Psychologytoday.com defines addiction as “a condition that results when a person ingests a substance (e.g., alcohol, cocaine, nicotine) or engages in an activity that can be pleasurable but the continuation of which becomes compulsive and interferes with ordinary responsibilities and concerns, such as work, relationships, or health.”
In everyday language, the word “addiction” sometimes does not refer to the mental illness. I am a culprit of claiming I am “addicted” to things like chocolate or Netflix. The term still slips into my lingo every now and then in those casual and lighthearted contexts. What many do not understand, however, is what addiction truly means.
I did not even figure it out for myself until recently. No one that I know of in my family suffers from addiction, and I grew up in the wealthy and seemingly quiet suburbs west of Atlanta. When I was barely 16 years old, I befriended and started dating my best friend, Nick.
Nick is funny, charming, handsome, athletic, outgoing, intelligent, passionate; I could go on and on about him. He is also very selfless and protective over me, and I know he would do anything to protect me and make sure I am happy. I did not think he would be my type when I first met him, but with all of those good qualities and more, he won me over and we became close almost instantly. He is a very talented baseball player too and watching him play was always a good time because you could see how passionate he is about the game.
Unfortunately, among all these beautiful things about a normal-looking and sounding teenage boy, he was also an addict. He was a teenager forced to grow up too quickly because of the way his mind was altered by the substances he did. I am going to go ahead and spoil the story; Nick passed away on March 21, 2017. We were dating for almost two years and spent nearly every day together, and days we did not physically spend together were filled with lots of Facetiming. I have been working on formulating my thoughts about this and there has been so much I’ve been wanting to speak on; it has taken me 50 days to do so.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard over the last two years: “But you are so innocent! How can you deal with dating somebody like him?” And the way I respond to that is please reread the paragraph above about his amazing qualities. The Nick I knew was not a “druggie.” It was only until he was almost done with his senior year, a year and a half ago, and life-changing event happened to him, that he started up heavily again with pretty nasty substances. It made him have a breakdown and spiral, and someone without mental illness would have been angry at first, but moved on naturally without many problems. That’s when he started to try to separate that huge part of himself from me. He was finding comfort in strangers or random acquaintances instead of me. I did not understand why he was cutting me out. I knew I was his girlfriend, so I had no idea why I was the closest person to him yet had no idea what was going on in this other life he lived.
When his best friend died, (not from overdose, from an awful life-long disease called cystic fibrosis) that was when I saw the worst side effects of addiction from Nick. I knew he was not born with depression like many sufferers are, he was given depression from the substances he had put in his body over the years. They altered the chemicals in his brain. He was again finding comfort in strangers and I desperately tried to be there for him as I was in the past. I confessed this feeling to him and I realized he was not doing it on purpose; he reminded me that, contrary to my belief, he needed me there, just to be there and not do much else. He said he felt better with my presence and begged me to stick around because I was his best friend. Something he famously has said over the last two years was that I brought “good vibes” around.
How do just a few bad decisions and many late nights of “fun” turn into a mental disease? I wish I could answer that question. I would ask him why he can’t just stop for me and be a normal and sober boyfriend, and he never knew how to answer. He knew it would make both of our lives better and easier but he did not know the answer. He told me countless times that he was trying and that one day, he will be sober and be the best person for me. I remember saying that I miss the times from the beginning of our relationship when he was sober and he would reply “you don’t understand. I haven’t been truly sober in a very long time. Even then I wasn’t, it just wasn’t as bad.” He was right, I didn’t understand.
It became very bad very fast starting around winter 2016/2017. That is when the most awful and evil drugs came into play, drugs I recall him promising he would never touch. He became a master at hiding it; outsiders would call him a liar and deceiver. I only found out about it when he Facetimed me complaining about going to a week-long rehab treatment in February. Even then, I was not worried; I was relieved. I did not have to worry about where he was or what he was doing, for 5 days at least. I felt like things were finally getting better. And he came back and somehow I just threw it to the back of my mind because he was acting so normal again, like he was when we first met nearly two years previously. I do not understand how easy it was for me to just put it away and feel so normal. After all, it was only a week, not even, and as bad as it got for him, there was no way he could have possibly been cured in a week.
I was offended by how much he cut me off recently. I thought I was his best friend, why would he hide this huge piece of himself from me? Those who knew of the extent to what he was doing either did it with him, gave it to him, or just stood by and let it happen. I choose to give them the benefit of the doubt because they probably just did not know what to do. Of course, I say over and over now that if I knew how bad it was I would have spoken up immediately, but I am not sure how I would have reacted if I had known the full extent. It is hard to say until you are in that situation, but I know from now on if I am ever found in the presence of something like this again, I will not hesitate to speak up. This is the difference between life and death.
The day after he took me to my senior prom was when the overdose happened. He Facetimed me at 11:47 am and I told him I was tired and he told me to go to sleep and that he will call me later and that he loved me. He seemed perfectly normal to me, his voice and mannerisms and all, because I can usually tell when he is on something. That day, he was ingesting cocaine and heroin, in the middle of the afternoon. I had no clue. The heroin he took was laced with fentanyl, which drugabuse.gov defines as “a powerful synthetic opioid analgesic that is similar to morphine but is 50 to 100 times more potent.” It cut off the oxygen to his brain and put him to sleep. He was pronounced braindead two days later. The energetic boy that I pictured was reduced to a patient attached ventilator in the hospital bed. All I can hope and pray for is that he was not in pain in his final hours.
