I used to believe addiction happened to “other people”.
People who were reckless. People who didn’t read. People who didn’t understand pharmacology, tolerance, withdrawal, all that clinical stuff you can stack neatly into paragraphs and feel smart about.
I researched. I read. I understood. I was “educated”, or at least educated enough to be dangerous.
And that’s the exact problem. I thought I knew. But here is the reality: I didn’t fucking know. I might have been well versed in the pharmacology, even the psychology, but I didn’t know what it felt like. Once I learned that “relief” button existed, I couldn’t un-know it. It stayed in the back of my mind.
Being “educated” did not protect me#
There’s a certain kind of arrogance that comes with being a person who researches everything.
You’ve probably heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I thought I was immune because I understood the mechanism.
I thought I could predict my own behavior because I could explain it.
I thought I was the exception because I could articulate the risks.
But that doesn’t fucking matter.
I’m not like them. I’m doing this intentionally. I have rules.
That is how it started for me. Not with chaos — with structure. With logic. With “I’ve thought this through.”
And slowly, that turns into something else.
How my addiction started#
My addiction obviously did not begin as “I’m going to ruin my life”.
It began as a system.
A strict rule: ONLY once a week.
Then a justified exception, because technically that’s fine.
Then a slightly modified rule that includes the exception.
Then a realization that the rule is already broken.
Then acceptance that it is “fine” because I’m still functioning.
Then another exception, and another one.
Then withdrawals start on off-days.
Then finally, the realization I was fucked. I started using daily to function.
I didn’t fall off a cliff. I walked down a staircase, one normal step at a time, until I was so far down I couldn’t see the door I entered through.
The most dangerous part for me was how reasonable it felt while it was happening.
Just tonight.
Just on weekends.
Just if I’ve had a hard day.
Just until the holiday.
Just until I get my life together.
Each exception felt so rational. And to a certain extent, it was.
I set a date to quit. “When I get some off-time from work and obligations, I’ll quit cold turkey.” That’s some damn hopeful thinking. Holidays are time for family, vacations, hanging out with old friends.. and now I cannot function socially without chemical assistance. Then comes the realization of how fucked this situation really is.
..I can’t quit?
When I first broke my own rule, it felt like it was over. I had shown myself that the rule could be renegotiated whenever the craving wrote a convincing enough argument. I felt like I had betrayed myself.
And this is a pattern of thinking I’ve realized I use for most things:
When X happens, I can finally start working out.
I can’t do X until I move to the city.
Things will get better when X happens.
And of course, when X happens, it doesn’t get better. I don’t start that project, I don’t do shit.
Just do it. Now.
Why I believed I needed drugs#
I have spent my whole life feeling like I’m not genetically built for this world. Not normal.
I know most people feel that sometimes. But I didn’t feel it sometimes. I felt it as a baseline.
Here are the “reasons” my brain offered me, and how every reason conveniently had a chemical solution:
I suck socially. It’s hard to make friends, hard to get close, and talking to girls felt impossible. So my brain found anxiolytics.
I was the “dumb kid” in school. Barely passed. Failed upper secondary. So my brain found stimulants.
I have never been able to sleep. Since high school I’ve averaged around four hours like it’s normal. So my brain found hypnotics and benzos.
On top of that, I overthink. I catastrophize. I make everything heavier than it needs to be, which then “justifies” the drugs that “solve” the heaviness.
Hell, I even took lots of shit to improve my “ugly” appearance. When you’re in this shithole, everything is bad.
And of course, I was just generally unhappy with my life. I took whatever I could to escape.. opiates, gabapentinoids, benzos, dissociatives, stimulants.. I had a daily routine of five different drugs.
I’ve always been painfully aware of my flaws, and I’ve been searching for “cures” for as long as I can remember. Then I got introduced to drugs. And they were the cure. At least they felt like it.
The rule I broke, and it broke me back#
I’m not a moralist. But I know when the trap snapped shut for me: when I started using drugs as medicine for my life.
My rule should have been personal and brutally simple: I cannot use a recreational drug to treat my emotions.
