u/Expensive-Novel2221

There’s not a single side of addiction I haven’t lived.

I’ve been the child sitting awake at night listening to chaos through thin walls, wondering which version of someone I was going to get. I learned young how to read moods, footsteps, silence, slamming doors. I learned how to survive before I ever learned how to feel safe. Addiction was never just something around me — it raised me.

I’ve been the lover of an addict too. Loving someone while watching them slowly disappear is its own kind of grief. You try to save them, cover for them, understand them, forgive them. You convince yourself that if you love hard enough, maybe they’ll finally choose themselves over the poison destroying them. But addiction doesn’t just consume the person using — it consumes everyone close enough to care.

And then there’s the hardest part to admit.

I became the addict.

Not because I wanted to hurt people.

Not because I didn’t know what addiction looked like.

But because pain has a way of repeating itself when you don’t know how to escape it. Somewhere along the way, the things I hated became the things I understood too well. I stopped trying to numb moments and started numbing my entire existence.

That’s the cruel part about addiction — sometimes you spend your whole life running from it just to wake up one day and realize it’s living inside you too.

I know the shame from every angle.

The disappointment.

The lies.

The isolation.

The guilt of hurting people while also hurting yourself.

The feeling of wanting help while pushing everyone away at the same time.

People talk about addiction like it only has one face. It doesn’t.

Sometimes it looks like rage.

Sometimes it looks like silence.

Sometimes it looks like surviving.

Sometimes it looks like someone trying desperately not to feel anything at all.

I carry all three versions of it with me:

the child,

the lover,

and the addict.

And honestly, I don’t know which one hurts the most.

I don’t really know how to put this into words without it feeling like it breaks me all over again, but I need to try.

Three days after my birthday, I lost my best friend—my cousin. The kind of loss that doesn’t just feel like grief, it feels like something in you gets permanently rewired. We were inseparable in ways that made it hard to tell where I ended and he began.

That Monday, I was supposed to go to school. Instead, we chose to drink. We kept going when we shouldn’t have. We ended up driving—he was behind the wheel—and went out for what we thought was just a cruise. It wasn’t.

We hit a metal railing. The vehicle flipped multiple times. Everything after that is fragments, flashes I don’t fully own but can never escape. He was trapped in the car, crushed into his seat by the door. I was ejected at 86 miles an hour.

I was found about 15 feet away, unresponsive, no pulse. I was brought back. I was airlifted to the closest medical center. They told me I had about a 30% chance of living. I had two punctured lungs, a lacerated kidney, a broken back at L3, L4, and L5, and a compound fracture in my ankle.

But none of that is the part that haunts me the most.

Before it all happened, we had taken his girlfriend and our other cousin to school. I still see that in my head—the normalcy of it, the way everything felt like just another day. His girlfriend had just broken up with him. There was tension there, things left unspoken, feelings none of us dealt with properly.

And now I sit with all of it.

The injuries, the loss, the silence that replaced his voice.

But most of all, I sit with guilt I don’t know how to put down. I replay everything over and over, wondering where the line was, where things shifted, what I should have done differently. Even when I know we made choices together, even when I know it wasn’t just on me, there’s still this part of me that feels like I’m to blame for the accident, for what happened after, for everything that can’t be undone.

I don’t know how to carry this properly. I just know I do.

I feel like I’m always somewhere in between being here and not being here.

There are days where I’m technically present talking, responding, moving through things but I’m not really in any of it. It’s like watching my life through glass. I can see everything happening, I can even react the “right” way, but it doesn’t fully land inside me. It’s distant. Detached. Almost like I’m split off from myself and just observing from somewhere behind my own eyes.

And then there are the swings. The emotional intensity that doesn’t feel explainable to people on the outside. One moment something feels okay, and the next it feels overwhelming, like everything is too much all at once. Relationships feel huge like they’re either everything or nothing and the fear of losing people can take over my whole system even when nothing is actually happening. I don’t always know how to explain that it’s not about drama or attention. It’s like my nervous system reacts before my thoughts can even catch up.

