At the heart of addiction lies trauma. It’s an answer to the question How can I live with such pain. My love affair with needles was a problem solver, and like all dysfunctional relationships it began with explosive belief that I’d found the one and ended with my world reduced to a pin prick. For three years I travelled back and forth to Australia using crystal meth and cocaine to make life feel better and for a while it really worked. I was stick thin and unapproachable but to a degree I was happy. My friends and I partied in remote and beautiful places, liberated in trance for days at a time, pounding the earth, our bodies loose, all rules abandoned, an ironing board for a bar, an inflatable for a pool party, ketamine and vodka for breakfast, we drove them wild. I made friendships that I cherish to this day and I look back and see how close I sailed to the edge and sometimes it takes my breath. It was magic and it was terrible and we’re lucky to have had it and come out of it alive and some of us didn’t. But temporarily it solved the problem, how can I live with such pain while not telling me what the pain was, a deal that by the third year was just me and my gear in a room and the most fleeting of escapes. Because as all addicts know, you’re chasing the feeling when you thought you’d found the answer and it’s never as good as the first time. By the third year I’d cut all connections, what did I need other people for, they just got in the way. I cannot pass a parked car in a lay-by without thinking the people inside have stopped for a taste and when I think of the ritual my cells remember. I have lain in the bath and apologised to my body and my veins have stood up in my arms and my blood has pulsed visibly and let me be clear, the body does hold the score, it is conscious, and it forgives and remembers everything. The end came at a party in Australia, not an outdoor trance delight but a room in a house where we’d gathered, the people there linked not by friendship but by method. I was lying in a bed, bodies were scattered about and on either side of me two people with needles in their arms. I remember having a moment of seeing the scene as if new, without the irrational explanations that had made it all right for me to be there. I remember thinking, what am I doing? It was so sudden and so obvious. I got up and left, flew back to England, never used again. I felt I’d got off light until I understood it wasn’t needles or crystal meth or cocaine that I was addicted to, but something deeper.
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A gold prize.
What a photo. What a time. Exhilarating freedom in one way whilst in the grip of the most dangerous and pervasive jail !! To think that battle was won and we survived, relatively intact!! Love you always. If nothing else the incredible friendship we forged was a gold prize