I had told myself recreational use was fine because I was stable. But I wasn’t only using for fun anymore. I was using substances as medicine for anxiety, self-hatred, loneliness, insomnia, pain, and identity. I had built a game that I could not win.
Because drugs work. That is the trap.
I’m a very flawed human. I hate being like this. Every drug “cures” one of my daily struggles, they make me feel normal. It sucks to feel like you never fit in.
Once I had tried a drug and knew it could erase a problem, it became the fastest solution to that problem.
And I was always going to have bad days. Bad weeks. Bad months. Hell, maybe even bad years.
Now I knew there was a shortcut.
My biggest mistake was keeping that shortcut within arm’s reach.
I remember having it on my desk like it was nothing. Like it was just an object. Like it was not an encapsulated disease.
One moment I was thinking. The next moment it was already happening. I didn’t even have time to process the decision before the capsule was dissolving in my stomach and the relief was already on its way.
That’s what I hadn’t understood. It wasn’t always a dramatic choice. Sometimes it was a reflex.
At one point it felt like a life-or-death situation. Either I fucking kill myself, or I just accept being a junkie.
A “better” terrible#
I used to assume drugs had to feel good for somebody to keep taking them. That’s a lie. My addiction wasn’t always chasing euphoria — sometimes it was choosing the kind of suffering I could tolerate.
Some substances didn’t make me happy. They made me feel terrible, just in a different way. A better terrible, is what I call it.
Ketamine is a good example for me. It was fun initially.. but lost its magic pretty quickly. My body started rapidly deteriorating, my energy was at zero, anxiety through the roof, didn’t eat or sleep, constant nose bleeds, and of course.. I started pissing blood. Did I stop? Nope. Snorting a line didn’t even feel good. It actually made me feel like shit.
So what’s the point? It was like choosing between a bad migraine and a stab wound. I just had a preference.
The hacker mindset that helped me, and also ruined me#
I’ve always had a “hacker mindset”. Not just computers — life.
I don’t like the conventional route. I don’t accept limits easily. I believe problems can be solved. Everything can be changed. With enough knowledge, everything can be hacked.
That mindset has given me real wins. Real discoveries. Real growth.
But it also fed my addiction perfectly.
Because if you believe every problem can be fixed, then drugs look like a tool. A patch. An upgrade. A workaround.
And once you start patching your emotions with chemistry, you stop developing the slow, boring human skills that actually make life stable.
I hacked myself through life because I believed I wasn’t good enough to do it naturally.
But cheating has interest. It compounds. It collects debt.
Eventually the bill arrives.
I couldn’t just remove the addiction#
People love to say “just quit”. And the clueless idiots who keep saying: “I have a strong willpower, I’d just quit”. Because it “can’t be that hard”.
“I quit cigarettes a while ago, just man up.”
“I used to drink EVERY weekend, wasn’t too hard to quit.”
Seriously, shut the fuck up. It sounds so stupid it almost feels like an insult, but it’s actually just ignorant incompetence. And yes, people have actually said this to me.
For me, addiction wasn’t just chemical dependency. It was a routine. A coping strategy. A replacement for sleep, confidence, social ability, calm, motivation, comfort, safety, and meaning.
When I tried to rip it out and replace it with nothing, I didn’t feel free. I felt empty. And emptiness was unbearable when I knew I had a pill that could fill it in five minutes.
I couldn’t just remove the addiction. I needed something real that could compete with it.
A purpose.
A person.
A project.
A life that is worth staying sober for.
That part was brutally hard, because my addiction damaged the exact things I needed to replace it.
It became a vicious circle: I used drugs because I was isolated. The drugs made me more isolated. Then I needed them even more.
A girl replaced a drug#
At one point, I met a girl, and something inside me shifted.
Not because she fixed me. She really didn’t fix shit.
But for a while, she replaced the thing drugs were giving me. Connection, hope. Suddenly my brain had something else to chase. Another source of dopamine.
That’s when I realized something terrifying: my addiction was not only about pleasure. It was about relief, and it was about replacement.
