. I remember the feeling about the prison at the end of the book. Because Raskolnikoff goes to jail. I was feeling desperate that the book was about to finish, and I didn’t know what I was able to do next. 

I didn’t know there was the possibility to go to someone else and say: ‘This is hurting me.’

“I received this great gift: desperation”

It was Sunday, in the clinic of a therapist. I entered the waiting room and nobody was there. I thought they had cameras in the walls., and they were looking at me, to see if I was going to steal something. I got so fucking scared. 

An old guy came in and asked me to wait for several minutes. There was a teddy bear in the room. I had hallucinations about that bear. I think it was because I had used a lot of LSD. Whenever I focused on objects, they diluted, and transformed. I could hear people from other buildings screaming at each other, but didn’t understand what they were saying. Everything was amplified. 

In the first session, the therapist didn’t ask me anything. I was prepared. I knew from University how to do this, and so I told him everything in one hour: how I am an ex-drug user, that I stopped for one month and two weeks, my history, how my parents beat me. For the first time in my life, I was crying. I was undressed of pain. 

I received this great gift. Desperation.

I became a geek. I went to classes. I wrote notes. My finger became deformed because I was writing so much. I had all this hunger. For the first time in my life, I was doing something that I was supposed to do.

I split up with my girlfriend. I told her that if I don’t quit everyone and everything, I will never get through this. We had been in a relationship for two years. 

She was black around the eyes. She was skinny. 

I had killed her spirit.

“I heard a voice saying something that created an alternative to using drugs”

After I started recovery, I didn’t have a girlfriend. I didn’t have friends. I was sleeping for four hours a night. I started to draw again. My parents were paying for my therapy, but after several weeks, they said they had no more money.  My therapist proposed to me to make a drawing before every session, and to pay for the therapy with pictures.

He worked like a mirror for me. If I went into the deepest zones in my mind, he came with me and I did not feel alone, and I would always find a way out. He said: “There comes a time in the life of a client when he changes his own voice with the voice of the therapist.” Whenever I thought of something that brought me bad feelings, I heard a voice saying something that created an alternative to using drugs. It was pretty amazing, but I was still sick. Something was missing.

Children accepted me. A psychoanalyst supervised me to work in a kindergarten. I was an assistant who interacted with the kids, and kept my mind focused on what happened to them, and played with them.

One of the kids was adopted, and was screaming, swearing and smacking other children. She was seven years old. The kid hit me and pulled my hair because she wanted me to be angry with her. She wanted other people to reject her.

With crayons, she drew a picture of a frog, and said: “The frog is sick”. I said: “I understand, but we are here to take care of that frog”. She stopped and something worked, and I realized that no adult in her life had ever let themselves understand her. All that she needed was understanding and acceptance.

She did not know she was adopted. Her foster parents were distant. Her therapist met with the director of the kindergarten, who later asked me: “What have you done to her?” because she had improved. 

I gave her the example of the frog, and said how she needs to be assured every time that she is ok.

But I contracted a bad infection in my throat. I went to the infectious diseases hospital, did some blood tests, and the doctors told me I had Hepatitis C. I stopped going to the kindergarten, and took treatment to cure me of the virus. 

I do not know what happened to the girl. I do not want to know.

“Whenever I saw someone on the street, they were surrounded by colors”

In the first year of recovery, I could not eat. I could not sleep. I stayed in the same clothes for weeks. I was talking to myself. I spent 45 minutes per week with a therapist. That was the extent of my social relationships. The rest of the time I was drawing, translating, masturbating, and smoking cigarettes.

My teeth hurt because I would not open my mouth. I started to walk on the streets and talk into a dictaphone.

Whenever I saw someone on the street, they were surrounded by colors. If someone focused on me, I saw them invaded by colour. Sometimes fuzzy, sometimes intense, violet, magenta, a lot of blue, green, white, sometimes dots of light.

On the street and around the trees, I saw white silhouettes, like an intense fog. If they were ghosts I was not afraid of them. Ghosts would never scare me.

My therapist told me: when we use drugs we are immersed in reality, because we need facts to use drugs – we need time, we need money, we have to meet a dealer, to find the tools.

But when we get to recovery, we are immersed in the spirit.

“Every time that fire goes out, that is when active addiction starts again”

My father was an alcoholic, and suggested I should go to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

In Bucharest, I went to an AA meeting. I said my name and that I am an ex-drug user and someone from the room shouted at me: “You’re an addict!” It was the first time I heard the word ‘addict’. These were not people I could relate to. After that meeting, I went to the first bar I could find and drank. 

At AA, I was told there was another man who was like me – an Iranian called Alireza. He gave me a hug. All the alcoholics kiss each other on the cheek and shake hands, but with this guy we were hugging each other. That was something new. 

He asked me how I was and for how long I had been clean. After that he told me about the Narcotics Anonymous meeting every Saturday.  

The meetings were held in a church. I listened to people in similar situations to me.

I met 16 addicts in a room. Each spoke about their experiences. For the first time, I saw a roomful of addicts not interrupting each other. I could feel it when another addict spoke. A mirror where I could see myself. 

Every time, the meeting starts with a moment of silence for the people still suffering from addiction. 

In that moment of silence, I pray that other people are thinking about me.

Therapy only gave me the chance to get into society. I am functional today because of therapy. But it was only when I found Narcotics’ Anonymous that my life changed. I found out this is not a moral problem. It’s a spiritual problem.

