Content Warning: Substance Abuse
I was seventeen when I first overdosed. I woke up to the hospital’s white lights, a sharp pounding in my head, and a look of fear in my mom’s eyes that still lingers in my dreams. I was confused as to how I ended up here, not just in the stiff hospital bed, but here, in the body of a girl who I had only heard about from doctor’s office pamphlets or television shows. I felt shame for my inability to answer a simple question. Why did you do what you did?
The thing is, it’s what I don’t remember that scares me the most. I watched a video from that morning. It was of me, but my flailing arms and enraged screams may as well have been those of a demon. Could that really have been me? My mom nodded, yes, that was you. And you said some very hurtful things. Then she walked away. I shivered in my paper gown, hopelessly confused. What had I done? Who had I been?
It’s hard to move on from something you don’t remember.
Drugs used to feel romantic to me. Lying on the beach below the Golden Gate Bridge, caressing the warm sand with my fingertips, watching the sky come alive. The clouds waved to me, the birds danced for me, the sun showered me in colors. Blues mixed with reds mixed with violets mixed with blues, a blinding cycle of lights that stroked my body and whispered ‘I love you’ in my ear. All that mattered was that beach, that sky, those colors.
I started using when I was fifteen, or maybe even younger. Drugs were part of the local dialect. In middle school, my friends and I came home from movies to find our older siblings partying in the kitchen with their friends while our parents sat on the deck outside and passed around a joint. By eighth grade, we were loitering in parks, some kids puffing on lit Twix bars while others smoked real weed. Every high school party overflowed with bottles and glass bongs and little bags of white powder. And we heard stories. Our friends at a nearby school were arrested for mass possession of prescription pills. That kid we knew from middle school overdosed and died on a Tuesday morning. Another girl was sent to Montana. Three of my close friends went to Montana.
So, even if you weren’t personally using, you were always around drugs, talking about drugs, thinking about drugs—they surrounded you. I suppose we felt obligated to embody the expectation of being a San Francisco hippie type. We held a blinding pride in the Bay Area’s culture of overindulgence, which seemed to us like self-liberation. Photographs of girls with flowers in their hair and flowing dresses from San Francisco’s “summer of love” covered our bedroom walls and lured us in with their carefree aesthetic. The Grateful Dead posters hanging above our desks taught us that drugs released our inner creativity. Instagram accounts such as @cannabisfeminist showed us that drugs were empowering. Sitting on the beach with flowers in my hair, serenaded by Bob Weir, my mind spinning in colors, I fully believed in the “summer of love” girls and the Instagram accounts.I clung onto their message even after my first overdose. Our overindulgence was fun, it was freeing, and everyone participated. I suppose I thought it was normal.
But what does normal mean? Normal compared to what? On one of the first days of college, I nonchalantly recalled a story to a new friend about the combination and quantity of substances that I had consumed at a music festival in Golden Gate Park a few weeks before. I laughed remembering how, on the last night of the festival, I walked home twelve miles by myself because I was too out of it to call an Uber. My new friend looked at me with shock visible across her face. She smiled and said that we come from very different places.
3,000 miles across the country, I realized that normal means different things to different people. As humans, we adapt to the environment around us, whether this be from growing up in an environment or simply transitioning. The actions of the people around us—the music they listen to, the people they idolize, the values they hold—create a rubric of what is normal. And most humans strive for an ‘A’ in normalcy, so much that we don’t often question why we act the way we do. We become sheltered by our environments. Is this what my teachers mean when they’re always talking about perspective?
I used to think that drugs gave me perspective. That they magically revealed me to myself. When I first started smoking weed, on every inhale, I had revelations: I don’t need to care so much, my anxieties are stupid, people will accept me how I am. On the exhale, I surrendered to that nothingness which I mistook for happiness. As I began to smoke more and more, I stopped caring so much. And that was good for me. I no longer had to meditate away my nerves before exams or meet as frequently with the school counsellor or waste an hour on my makeup in the mornings. I didn’t have a single panic attack for two years. My mom was proud of my “progress.” But it stopped being good when I stopped caring at all.
I was still an A student, kept up with my activities, and secretly applauded myself for being able to do both while stoned. It was myself that I stopped caring about. I replaced my jeans and sweaters with tie-dye shirts and dirty sweatpants. Piercings covered my body. I clung onto unhealthy relationships that were founded on drugs and sustained themselves with drugs. To me, love and drugs went hand-in-hand. One depended on the other; love left a void that only drugs could fill.
And that void only increased with time. My normal coping mechanisms (mainly weed, often cocaine, sometimes psychedelics) suddenly stopped working. My two-and-a-half year relationship with a boy who once gave me a bag of weed as an apology for cheating crumbled. Has your heart ever felt so crushed you would do anything to make it better? Well, that “anything” came to me in the form of a white pill.
I remember when I first ran my fingers over the palindrome inscribed on the back. XANAX. “It’ll make you feel better.” Mac Miller’s “Self Care” track played in the background. I remember the thrill that ran through my body when I swallowed.
And then I stopped remembering.
I went to school. I fell asleep at school. I went home. I fell asleep at home. I gave a presentation in class that I didn’t remember. I had a meeting with my dean and she told me that she was worried about me, but I didn’t remember. Everything was fine, until I woke up, blinded by white lights, in a stiff hospital bed.
Why did you do what you did?
It’s easy to blame your problems on a culture. It’s hard to realize that it was you who let yourself become victim to it.
I do both today. I realize that you don’t have to look like one of the girls in a doctor’s office pamphlet or on television to struggle with substance abuse. I was accepted into Yale University between overdoses. I was blessed with the promise of a bright future and had a lot to look forward to. It was simply a deadly combination of an overindulgent culture and a lack of self-esteem.
I used to hate that question, the one about why I did what I did, because I thought it was judgmental. It implied that something was wrong with me, or that I was pathetic. It argued that what I did was not normal, but who are they to say what’s normal? So I became defensive. I resented my mom for thinking that I needed help, resented any doctor or therapist who gave me help. Too often I slammed the door in my family’s faces, screaming that they just didn’t understand what normal was to me. I know now that the question was not meant to blame me for what I had done, or make me feel bad about myself, but rather to encourage me to consider that I was using drugs to cope with the unstable aspects of my life. To consider that I hadn’t cared enough about myself to keep me safe. It wasn’t about blame, it was about helping me own up to my weaknesses. I finally asked myself the question.
I did what I did because I let myself get swept away in what I believed was normal. But let me tell you, normal isn’t worth it. I don't remember the “I hate you”s I spat at my mom in a drugged up state, but I’ll never forget her tearful recollection of that night. That night I was anything but normal. At least I know that now.
By Anonymous.
