I Don’t Have to Struggle Anymore
It’s taken me a decade to work up the courage, but I’m finally ready to share my story of drugs, detours, and depression
“To heal is to touch with love that which was previously touched by fear.”
— Stephen Levine
I was in the middle of a yoga class, in down-dog pose, when the enormity of it all hit me with the brute force of a left hook from Mike Tyson.
My life had gotten completely out of control, and once again I’d come to a painful inflection point: Leave everything I know or face dire consequences. There was no other way out.
But I was terrified of change. For over a decade, I’d been a passive player in my life, stuck in a post-college morass of dead-end jobs, dysfunctional relationships, drug dependency, and depression. Along the way, I’d hitched my wagon to one girlfriend after the next, letting their major life decisions determine mine because I was afraid of being alone.
Now here I was, forced to make a decision that was entirely my own. It was one of the reasons I was here in treatment — to practice decision-making after getting to a clear-eyed baseline I wasn’t capable of in the outside world.
Hyperventilating, I shifted into the next pose. Then I caught my breath, took a deep lungful of air, and let out an exhale that seemed to last 100 years.
Was I ready to start all over?
Ten years ago, I took a three-month timeout from society in Houston, Texas. From November 2012 to February 2013, I was a patient at the Menninger Clinic, one of the country’s leading psychiatric treatment facilities.
By the time I checked in for treatment — my second in-patient attempt at getting clean — I was drug-addled, barely employed, and in a wildly unstable relationship that had reached a Sid and Nancy-style nadir of drug abuse and depraved behavior. All of this and yet — you might think it absurd — I still questioned whether or not I needed in-patient treatment.
For months I’d thought about seeking help, but I kept finding reasons not to. Finally, things in my personal life got so bad, so unmanageable, that there wasn’t another option. I had to do something different. In late October of 2012, I called my mom and came clean about what was going on — the drug abuse, the mental health problems, the long stints of unemployment, everything.
“I can’t go on like this anymore,” I whimpered.
She bought me a plane ticket home and I flew back a few days later. We drove down to Texas together a few days after that. I never pictured my life looking like this in my early 30s, so how had it gotten to this point?
This is my story.
From a young age, I had the sense that I was different from my brothers and sisters. While they lead carefree lives, I was obsessed with what could go wrong at any minute.
“Oh, that’s just Chris,” my parents would say. It was an easy brush off to my constant fears of forgetting an important message to take to school and facing public humiliation in front of a classroom, or being the one who gets kidnapped in the middle of the night by intruders because my bedroom was closest to our front door. To them, it was amusing. To me, it was deathly serious.
In 1992, my dad got a job back in our hometown after we’d lived, for four years, in small-town, coastal Connecticut. We moved midway through the school year. I cried myself to sleep for weeks before we left. It was my first, real disappointment. Just like that, I was plucked from my place in the world. I’d had a Huckleberry Finn-like existence of running around in the woods and hunting for frogs, toads, and salamanders with friends. I was a free-range kid. Now that life was gone.
It was swapped out for a lot more time spent indoors. Consigned to the drab suburban landscape of Kansas City, I deeply missed the forest and the inner peace it brought me. It’s where I felt grounded.
Going through puberty at this time was a double gut punch. I became acutely aware of how uncomfortable I was in my own skin. I also felt awkward in groups and social situations. This period marked the beginning of a serious social anxiety disorder, though it went undiagnosed at the time.
I desperately wanted to escape anxiety’s stranglehold. To cope, I chewed the sleeves of my Catholic school shirt to bits, and when they were sufficiently tattered, I gnawed the shit out of my poor thumbs, peeling off patch after patch of sensitive skin with my teeth and fingers. It gave me something to fixate on; something to distract from my inner turmoil. Any observer these days might look at a kid who displayed such behaviors and think, “We need to get him someone to talk to about his anxiety,” but back then there wasn’t a public dialogue about mental health like there is today. So I quietly dealt with my struggles, alone.
I wanted something — anything — to help me escape this never-ending nightmare of painful self-awareness. But there was nowhere to turn for help … until there finally was.
