Drug of Choice

I remember very vividly the last time I did coke. I also remember how in my youth, I swore I’d never touch the hard stuff. How could I have known that the day I was pressured into it would also be the day that I fell in love with it.

Cocaine. Just the word leaves me excited, but anxious. It’s been six years since the last time I even laid eyes on it, but to this day if someone were to put it in front of me, it would take every part of me to walk away.

It was the weekend of my son’s fourth birthday. I had a party planned at the park with my entire family on Saturday. I was a single mom, going through a hellacious divorce. I was in the middle of a wild ride. I was free for the first time and running amuck. I was falling back into old habits, and the Friday before the party, I met up with some old “friends.” I had to bring my children with me because they had nowhere else to go. I had been clean two years at that point. I was proud of my sobriety. Well, from drugs anyway. Alcohol was another demon I had yet to conquer.

When the little white bag came out, I knew I was going to do it, but the guilt I felt was like never before. For the first time I truly felt scared, worried, and disappointed in myself. That didn’t stop me, though. We hid in a small room away from the children while they watched cartoons. Just three of us, doing line after line after line... debating on how long we should wait between each rail in an effort to stretch it out. My daughter was at a curious age, and she kept coming to the door asking us what we were doing. I felt sick. I felt disgusted with myself. I wanted so bad to leave and reverse the last two hours of my life. I wanted to go back to being clean. I wanted the shame to stop. Instead, I stayed and continued to put a straw up my nose. I’m not sure what I was trying to prove. I was nearly ten years older than my present company, and I was a mother—they didn’t have children. They were stupid kids, but I knew better.

I barely slept all night for all of the obviously reasons, but let’s not forget I still had to show up to the park the next day in the hot Louisiana sun and be around my entire family and my friends for my son’s birthday party.

Between attempting to not look guilty and feeling miserable in every way, I was having to pretend to be mom of the year. Cake, presents, games, songs, cleanup. It didn’t matter what was going on, this feeling overshadowed it all. It took away from what should have been a special day. The drugs only compounded the negative, paranoid feelings. I couldn’t stop mentally beating myself up. I couldn’t wait to go home away from everyone and cry. I wanted to die.

I learned a very valuable lesson that day. When you invest so much time and effort into bettering yourself, then you let a promise of an imaginary good time backslide you to this person you thought you had beaten, you will undoubtedly decide to never make that mistake again.

So that was it. That was the day that I made a choice to never let a drug do me again. Because that’s exactly what was happening, I wasn’t doing the drugs... they were doing me.

No matter how big the screw up or the set back, you can overcome it. I spent a decade being an addict, but the day I made the choice, REALLY made the choice, the second time when I felt it in every fiber of my being... that’s the day I quit cold turkey and never looked back. It can be done. I’m living proof of that.