A lot of it connects to things that never really got processed right in the first place. Experiences that stayed in the body more than the mind. So even now, certain tones of voice, silence, distance, or conflict can feel bigger than they are. Not because I want them to, but because my body remembers things my words can’t always explain. It’s like my past doesn’t stay in the past it slips into the present without warning.

The hardest part is that from the outside, I can look “fine.” I can function. I can hold conversations. I can even make it seem like I’m grounded. But internally it can feel like everything is shifting at once, or like I’m not fully inside myself to begin with.

And still, I keep trying to make sense of it. I keep trying to stay connected to people, to reality, to myself because even when it feels fragmented or unstable, there’s still a part of me that wants to come back to center.

I feel like I’m always somewhere in between being here and not being here.

There are days where I’m technically present talking, responding, moving through things but I’m not really in any of it. It’s like watching my life through glass. I can see everything happening, I can even react the “right” way, but it doesn’t fully land inside me. It’s distant. Detached. Almost like I’m split off from myself and just observing from somewhere behind my own eyes.

And then there are the swings. The emotional intensity that doesn’t feel explainable to people on the outside. One moment something feels okay, and the next it feels overwhelming, like everything is too much all at once. Relationships feel huge like they’re either everything or nothing and the fear of losing people can take over my whole system even when nothing is actually happening. I don’t always know how to explain that it’s not about drama or attention. It’s like my nervous system reacts before my thoughts can even catch up.

A lot of it connects to things that never really got processed right in the first place. Experiences that stayed in the body more than the mind. So even now, certain tones of voice, silence, distance, or conflict can feel bigger than they are. Not because I want them to, but because my body remembers things my words can’t always explain. It’s like my past doesn’t stay in the past it slips into the present without warning.

The hardest part is that from the outside, I can look “fine.” I can function. I can hold conversations. I can even make it seem like I’m grounded. But internally it can feel like everything is shifting at once, or like I’m not fully inside myself to begin with.

And still, I keep trying to make sense of it. I keep trying to stay connected to people, to reality, to myself because even when it feels fragmented or unstable, there’s still a part of me that wants to come back to center.

Mother’s Day is coming up, and instead of feeling comfort or warmth, I feel grief, confusion, anger, and emptiness all tangled together.

A few weeks ago, my mother died.

I didn’t hear it from my family.

I didn’t get a phone call.

No one sat me down or even thought I deserved to know.

I heard about my own mother dying from my SO.

And I don’t even know how to explain the kind of pain that causes. Not just because she died, but because it confirmed something I’ve felt my whole life — that somehow I’ve always existed outside of my own family. Forgotten. Excluded. Disposable.

The truth is, I hadn’t spoken to my mother in years. People on the outside might judge that without understanding why. But relationships don’t die overnight. They die slowly, through years of neglect, abuse, silence, pain, and wounds that never heal correctly.

I spent most of my life carrying things I should’ve never had to carry as a child. Emotional neglect. Abuse. Feeling unwanted. Feeling like love was conditional, unstable, or something that could disappear at any moment. I learned very young that home was not always safe, and family was not always protection.

And eventually, I stopped speaking to her because I didn’t know how to keep surviving while reopening those wounds over and over again.

But none of that makes this easier.

Because no matter what happened between us, she was still my mother.

And now she’s gone forever.

There’s no future conversation.

No closure.

No chance to fix anything.

No chance to hear her say she was sorry.

No chance for me to say the things I buried under years of anger and distance.

Now all that’s left is silence.

What makes this harder is that my relationship with my siblings already felt broken long before this happened. There’s years of resentment, distance, pain, and things left unsaid between us. And finding out this way made me realize just how disconnected we’ve truly become.

I don’t even know if they hate me, blame me, forgot about me, or simply stopped caring a long time ago.

