“It’s funny – people talk about rock bottom as if you hit rock bottom and you decide to get better. I don't think that is necessarily true. The thing about the concept of rock bottom is that you can always sink lower, no matter how depraved and dishevelled you are. ‘Oh I stole money from my mother’ but yeah, you still aren’t eating a human baby – you can always go lower, right? I had bottomed out several times before I decided to go to treatment. I was just tired. I was tired of my identity as a lonely drunk and drug-user, and I was afraid that those had become such ingrained parts of my personality and that if I were to walk away from them, there would be nothing left over. But it got to the point where the fear of exploring that was worth it. 

“The question after a while becomes ‘Why am I always feeling horrible?’ If part of the reason why is because of my lifestyle, then that’s good, because that means there’s something I can do about it. So, why not? I didn’t really have anything to lose, and I had everything to gain. So why not? Because it’s scary? So what? Deal with it. You have to. Well actually, that’s not true, you don’t have to. You can stay scared. You don’t have to do anything. 

“I realised that as soon as I can start taking responsibility for how I feel, that gives me the freedom to do something about it, and I'm not a victim anymore. I think that’s a trap a lot of people fall into: I’m this way because of this. Well, there may be truth to that, but what part do we play in our circumstances? I get drunk and fall down, then what? I get mad at gravity? Or the ground for being hard? Okay sure, but what part did you play? I also went to treatment as an experiment, because I had been living the way I had been living for so long. Maybe after a month of not drinking or getting high, I would spontaneously combust. I wouldn’t know because I hadn’t done it for so long. There was genuine curiosity.

“When I relapsed it wasn’t ‘I can have a little bit. I’m better now, I can handle it’. I went out with every intention of getting obliterated because I was in more pain than I knew how to manage. I remember sitting on the street at about Main and Hastings. I was drunk. I was high. And I remember thinking ‘this isn’t working. I’m still in pain. I’m drunk and I’m high, but I’m still in pain. What was the point?’ I remember feeling kind of disillusioned, and in a way, abandoned by the substances. I felt ripped off. I put a lot of effort into this relapse. I spent good money. I should be feeling better – why am I not feeling better? I went home feeling really disappointed and thinking ‘this isn’t working anymore’ and sincerely wondering ‘Did it ever work? Have I been fooling myself this whole time?’ That was the big takeaway from me: the substances don’t fix the underlying problems. The best you can hope for is for them to get you to a state where you don’t care.

“I’ve relapsed again since, but that time, I didn’t keep going. It wasn’t a multi-day affair. I woke up feeling not particularly ashamed or foolish, because I was in pain and I thought that it would help. I can’t hold it against anybody to not want to be in pain, so why should I feel ashamed by that?

“What they would say time and time again is that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety; the opposite of addiction is connection. The more experiences that I have, having been through treatment, the more I find that that really is true. If we’re able to connect with one another at a personal level, that kind of fulfils a need that most of us either don’t have enough of, or don’t have the right kind of in our lives, and that we’re trying to supplement with substances. Personally I don't think that there’s very much wrong with very many people that can’t be boiled down to a sense of loneliness. Not using drugs and alcohol doesn’t necessarily fix that, but it clears things up so that you’re better able to establish genuine connections with people.

“I met someone at the treatment centre I was at. The impact that this person had on me was life changing. I didn’t feel like a lovable person, and not in the sense that not anybody could love me, but that wasn’t receptive to it. All this love was sent my way and it would just bounce off me like a rubber bullet without having any effect. She was able to do it in a way that stuck and meant something. I didn’t think that that was possible. I thought I became too hardened in a sense – that this shell or armour had become impenetrable and that nobody could punch through it. But she did. We maintained connection here at Grace Mansion. She relapsed shortly after she moved out. I did my best to maintain connection, but it only got harder as she went deeper down her path. At a certain point, I realised that where she was going, I couldn't follow. So that sucks pretty hard. But I do get to keep the sense of love that I felt. I get to hang onto that.”

“In treatment, they talk about starting all over again. Most of the time that isn't true. People go back to their houses, their families, their jobs – the same everything. I walked into this place with a duffle bag full of clothes and that’s it. I walked into an empty room with a bed and a night stand. No blankets, no pots and pans – no nothing. So I really did get the opportunity to start all over again.”

This story is part of Hey Stranger’s partnership with The Salvation Army Belkin House.