This is What Being the Daughter of Addiction Looks Like

The “This is What It Looks Like” community often focuses around people battling their mental health issues, and talking candidly about them. However, it is also a safe space to talk about trauma, as well. This one sort of combines the two, I suppose. I’m delving into a new side of this blog for myself, which shies away from talking about my day-to-day life living as a mentally ill person; this post will examine one of the root causes, at least in my opinion. This is something I’ve talked about before, but never this candidly. Trigger warning for drugs and death.

I was perusing Facebook today at work, when I came across a CBC article detailing the accidental overdose of a girl out west. She was found in a Starbucks bathroom, and her mom has insisted that the killer must’ve been Fentanyl. She was 16.

When I was 13 years old, I got the news that my mother, the one I have grown to be a splitting image of, had died while I was away on a trip. We know the killer was Fentanyl. She was 35.

Prior to her death, and for a long while afterward, my understanding of addiction was horribly constructed, based on what I had heard from the mouths of others. I had come to think that addiction and substance abuse were selfish, conscious acts. I thought that anyone that had a habit was automatically lazy and wanted to spend their lives at hold of their poison.

There was a lot of anger that came along with being the daughter of an addict, and I think that was rooted in a lot of shame and hurt. Shame, because the cat was out of the bag: my mom was an addict. Hurt, because I felt like I had done something wrong or that I hadn’t done enough to want her to stop. The anger turned into hatred. For leaving me. For choosing drugs over her child.

And I look back on all of this now, especially after my diagnosis and my life with a mental illness, and I am both disgusted and embarrassed at the way I talked of her and thought of her. I’m certain that my understanding wouldn’t have changed the outcome, but I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for not giving her the compassion that I now know I should’ve possessed.

Mom was always sick with something or other. This resulted in hundreds of tiny orange pill bottles and random plastic patches laying around the house. The patches, of course, were Fentanyl. Fentanyl is a heavy duty painkiller that has now, apparently, become something of a recreational drug that simulates Oxycontin. And every time I read about another overdose, I can feel my blood boil. I want to shake them and tell them exactly what happened to me! But then I realize then, that I’m reverting back to this old way of thinking, that addicts are comfortable and safe where they are.

I have begun to see the destigmatization of anxiety and depression, which is really fantastic and a step in the right direction, undoubtedly. But I’ve been so frustrated that there have been virtually no strides in the change of public opinion of addicts. Everything I read and hear seems to criminalize, demonize and dismiss them. And I think it should be evident, by now at least, that treating mentally ill people like monsters, isn’t going to do anything but kill them. Why can we still not seem to recognize addiction as a mental illness?

Now, I am 19 (going on 20) and I have grown to not be full of shame. I am not angry, nor embarrassed. I’m a daughter who, with time/education/understanding, is proud of her mother. Every single day. And misses her. Every. Single. Day.

This is what the daughter of addiction looks like.