On Wednesdays We Wear Pink
Coming out of addiction and that kind of life and trying to reenter society is like trying to get a seat at the mean girls table. You literally feel like you have completely forgotten how to function around “normal” people and in a way you have.
I remember when my husband first exposed me to that kind of life and all of a sudden I was spending days awake with people who had been using drugs for the larger portions of their lives but at the very least for years and as they would all sit around and talk about when they did this drug or that drug for the first time or the time that they all got high and did [blank] or their time in jail. I sat and played candy crush like i was some kind of wall hanging.
Once my husband said, “No wonder no one likes you, you don’t ever talk to anyone you just sit there.” I looked him dead in the face and asked what he expected me to talk to them about. How was i going to join in? The flow of conversation would undoubtedly be impeded when an exchange like this happened:
“Yeah so that one time when I was shooting up heroin in the bathroom of the McDonalds and then the cops came in to serve my VOP warrant, you know what I mean about that feeling...”
and I come back with. “Yeah, one when I was on a mission trip with my church teaching vacation bible school to kids in low income housing i was really afraid that i was gonna get caught kissing this guy from the sister church when we went kayaking. Crazy times.”
seriously. no.
I didn’t talk because I had nothing in common to talk to them about. I had never experienced those things.
But something weird happens when you spend time in that life. You start to assimilate.
You ever heard that tale about putting the frog in boiling water? So it goes that if you drop a frog into boiling water, the frog will immediately jump out. BUT, if you put the frog in regular water and then you start to heat it to boiling the frog will literally stay there and be boiled to death because it just adjusts to the temperature of the water.. The same thing kinda happens.
The longer you stay in the trap the more you start to feel removed from your life before or from the “normal” society. The more you feel like you don’t belong there or anywhere. You have lost relationships and you have lost friends and now you realize that it’s hard to reconnect because some may not know why you fell off, or some have gone on with their life and they have families and responsibilities and you are ashamed. Or they know what you have been doing and they don’t want that around their kids etc. Or you know the only time that you really miss your old life is at 3am when you can’t sleep for the dope that you did earlier and your ole man is taking apart a 1987 truck and you are left alone with your thoughts and you can’t message them then because regular people are effing asleep.
You change until you don’t even think that you belong back in that “normal” life.
But then, a miracle. You decide that you don’t want to stay there anymore and you will not give drugs another second of your time and you start to want to get back to pre-world war Z life and so you start to try to reconnect.
and you find that you have the same problem. you find it hard to talk to your non-drug life friends because they want to talk about their investments and their job and you are like...”yeah, so see this vein here, this is my driving vein. Funny thing, the only time that the ole man could hit me there is when i was driving the car coming back from a dope run” and the look at you like you have snakes crawling out of your head and they are uncomfortable and you are uncomfortable and you want to crawl back into a hole.
addiction makes people uncomfortable because they don’t know how to react and I know this because I was once that person. I have apologized to someone once because i saw them physically become uncomfortable when i made some old drug life reference.
Let this serve as a PSA to “normal” society. Ranking right up with stopping the drugs is trying to get back into society. Trust me when I tell you that it is probaby the single biggest issue that we face. Because it causes in us all of the feelings that we escaped by using. We worry about being misunderstood, we worry when applying for a job because what f they ask why there is a huge gap in our employment? what if they want to go into detail about any kind of legal history, what if we are stunted in going forward because we are looked at and judged by a past that we are wanting and trying so hard to leave behind. what if we try to talk to our old friends and they don’t want to talk to us. What if they just think that we ghosted them and it wasn’t that we didn’t want to talk to them it was that we didn’t want you to see us strung out, we didn’t want you to know that we were like that. What if we have damaged relationships so bad that they can’t be repaired. What if your kid points out our tract marks and asked about them..or our scars from cutting. What if you invite us over and someone starts to talk bad about addicts. What if they ask us what we have been doing or what job we have and we can say nothing because life didn’t go like we planned and no we don’t own a car or a home we are struggling to work at Burger King and pay off our court costs?
We want our lives back. We want YOU back. We want US and our lives back. We are TRYING...please understand. Please understand that we are happy for you. Please understand that you don’t have to feel bad that you are where you are and we are where we are because we are alive and we are trying and we want to make it. If we try to message you on facebook or buy your new baby a gift please let us. We have literally felt like the scourge of society and our families for a long, long time. We have literally felt hated and rejected by everyone even ourselves and now we are clean and we are just trying to get our life back so hard. if its hard for you to talk to us because you don’t understand what we have been through or because we hurt you please TELL US. i would rather you say eff you than just say nothing. If you don’t want the gift because you think it was bought with drug money or will come from a drug house say that or let us send it and throw it away because it took A LOT for us to even write you. and being able to enjoy little things like seeing people we loved when we were happy be happy makes us feel like somebody again.
If you know someone trying to get their life back from abuse or addiction or mental illness or incarceration; GAS THEM UP. We are trying. We go to bed not thinking of the progress we made that day but of all the ways that we still didnt measure up that day.
and if you are reading this and you are like me struggling to get back on track and to join the land of the living again. I see you.
Great job staying clean today.
Great job using one less time today.
Great job calling your mom today.
Great job putting in that job application even though you are scared of rejection today.
Great job not hurting yourself today.
Great job showering today.
Great job. I am so proud of you and whether you wear pink or not you are welcome at my table and in my circle anytime and every time. Because I’ve been where you were and i’ve been where you want to be.
And on Wednesdays...we all make it.