And honestly, part of me understands why relationships with me become difficult. My life has been full of self-destruction, addiction, emotional instability, shutting people out, and hurting people while trying to survive my own pain. I know I haven’t been easy to love. I know there are times I disappeared emotionally long before anyone else disappeared from me.

But this still hurts.

It hurts in a way I can’t fully describe.

And on top of all of this, I’m separated from my SO, which leaves me feeling even more lost. Everything feels uncertain right now. My family is fractured. My relationship feels fragile and unknown. The future feels unclear. I wake up every day not knowing what my life is even supposed to look like anymore.

I feel grief not just for my mother, but for everything that never became what it should have been.

The childhood I didn’t get.

The family I wanted.

The peace I never learned.

The stability I pushed away.

The relationships I damaged.

The version of myself I could have been if life had been different.

Mother’s Day is supposed to be about love, connection, comfort, and family.

For me, it feels like standing in the middle of ruins, trying to understand how so much became broken.

And the hardest part is that even after everything, some part of me still just wanted a mother.

I think the hardest thing I’ve ever had to admit is that I don’t feel at home anywhere anymore.

Not in my own mind.

Not in my own skin.

Not even in the places or people I used to run to when life got heavy.

There’s a kind of loneliness that comes from losing people, but there’s an even deeper kind that comes from losing yourself. That’s the place I’ve been living in for a long time.

I spent years destroying the things that mattered most to me. I hurt people who loved me. I chose addiction over connection, anger over honesty, escape over responsibility. Every bad decision pushed me further away from the life I wanted and further away from the person I could’ve been.

And now I carry this constant feeling of wanting to “go home,” while realizing I don’t even know where home is anymore.

Because home is supposed to feel safe.

It’s supposed to feel warm.

It’s supposed to feel like peace.

But when you spend enough time at war with yourself, even peace starts to feel unfamiliar.

The truth is, I think I’ve spent most of my life trying to fill something broken inside me. I tried to numb it with drugs, with self-destruction, with running from reality, with pretending I didn’t care. But none of it fixed the emptiness. It only made me lose more of myself along the way.

And the worst part is knowing the damage didn’t stop with me.

The people around me carried the weight of my choices too. The people who loved me had to watch me disappear piece by piece while I kept convincing myself I was beyond saving. I created pain where there should’ve been love. I made people feel unsafe when they deserved security. I turned my own suffering into something that hurt others.

That’s something I have to live with.

I think what hurts now is realizing I don’t actually want to die. I just got tired of feeling lost all the time. Tired of feeling disconnected from the world, from people, from myself. Tired of waking up feeling like I’m surviving instead of living.

I miss the idea of home more than I miss any physical place.

I miss feeling whole.

I miss feeling wanted.

I miss feeling like there was somewhere I belonged without shame following me into the room.

Maybe this confession is me finally admitting that I can’t keep running from myself anymore.

Because no matter where I go, I’m still there.

And maybe healing starts when I stop searching for home in places, substances, or other people and start trying to rebuild it inside myself instead.

There was a time when I thought I could save everyone around me. I wanted to carry people through their pain, fix broken situations, be the person nobody else would give up on. Maybe part of that came from knowing what it felt like to need saving myself and never really feeling like anyone came.

But somewhere along the way, I lost myself trying to outrun my own damage.

I kept pouring into other people while I was falling apart inside. Addiction, anger, shame, trauma, self-destruction — all of it kept eating away at me while I pretended I could still hold everyone else together. I wanted to be needed because it distracted me from how empty and broken I felt. And the truth is, while I was trying to save everyone else, I was destroying myself and hurting the people closest to me in the process.

I became someone I never wanted to be.

I hurt people who loved me. I made promises I couldn’t keep. I let my pain turn into chaos for everyone around me. I chose escape over responsibility more times than I can count.

And eventually I realized something painful: you cannot save anyone when you are drowning yourself.