When I felt like I had nothing, drugs became everything. When I had something real, the need quieted down.
Rat Park gave me a model, not proof#
The famous Rat Park study compared morphine consumption in rats housed alone with rats living in a larger social environment. It gave me a useful way to think about isolation and drug use. It does not prove that environment explains human addiction, or that connection alone cures it.
What I knew more directly was my own pattern. I lived it.
The more isolated I got, the more I needed chemicals to survive my own mind. The more I connected to something real, the less I needed them.
For years, I used drugs maybe once a month. I never really had a need for them. My life was exciting, I was social, I was liked, I performed well. Drugs didn’t really have a place.. until they did.
Then my life changed, and I already knew the “cure”.
Most people have an escape. Mine was louder#
I don’t mean that everyone is an addict in the clinical sense. That would flatten what addiction actually did to me. But the pattern of protecting a familiar escape isn’t unique to drugs.
I had seen versions of that pattern outside drugs, in myself and in people I cared about.
Bad relationships are an obvious example: knowing something hurts, feeling it, and staying anyway.
Feelings run the show far more than I used to admit. Familiar pain can feel safer than an unknown life.
I could understand why people stayed in bad relationships, sexless marriages, and homes full of tension and quiet resentment. Not because they were stupid — because leaving could feel harder than staying. Familiar pain was easier for me to understand than an unknown life.
A breakup is not the same thing as drug withdrawal. But the shape felt familiar to me: losing a constant I had built my life around and having to learn how to exist without it.
In my head the bargain looked simple: leave, suffer through the empty and unstable part, or stay with a familiar misery. “Manageable pain” could win over short-term hell even when I knew the long-term cost.
Sometimes I couldn’t even see the pattern while I was inside it. Other people could. Then I’d look back and realize how long I had been stuck.
I don’t think escape is rare.
Most people seem to have something that makes reality softer. Food. Validation. Porn. Work. Gambling. Social media. Approval. Drama. Comfort. Alcohol. Control. Being needed. Being wanted. Being right. That does not make all of those things equivalent to a substance-use disorder.
My addiction just happens to have a pharmacy label.
So when people looked at me like I was broken, an angry part of me thought: you’re not automatically better than me just because your escape is socially acceptable.
Therapy felt like a gamble#
This is what happened in my treatment. It is not an argument that therapy is useless, and it is not advice to quit treatment or detox alone. Abrupt withdrawal from benzodiazepines and other sedative-hypnotics can be medically dangerous; medical supervision is recommended.
I don’t believe therapy is inherently evil or that help is pointless. But the care I received felt rigid, overstretched, ignorant, and more focused on rules than my reality.
I was told things by therapists who were supposedly specialized in addiction treatment that still make me pissed:
“Amphetamine is not addictive, that’s no problem to quit.”
“Haven’t you quit that crap yet? Just quit.” — This was said while I was drowning in downers, high-dose pregabalin and benzos. Cold turkey can kill you.
The first time I spoke to my therapist, I got: “We have to set a sobriety date, exactly 30 days from now.” At that time I was a polyaddict — daily, across uppers, downers, opioids, dissociatives, everything. A whole system.
In months of therapy, I never got a taper plan. It was always “just quit.”
In my experience, trace amounts of weed meant I was treated as dangerous, while extreme alcohol use seemed easier for the system to tolerate because alcohol was legal.
I believed many of them wanted the best for me. But what they could offer was trapped inside constraints that felt completely detached from my situation.
Arbitrary rules ended up dictating my life, and I stopped believing those rules were based on my health.
The second I felt judged, misunderstood, boxed in, threatened by consequences — it triggered something in me that became pure survival.
I became secretive, defensive, strategic. And yeah.. I fucking cheated. There are about a million substances and research chemicals that aren’t in their database. No, it wasn’t healthier or safe. But it felt like a life-or-death situation.
I started running two plans at once — one for what I told them, and one for what I did to survive.
That is not healing. That is war.
In my case, the drugs were not the whole root problem. They were also a symptom of everything I was trying to escape.
