Freedom

I was so naive.

I used to think drugs freed my mind. Now I know differently. They narrowed it.

Nothing is what it seemed at all. All the friendships I made along the way sit in their own unrealistic battlegrounds. Every single person apart from C (sometimes including her?) Is a sea of disappointment, disharmony and self abuse.

S pretends she now has the life she always wanted to live- her own flat, a job a partner with a life she feels part of. She is still an incapable human. Still completely inept when it comes to standard growing up skills. Three men take advantage of her, drink and mess around in her flat without cleaning tidying or adding anything to her life yet she sits there in the mess with a smile on her face talking about her ‘three boys’.

She dangles herself dangerously in front of C, which had created emotional eruptions of hazardous proportions between him and her bf. Lacking all elements of self esteem.

She has grown up thinking it’s okay living in a shithole. She grew into an adult around k, who was in the midst of personal breakdown at the time. At least K knew that her lifestyle wasn’t normal and is now changing. S has no idea. Her kitchen is rarely cleaned at all and is full of flies and rubbish. Food, drug and alcohol stains are never cleaned up off the sofa or the floor. Dirty nappies are everywhere and the bedding is never changed. I can’t reason that it’s her depression anymore either, she simply lives that way because she thinks its ok and nobody tells her any different. Is that freedom? No, it’s kind of disgusting. To think how many nights I’ve spent in that flat. How many times I’ve cuddled the baby after doing a line. Disgusting 😕

C lives with his parents. Unable to manage whatever emotions he has inside him, unable to process feelings, he gets drunk. All the time. At every opportunity. Whoever is out he will be out with. He has no morals. A guy could punch his dad in the face one day, invite him to the pub the next and he would say yes. He still has star wars bed sheets, sleeps in a single bed in his parents loft and wears the same pair of DCs he bought with his first paycheck aged 18…8 years ago. No responsibilities. Is this freedom? I don’t think so, just avoidance. One day he’s going to realise how quickly time has passed, or maybe he never will. But he will probably never move on from the rigamole he has going at the moment.

There’s a whole host of others who live in self perpetuated denial that their life actually has meaning. Three are dead, many just about pay the way for their drug habit. I always used to think I wanted to be a part of their lives, that living their way would free me of all the responsibilities that scare me about life.

I was wrong.

Life goes on. The years keep going by and time catches up with everyone eventually.

It’s so much easier to see the writing on the wall now that I am sober. I am not trapped. I could do whatever I want to in life. By allowing people like S and C and K and A to flood my thoughts with their opinions of life, I have trapped myself. Trapped in their life. Because they are stuck. In every financial, emotional, geographical and social sense. They are stuck. They can’t get out. They may have rewired their brains and wrapped their life up in fancy paper and called it ‘freedom’, but it certainly isn’t. I’m just glad I realised this before I ended up as stuck as them.