I used to struggle with drug addiction. I am clean now and have been for a few years. I used to be addicted to amphetamine, but I did lots of other drugs too. Why amphetamine? I think the main reason was that I was constantly feeling weak due to my poor management of diabetes, but also because I always enjoyed talking to people and speed is a drug that really opens people up. I was (and still am) quite shy and have some social anxiety, which speed makes quick work of. Not only that, but I also suffered from depressive episodes, and doing drugs was an escape. I believe all addictions are an escape from something. Anyway, those are the reasons I started taking the drug and later got addicted. After a while, maybe a year, of doing the drug, all the positive effects went away. All I felt were the negative effects of not doing it. I got to the point where I wouldn't get out of bed without taking a line first. I remember meeting up with a friend who also did a lot of speed and after talking about it with him for a while he said, “did you notice that we only complain? We never once said that it feels good or that it helps us in some way. All we feel are negative effects” (not a direct quote, this was a long time ago). It really hit me, at that moment I understood that I'm falling down into a deep hole.
I used to stay up for about two straight days taking speed, sleeping from morning to morning, going to the dealer to get more and do it all again. I don't even remember what I use to do during all that time, it's just kind of a blur, but going to sleep felt like losing, so I just did more lines to the point where I would pass out from exhaustion. After a while there really was no happiness, no high, no overwhelming sense of accomplishment the drug used to provide in the beginning. It felt like I was just doing it out of habit, or because it seemed like there was no other option. I remember the brief moments of soberness, if you can call it that, I used to feel very weak, and depressed, and I would hate myself for doing what I did. I thought that because I was depressed before doing drugs, it couldn't be the drugs that were making me sad. But the blame I felt definitely didn't help. In total, I spent about two years doing drugs, and about half a year of that was pretty much daily.
I took a tolerance break before a big party to reset my tolerance. I didn't take speed for a whole week, which felt like an enormous task. After that weekend, the next weekend was my mom's birthday, and we were going to a remote place for a couple of days with extended family. I knew that if I showed up there having done drugs the entire week before, it wouldn't be good, so I took another week off. It had happened before on my grandma's 80th birthday. I felt terrible, and I thought that everyone could see. I kept feeling tired, so I kept sneaking away to do more speed, and that just made me blame myself more and feel even worse. I felt like the biggest disappointment ever, and it was a big wake-up call for me.
After I came home from my mom's birthday, I didn't do speed. For a while, I didn't even think about it. I don't know why, I guess, I had just grown tired of it. After some time it became difficult, I started having cravings, especially, when getting into situations, where being high was the norm before. I had some bad days, some breakdowns, a relapse, but I got through it. And I noticed that my mood started improving significantly. Three and a half years in, and I can't believe that I used to get high pretty much everyday. Back then, I couldn't imagine ever living sober again. I had talked to someone who quit drugs and when I asked them for how long, I saw this fear in his eyes and a shaky voice answered "three years". I felt like I understood it, and it made me want to never quit. I didn't think there was much point in doing so, if life was just going to be a struggle and constant thinking about it anyway. Funny how things change.
Looking back at it after all this time, I don't really feel any regret. In a way, I forgot what life used to be back then, but I think I had to go through it to become what I am today. I occasionally still get the thought, that speed would make some stressful situation easier to handle, but it never gets to the point of being too much anymore, and these thoughts are becoming less and less frequent. When I started doing drugs, I felt like everyday I had a choice: to have a guaranteed the best day ever or to roll the dice and see what life brings me, and when life had let me down so many times, the choice seemed obvious. However, I soon came to realize that this choice is very misleading, the real choice was: deal with your problems today, or live in blissful ignorance for one more day until the problems pile up and seem more and more unmanageable.
Having this experience doesn't make me an expert on addiction, but I do think I have some deeper understanding of how it works and what it means to be addicted. I used to be addicted to social media in a very similar way: it begins with high dopamine rushes and devolves into mindless actions that are done out of habit, even though they do not provide any enjoyment anymore. I believe that the first step to solving a problem is recognizing that you have one.