I came into my first therapy session incredibly high. I actually came right from the ER due to a suspected overdose, and she took notes of my signs of impairment. Then because of her threats and ridiculous deadlines, I came in completely sober for my next visit. And guess what, I was “clearly high” according to her. I didn’t try to argue, I just nodded and asked what the signs were. I was just tweaking on a potent drug called withdrawal.
Next session I was not sober at all, but appeared sober to everyone. This pattern of inverse correlation continued, and it completely makes sense to think this way.. if you’re an uneducated moron.
Eventually, I reached a point where I, allegedly, threatened and really frightened my therapist. They removed the only stable thing in my life. They removed the tiny amount of control I had left. So I had to regain it. I did some things I shouldn’t have. And that’s not who I am.
So yes, I quit therapy to get well.
And I hate that sentence, because it sounds so backwards, but it’s what happened.
That is my history, not a recommendation. If treatment feels unsafe or impossible, finding another clinician, service, or advocate is not the same as disappearing and trying to survive withdrawal alone.
I realized nobody could do recovery for me. That did not mean I had to do it entirely alone.
I’m really not a bad person, but I felt forced into an impossible corner where following the rules meant collapsing or losing my ability to function. So I bent. I broke. I hid. I survived.
The experience also left me furious about the gap between law, policy, and ethics, but that is another article. The important part here is that I lost trust in the people treating me. At the time, it felt like their incompetence might literally kill me.
Addiction is lonely#
The loneliest part of addiction is that nobody knows.
Nobody knew then. Most people don’t know now, and those who know don’t know the full story. I mostly looked “fine”, so it couldn’t have been that bad.
I could stand next to someone, smile, do my job, and act normal while my entire inner world was held together by chemicals and fear.
Sometimes what I needed was a loving hug. Someone telling me that it would be fine, and really meaning it.. man.
The battle is lonely in a way that’s hard to explain. I was afraid to tell family or people close to me because I expected panic, judgment, failed attempts to help, or some fucker claiming to understand because he quit sugar last year. That fear was mine; it is not advice to keep addiction secret. Secrecy can be dangerous too, and disclosure is complicated.
It also became real when I told another human. I saw their reaction and heard their thoughts. It wasn’t limited to my own brain anymore. I had actual feedback. External thoughts.
And we can’t forget about the shame.
I was afraid people would look at me differently and treat me differently. And I’ll be completely honest: I used to look at addicts differently myself. Once I was on the other side of it, I felt people lose respect for me, get angry, and treat the addiction like a moral failure instead of something I was struggling with.
I also felt every tired look or strange moment being reinterpreted: “Must be the drugs.” I didn’t want to be constantly analyzed or have every action treated as evidence. Maybe nobody did it on purpose, but I knew the suspicion could sit in the back of their minds.
That fear is why I stopped telling people about the issues I was having. I overthought everything I did, and regardless of my sobriety I kept thinking: “act sober.”
If you’re in it#
If you’re reading this and you’re in it, I’m not going to give you fake motivation. I’m not going to say “just be strong”, and I don’t necessarily think you should take advice from me. But I’ll end with this:
I could not heal while nothing around me changed.
For me, stopping the drugs also meant building replacements for what they had been doing: relief, connection, confidence, sleep, and something to look forward to.
What helped me was trying to explain it, first on paper and then to someone I really trusted. Why did I start? What was I trying to treat? What was I feeling? How had things changed after using? Did I want to quit, and why or why not? How much money had I spent? That last one kinda fucked with me. Quantifying things made it harder for me to hide from them.
These were hard questions. Asking for help did not make me weak, even when the first help I received went badly. Owning my mistakes, my flaws, and who I am is manly as hell. And I’m telling you, hell is as manly as it gets.
Recovery for me has not been about becoming normal. It has been about becoming honest about what I need, what hurts, and what I was trying to survive.
That’s why I’m writing this: to articulate it and understand myself. This is part of my recovery. If it helps somebody else put words to their own mess, good.
Good luck, brothers.