When I used drugs, it was something beyond my power to stop. I did not use drugs because I wanted to use drugs. I was using because I could not not use drugs. That force needed something bigger than myself to help me stop, because addiction is something bigger than myself. The force I needed was God as I understand him.

I saw kids in the parks, and I knew that was God. I saw the trees, and I realized that was God, and I saw the pavement, that was God, I saw the cars, and I thought: is that God? That was God as well. A voice asked me – What about crimes, what about drugs, what about wars? Rapes, children being molested? And I realized, with my heart open, that was God as well. For me God is all good and bad together without me giving it a value.

The NA program is simple. It is a twelve-step program, where I have a sponsor who has worked the steps, and works with me on them. One side of addiction is a lack of connection with other people. In Bucharest, addicts do not get that connection with other people when they stop using. 

In this recovery process, I try to keep the light on. It is like having a candle or a little fire, and I have to keep it burning. Every time that fire goes out, that is when active addiction starts again.

“I began to have a new understanding of hope. I wanted to feel better”

Because the meetings were in a church, I started to get religious. What I knew about religion was from a picture book at school, with a moral message. A boy puts a ladder against a tree, climbs up to a bird’s nest, and destroys what he finds. I do not know what happens to him. But there is a picture of the boy lying on the ground.

I started to pray every day before I left my apartment. If I missed a prayer, I felt bad. I went to every church possible in Bucharest—Catholic, Jewish, Orthodox— and stayed on my knees. I got sick doing that. 

What is powerful is the Serenity Prayer: 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

That gives me strength.

Going to these churches, I was building hope. It was like Pandora’s Box. All the evils from the world had left—and hope was all that remained inside. I began to have a new understanding of hope. I felt desperate to find somewhere to entrust my being.  

I wanted to feel better. I want to feel better.

“In recovery, I realised that normal people who are not using drugs are more intoxicated than addicts”

When I was using drugs all night, I went back home in the morning and saw all the people going to their jobs. I thought their life must be much greater than mine. 

In recovery, I realised that normal people who are not using are more intoxicated than the addicts I used to hang with. The real world is more crazy than the world where I took drugs.

When I was using, if I liked a girl, I got hooked on her fast, maybe we had sex, maybe not. I used this relationship to get money or drugs.

After two-and-a-half years of recovery, I started seeing a girl. She told me she had been raped by a writer. The guy was using ketamine and raped her. I left her. I didn’t need that. 

I wrote a blog where I shared my experiences, and I wrote about feeling suicidal. A woman from Cluj got in touch with me, and thought it was sexy. She was 33 years old and she sent me a picture of herself.

I asked who took that picture. She said: “My boyfriend. We have been together for seven years”.

We met in a five star hotel in Bucharest. Her boyfriend paid for her to stay there, so she could run a marathon in Bucharest. In the hotel, she brought alcohol disinfectant and cleaned everything in the room. While she was naked. 

The sex was powerful because, when I was on drugs, I never got to finish.

But when these kinds of people came to me, I didn’t know how to deal with the situation. I found a world here in Bucharest where girls fucked with anyone anywhere anytime. Meanwhile guys manipulated this situation. This was sick.

I was attracted to girls who were vulnerable, so I could abuse them, victimize them, and save them. The danger was for my girlfriend to be independent. 

When I was an addict, I used the lizard part of my brain. When a little danger comes towards a lizard, it runs away, and that’s how I reacted. As soon as I felt a girl I was with was becoming independent, I made accusations against her, and put her in a vulnerable position, to the point where she lost any sense of reality.

“Some people go on trips and take photographs. I don’t have the money to do that. So I draw everything on paper”

Painting helped me deal with anxiety. I did not know what art was. But I realised it was something I needed to do. Some people go on trips and take photographs. I don’t have the money to do that. So I draw everything on paper.

In four years of therapy, I drew monsters and masks, in the style of the Aztecs and Mexicans. As my recovery progressed, my perception changed, so my characters developed, and I drew my feelings, relationships and struggles. My paintings connected to human life. When I stop painting for several months, I feel the side effects. It is a relationship I developed. The only relationship where I can be myself. 

Later, I met the man who I met at six in the morning, and told me to stop using drugs, who I listened to. He was my age and was still living with his mother, who was a lawyer. 

I said to him: “You don’t know what you did to me, but afterwards I quit drugs and now I am clean.” 

He was like: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

I have been clean for seven years and six months and three days. I am 29 years old and the only decision I took full responsibility for was to stop taking drugs.

The first step is accepting the problem, the second is accepting a solution, the third is where I put myself beyond my own understanding, and give myself to a higher power. The fourth step is when I make a list of all the people I harmed. I have to make amends with all these people. The next seven steps are about recovering life and its purpose. The twelfth is the most important: after the spiritual awakening as the result of the other steps, we try to carry this message to other addicts.

Today my parents are old enough not to hit me anymore. They understand life. “You know,” my mother said to me. “It’s like you never used drugs.” 

I have to develop a new understanding of what intimate relationships mean and what sex means. Addicts use relationships to get that high back. It is different from being intimate and open with people. 

But we are not prepared to tell another person our worries, not prepared to express feelings, or to understand.  

As an addict, if someone would tell me, ‘I love you’, I would get scared. If someone hit me, that would be familiar.

To have an intimate relationship as an addict is, as one of my friends says, like playing in the Champions’ League.

But we never finish the steps. It is always a work in progress.

Whenever the clinic doors are open, I go to a meeting. Sometimes I come alone to the small room in the evening. I light a candle, and read some literature on recovery. 

I stay here for an hour, and then I go home. 

____________________

This text has been shortened and edited