If you went to grade school in the United States during the late 1980s or early 1990s, you probably remember a series of strange commercials about what supposedly happens when you’re high. Even to the malleable mind of an adolescent, most of the scenarios presented were totally absurd, so I wondered what the creators of this bullshit propaganda were really trying to hide from us.
In the summer between 7th and 8th grade, I smoked pot for the first time. I loved the way it lightened the load psychically. I knew I’d found an effective tool to quell my anxiety.
By the time I was in high school, I was smoking pot frequently on the weekends. My ritual was to climb out onto the roof of my parent’s house, pack a bowl in my little smiley face metal pipe, and light up. Then I’d hit play on my Discman. Staring up at the stars, I’d get lost in thought while David Gilmour’s spacey guitar riffs on Dark Side of the Moon swirled around my mind. Interesting epiphanies floated by. New insights came. I was learning how to navigate altered states of consciousness. It was a magical time.
Meanwhile, I was holding it together in school. I got good grades, excelled in sports, and had a close group of friends. I was starting to develop a sense of who I was as a student-athlete. But underneath it all, a secret identity was growing.
The biggest failure of Drug Awareness Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) in the Just Say No era was that it forgot to include the most important part of drug education: the testimonial from the former addict. We’re talking the gritty details of addiction — the health problems, the legal repercussions, the real-life examples of losing it all through slavery to a substance. Instead, we got professional athletes and celebrities, who looked like they’d never touched a drug, spouting off clearly rehearsed anti-drug talking points.
It was like self-paced coursework and I was on track to get a bachelor’s degree in psychoactive drug studies.
In the absence of truthful information about drugs, I had to find it on my own. Where did I begin my quest for knowledge? The Internet, of course. But this was the late 90s, in the primitive days of the World Wide Web, when you really had to dig around to find quality information. So when I came upon excerpts from Terrance McKenna’s True Hallucinations and Albert Hoffman’s LSD: My Problem Child posted in an obscure Usenet group, I thought I’d uncovered some ancient archaeological treasure.
This was my gateway into the drug culture. Soon enough I’d found websites like Erowid, the Hive, and Lycaeum with detailed information about every known psychoactive substance under the sun. I read dozens of “trip reports,” personal drug experiences people posted on these websites. I studied the pharmacological properties of drugs and even kept a folder with my findings. I knew Latin names, chemical compositions, and the differences between one class of drugs and another.
I devoured books by psychedelic pioneers and counterculture icons such as William Burroughs, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, Terrence McKenna, Paul Stamets, John Lilly, and Carlos Castañeda — all of whom advocated for drug use to expand consciousness. It was like self-paced coursework and I was on track to get a bachelor’s degree in psychoactive drug studies. My curriculum included ethnomycology from Stamets; the anthropological origins of ayahuasca from Burroughs and McKenna; entactogen research from Shulgin; and shamanic use of mescaline from Castañeda.
Growing up Catholic, I also had an unexplored spiritual side and wanted more than what weekly Church attendance provided. Catholicism preached we were removed from God while psychoactive drugs promised a direct connection. I yearned for the sort of “Union with Source” the psychedelic pioneers wrote about, and I was deeply interested in using drugs to uncover the truth behind reality.
By the time I’d reached high school graduation, I’d become a seasoned psychonaut. In addition to mainstream drugs like psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, and marijuana, I’d experimented with all sorts of obscure research chemicals ordered from thinly veiled drug dealing websites (thanks JLF Poisonous Non-Consumables!). I’d had all sorts of experiences — some fun, some not so fun, some downright scary. Through it all, I was still that kid seeking something to take the edge off of his anxiety and insecurity.
I’ll never forget the first time I thought, This is what I’ve been looking for. It was early in the fall semester of my sophomore year in college. One Saturday night, after coming home from a party, I’d squeezed into my dorm bathroom with a bunch of other drunk college kids to continue drinking. One of them pulled out a small, clear baggie containing a pearlescent powder. I knew right away it was cocaine.