Now, I don’t wake up believing I can rescue the world anymore. I don’t even know if I can undo the damage I’ve caused. What I do know is that I’m tired. Tired of running from myself. Tired of numbing everything. Tired of pretending I’m okay while slowly destroying every good thing in my life.

So now, I just want to save what’s left of me.

Not because I think I deserve forgiveness. Not because I think healing erases the past. But because if there’s still anything human, honest, or good left inside me, I don’t want to bury it too.

I know apologies don’t rebuild trust overnight. I know words are easy after enough damage has been done. But this is the truth I’ve avoided for a long time: I cannot keep living like this and expect the people I love to survive the fallout of who I become when I refuse to face myself.

I don’t want to keep being a source of pain. I don’t want my daughter to inherit my destruction. I don’t want the rest of my life to be defined by running from wounds I never learned how to carry.

I used to want to save everybody.

Now I’m just trying to save whatever part of me still has a chance to become someone better before there’s nothing left worth saving at all.

Thank you for listening

Whenever things got hard, my mind would go straight to the same place to quitting, to ending everything. It became a pattern, almost like a default way of thinking when I felt overwhelmed. I told myself it was an escape, a way out when I couldn’t handle what I was feeling.

But last August changed something in me. When I actually died, even for that moment, it scared me in a way nothing else ever has. It forced me to see the truth—that I didn’t really want to die. Not in the way I convinced myself I did.

What I wanted was for the pain to stop. What I wanted was relief.

And in that moment, I also realized how narrow my thinking had been. I wasn’t considering what it would do to the people around me especially my child. The thought of her growing up without me, carrying that kind of loss, is something I can’t ignore anymore. That realization hit me hard.

I can see now that the way I’ve been thinking isn’t just about me. It has consequences beyond my own pain. And even though I’ve felt trapped and overwhelmed, I don’t want my story to end like that.

I’m trying to be more honest about this part of myself, the part that wants to run when things get hard-and to face it instead of giving in to it.

I need to tell the truth about who I’ve been, what I’ve carried, and how it’s shaped me.

For a long time, my life has been a pattern of self-destruction. Addiction became my escape not because I wanted to lose everything, but because I didn’t know how to sit with the pain inside me. It was never really about the substance. It was about trying to numb what I couldn’t understand, couldn’t process, and didn’t know how to heal.

I’ve carried things I stayed silent about for too long being abused sexually, mentally, and physically. Those experiences didn’t just hurt in the moment, they changed the way I see myself and the world. They left me feeling unsafe, ashamed, and constantly on edge.

At the same time, I grew up without the kind of love I needed. The emotional neglect left a hole in me that I kept trying to fill in the wrong ways. I learned to survive without being seen, without being comforted, and without being taught what real love looks like. Because of that, I never really learned how to give or receive it.

Because of everything I’ve been through, I struggle with CPTSD, BPD, and DID. My mind doesn’t experience things the way others seem to. Situations that look normal from the outside don’t feel normal to me on the inside. There’s often a constant sense of unease, like I’m not fully safe, like something is wrong even when nothing is happening. I split, I disconnect, and I sometimes don’t feel like one steady version of myself. It makes relationships, stability, and trust hard to hold onto.

The truth is, I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I wasn’t worth loving. That belief followed me into everything my relationships, my decisions, and the way I treated myself. I pushed people away, sabotaged anything good, and lived like I didn’t matter. Not because I didn’t care, but because deep down I didn’t believe I deserved anything better.

I can see now how all of this is connected-the trauma, the neglect, the addiction, and the self-destruction. None of it came from nowhere. But I also know I can’t keep letting it control me or define every choice I make.

This is me admitting that I’ve been hurting for a long time, and that I’ve hurt others because of it. This is me acknowledging that I need help, that I need to face what I’ve been running from, and that I need to start rebuilding some sense of stability and self-worth.

I don’t fully know how to love myself yet. But I know I have to learn if I want anything in my life to change.

This is me being honest for the first time in a long time with myself.