It’s been almost eleven years since I went to rehab. I spent six of the longest months of my life there trying to build myself back into a human being. It was the hardest and best thing I’ve ever done, the most painful, and by far the most frightening. It was something I did out of necessity not virtue, a decision that thankfully changed the course of my life.

I started drinking and using drugs for one reason. Drugs and alcohol allowed me a brief reprieve from what had been a lifetime of pain and confusion. What I felt when I got high was relief, a literal opiate wave numbing my psyche, a sense of peace, the ability to relax and breathe. For all the anguish I’d experienced since I was a child, I’d finally found a cure. A cure.

But those moments were fleeting and the more I used the more I needed until I was using just to exist, just so that I could get up and walk around from time to time, so that I could pretend to exist among the god damned normal people. My cure had turned into a means of staying one step ahead of the pain, which lurked around ever corner, always waiting, and I knew that if it ever caught up with me it would end me, tear me limb from limb. I used and drank and ran until the drugs and the alcohol just stopped working.

After several months of weeping and screaming and shaking treatment became a safe harbor, a place where I could sift through the wreckage of what had been my life. Once I was able to comprehend feelings and words and regained some semblance of a thought process I realized that I had suffered all my life from depression. I was crazy, maybe, but my illness had a name.

A kind doctor diagnosed me and spent countless hours listening as I talked about things I’d never talked about before, and eventually convinced me that I was not a terrible person. It took some doing. Very slowly, I started getting better. Once I began treating my depression, my need to otherwise medicate became much less of an issue.

Here’s the thing: Even though the abuse of drugs and alcohol almost ruined my life, I know that it also saved my life. That’s a hard thing for people to understand. Drug abuse and alcoholism is often seen as a weakness or an indulgence but I’m living proof that they are sometimes neither. Sometimes self-medicating is all a person has left and that is a terrible and horrifying thing- salvation via destruction. The selling of one’s soul for just a few moments peace.

Whenever I encounter an obvious drug user and they ask me for money I always give it to them. I know how bad, God have mercy, it hurts to run out of your medication.