He dumped the coke on the bathroom vanity and started forming it into several straight lines. From his other pocket, he pulled out a plastic straw and offered it to a guy next to me. In one quick action, the guy hoovered up two lines. Then he passed the straw to me.
The previous summer, a high school friend attending school in Chicago had gotten into coke and was singing its praises to me over dinner at a restaurant one night. “You want to try some?” he said with a devious smile, handing me the same kind of small baggie with the same kind of white powder under the table. I went to the bathroom and did a small bump of it. Nothing happened. So when I was given the straw on that particular drunken night in my dorm bathroom, my expectations were low.
After I did that line, everything about me changed. My social phobia evaporated and I immediately wanted to talk … and talk … and talk … and talk some more. And that was perfectly fine because everyone around me seemed to be interested in what I had to say. With this newfound confidence, I was on top of the world. I felt smart. I felt attractive. I didn’t feel so insecure. The dark, depressive clouds in my mind had parted. Now all I could see was sunshine.
I’d found my drug of choice.
Within a few months of that experience, I was using the drug regularly throughout the week. This was no longer the occasional weekend thing; it had turned into a full-blown dependence.
As a cash-strapped college kid, I’d needed a way to afford the steep price of my habit. The solution I’d come up with was to make and sell fake driver's licenses to students on campus and at other local colleges. I made a lot of money with this illegal enterprise, most of which went up my nose. The drug continued to sink its teeth into me, but remarkably I held it together in the classroom and ran well at cross-country meets on the weekends.
When I came home to visit family in the Midwest, I hid my habit and pretended to be a model student-athlete. I told them things were going great. But I used even on these visits.
Then, one fateful night nearing the end of my sophomore year, my life took a swift turn off the track I was on. I’d gone for a run around campus in the evening while a friend, who didn’t attend school, hung out in my dorm room. At some point, he decided to light up a joint. Drugs were strictly prohibited on campus, so when he heard campus security coming, he quickly took off.
I encountered Heather at the end of my run, right as I was about to enter my dorm.
“Oh my God Chris, are you okay?” she asked, her head tilted in concern.
“Yeah I’m fine, what do you mean?”
“Oh, you didn’t hear? Campus security took a bunch of stuff out of your room in trash bags.”
A good friend, confidante, and cross-country teammate, Heather was one of the few people who knew the extent to which I was involved in illegal activities. She also knew how much incriminating evidence I had in my dorm room.
I sprinted up three floors, panicking. When I got to my room, I witnessed a scene of absolute chaos. Dresser drawers were pulled out and emptied, clothes scattered across the floor. The sheets on my bed were gone, so were stacks of my CDs. Most importantly, both my laptop computer with hundreds of fake ID templates and my satchel bag with enough drugs to make even Hunter S. Thompson blush were missing.
What followed was a series of increasingly severe consequences. I got arrested and charged with three felonies, which altogether carried a six-year prison sentence if convicted. I got kicked out of school and was banned from stepping foot on campus ever again.
I was briefly living in my car. I was completely lost, suicidal even. My family had to hire a lawyer for me. Eventually, this lawyer was able to get my case transferred to Kansas, where I would attend a new school much closer to home. I received a “deferred entry of judgment,” an agreement that my three felony charges — two for forgery, one for possession of a controlled substance — would be suspended while I completed five years of probation. Then I said a sad goodbye to California.
I attempted to pick up the pieces of my shattered hopes and dreams on the West Coast. I tried to soldier on and put the past behind me. But the hurt stayed. The trauma of what I’d gone through, the catastrophic failure it was, lodged deep within my psyche and continued to influence my life in profound, unseen ways for years to come.
Gabor Mate, the famous Canadian psychotherapist, has something he likes to say about drug addicts: “The first question is not why the addiction; it’s why the pain?”
For me, the pain of feeling misunderstood in childhood evolved into a disastrous self-image as I got older. “I’m a failure” became my personal mantra. In short order, personal failure after personal failure followed to confirm that this was, in fact, the case and probably always would be. As if I was following an invisible playbook, I kept repeating patterns of self-sabotage. It was an effective way to control the outcome and keep confirming what I was telling myself every day.