I have been trying to backtrack how the Nick I met two years prior became the Nick in the last few months of his life. It happened so fast, in only a few months, and, despite some popular belief, was NOT voluntary. If Nick had full control of his decisions, he would have quit ages ago. He did not want to be plagued with the addiction and the impulsiveness, depression, anxiety, among other things that went along with it. He wanted to be “normal” and play college baseball, or enlist in the armed forces, (he was going back and forth for what he wanted to do) and have a relationship with me. Personally, I imagined him enlisting and playing ball on the base so he’d get the best of both worlds without feeling the pressures he faced in school. He just wanted to be a typical 19-year-old man and grow up and live his life like anyone else would. He had so many visions for himself but drugs took the drive that he needed to fulfill them away from him. It hurt me watching him slowly lose nearly all the motivation he had, because he had so much potential and so many talents. Before the last few months occurred, treatment for him would have been significantly easier, but he got in very deep. If he had a chance to get himself back into a help center, it would have been a physically and emotionally painful process and he most likely would have never felt fully normal again.
Now that I have seen the evil disease that is addiction face to face, I am working on how to fully understand it and hopefully help erase the stigma surrounding it. More importantly, I hope more lives can be saved. I never thought I would be someone that would have to face it; I never thought I would be only 18 years old and have lost my boyfriend and best friend of two years. As a huge fan of Glee, it hit me a little hard when Cory Monteith died, and he is a complete stranger. I never really understood why it hit me hard; I think it was because I could never imagine losing someone so terribly and in such a sudden way, let alone losing someone so close to me. He was not physically ill; he did not have cancer or a chronic illness, but he was suffering to an extent I never knew of when he was alive. No one will ever understand the world as Nick knew it.
If you are reading this, I hope I can help you understand the seriousness of addiction and the effects it has on the addict and their loved ones. So when I hear something like: “yeah but it’s not as bad as cancer. Little children in hospitals did not ask to be sick and addicts make themselves sick,” I wholeheartedly resent statements like that. Comparing addiction to cancer is like comparing apples to oranges; they are both diseases but they are completely separate kinds of diseases. Telling someone they should not be suffering as much as a cancer patient is why the stigma is so bad, and the reason why so many will not speak up and ask for help. I see addiction in a similar way as an eating disorder, another chemical imbalance a person is born with that develops over time. Their brain forces them to see the world and the way they see themselves differently. Addicts do not wish this upon themselves or their loved ones. They do not want to find real satisfaction over having such a necessary dependence on a material substance. Some people have terrible upbringings that cause them to resort to finding an outlet which escalates to addiction. Some people have addiction in the family; it is a genetic disease. Some people are just more strongly impacted by outside substances than others. Some are born to be more easily addicted to substances. I have read stories about people who are seriously injured and in the hospital, where they are put on morphine, and unknowingly develop an addiction to it.
It is hard to pinpoint why exactly Nick became an addict, and I will most likely never know for myself, just like how I’ll never know what made him turn to those dangerous and evil drugs in the last few months of his life. I’ll never know why he was not given a second chance like so many addicts (and those who are suffering in general) are blessed with. Though it is easy for an addict to stop caring about their loved ones and see getting high as the sole thing that keeps them going, Nick was never like that. I think that was why he kept me so far away from that side of him. He was trying to not only protect me, but to make sure I only knew and remembered his best qualities, and never associated him with the worst parts of himself. He had such a big heart for everyone. Thankfully, it is very easy to remember the best things about him and he left me with so many lovely memories I will never forget.
Heroin is becoming a very popular drug. The craziest thing to me about getting access to these drugs is that you never know what you are putting in your body. You are getting them from criminals off the street who want nothing but your money. People that deal these nasty killers are not your friends or people you should trust. To me, it’s the same thing as handing a suicidal person a loaded gun. Nick did not plan to die that Sunday afternoon, but at the same time he did not realize how intense the substance was that he was putting in his body. He was just looking for the little relief that he felt the drug provided him. His brain told him the drug would make any problem he had go away. Even with something as “harmless” as pot, for example, you truly do not know what you are ingesting. It could be laced with absolutely anything. That thought alone scares me and blows my mind. You are playing a guessing game when you choose to put something foreign in your body.
I encourage those suffering to reach out for help. There are many programs out there that have successfully helped addicts get on their feet and become sober. There are also many programs for those who are depressed, whether it is a result from addiction or not. If you know someone who may be suffering from addiction, even in the earliest forms, be forceful. Be stubborn. Tell them it is life or death, and how it only escalates from the “easy” and “party” stuff. You will not be the bore at parties; I was called that among other things when I would openly disagree with people’s choices. It never bothered me, yet it still was not enough to change anything. I wish I had been more forceful than I was. Now that I lost my best friend in the world, I personally will be nothing but stubborn about things like this. It is not a joke, not fun, and destroys lives. Don’t let it be your best friend, significant other, child, parent, cousin, or sibling next. I wish more than anything in the world that it was not Nick that has to set this example, and that he was either given another chance or never cursed with such suffering to begin with, but if his legacy makes any impact at all, I hope it be that it saves lives.