At each fork in the road, with every change in course, my pain came along for the ride.
So, for my remaining three years of college, I continued to use drugs, both as a salve for psychological pain and as a powerful tool to keep the failure feedback loop churning. You’ve failed, you’re a failure, so why not keep failing to show just how much of a failure you really are? It sounds ridiculous, but that’s what I believed; it was the only thing playing on a radio station I was tuned into 24/7 in my mind.
I barely graduated. I squeaked by with a GPA that met the bare minimum requirement to get my journalism degree. By that point, I was using heavily again and didn’t care about my grades. After graduating, I followed my college girlfriend out west when she got a job in Oregon. But I had no real plan, and before long I’d set up drug connections in my new home base of Portland.
Our relationship ended abruptly a few months after the move, due to my continued drug use. I jumped into another relationship not long after. Seven tumultuous years later, it ended when I went to rehab in Texas. Then I packed up my Ford Explorer with everything I owned and moved back to Portland for a second stint.
At each fork in the road, with every change in course, my pain came along for the ride. It was like an invisible ball-and-chain I kept pulling from one place to the next. But I couldn’t see this at the time.
We tell ourselves all sorts of stories to survive in this world. They can move us forward or hold us back. They either help or hinder — it’s that simple.
The story I’ve told myself throughout my life is that I was meant to struggle. And it’s turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy because, for so much of my life, I’ve struggled. I’ve struggled to be understood by my family; I’ve struggled to find my place in the world; I’ve struggled to make ends meet. In one broad stroke, my life has been defined by struggle.
But now, at the age of 41, I can finally see that this long-held belief doesn’t define me anymore. As my last therapist said, “You’ve been singing that song for a long time. It’s time to sing a new one.” He’s right. The story I’ve told myself for decades doesn’t match the man I am now. I no longer use drugs. I have a unique place in my family, and I’m fine with being different.
In all the areas of life where I’ve truly applied myself, I’ve been successful. I rekindled my love for running seven years ago and, after working hard every year since then, I’m now one of the best masters runners in my city. I’ve also zeroed in on my natural talent for writing after decades spent in the wilderness of unfitting career paths, and I’ve been gainfully employed as a copywriter since 2014.
When I pick up a pen or start typing on a screen, it’s like putting on a pair of glasses. Everything comes into clear focus. I now see where I need to go all in. I must continue to tell my story with honesty and vulnerability, in hopes of encouraging the same in others. With your help, dear reader, I’ll continue to write on this platform and make it my mission to craft authentic essays and other writing that expresses the wide spectrum of who I am, warts and all. And I’ll champion writing where I see the same being done.
In parting, I want to say a heartfelt thank you for spending your time with me on this long read. And I hope you took something good from it. If you’re struggling with similar issues, know that it gets better when you start telling yourself a different story about your life.
Our stories can hold us captive, but they also can liberate us. How will you use yours?
Postscript
It’s amazing how life works.
On January 15th of this year, I returned to Houston for the first time in a decade. I was there to run the 51st Annual Houston Marathon. Two months before, I’d dropped out of the Indianapolis Marathon midway through the race, causing me to search for another Boston Marathon qualifier. Up until that point, I had no intention of running the Houston Marathon — and I wouldn’t have needed to if I’d had a good performance in Indy. But there I was, still without a Boston qualifying time, and I didn’t want to waste my marathon training. When I found out a few training partners were running Houston, that sealed the deal.
In early December, I paid the registration fee and booked my hotel room. The fact that I was once a patient at a psychiatric facility in Houston hadn’t occurred to me. When that realization came mid-way through the race, though, it was a transcendent moment. Here I was, healthy and doing what I love, making wonderful new memories in a city where I’d spent some of my darkest hours. Running this marathon was helping to heal the trauma of my past. I was so proud of how far I’d come.
Of course, there were plenty of moments late in the race when I questioned my ability to finish. But just like I’ve done in life, I continued to push forward until I crossed that finish line.
I never gave up. It’s all I knew how to do.
Oh, and I got that Boston Marathon qualifying time.
