I remember reading a blog some time ago on another site by some old fuck that lives in her own little world and refuses to accept that the world changes, and she refuses to accept that sometimes people can’t help their situations. One particular blog of hers was about drug addiction, which was something she clearly knew nothing about. “People who use drugs have no one to blame but themselves. They had the choice to use drugs or not to use drugs and they chose to do it so they shouldn’t be helped.”

I was talking to my brother-in-law about this. We used the example of a party one time. No one goes to a party and just blurts out, “So who’s got heroin in this motherfucker?” A lot of the time heroin stems from an addiction to opiates, which are prescribed by doctors to manage pain. We as humans will find any way possible to eliminate the pain in our lives, whether it’s physical or emotional.

I started drinking and using pills when I was 19 or so. I’ve used coke, still smoke weed, drink occasionally (but have recently discovered that I can’t drink alone anymore. I won’t drink alone anymore.) Also, as I mentioned in my previous blog, I tripped on acid for the first time this past weekend. We’re all looking for ways to avoid, ignore, or eliminate pain. I don’t know too many people who become addicts because they’re happy. No one drinks alone because they’re entertaining happy thoughts. Those of us who use are trying to mask, hide, and again, eliminate pain. We’ll go to any lengths to do it.

I know what depression is like. I’ve struggled with it since my teens. It’s not something that’s easy to live with and it’s not something I’d wish on another person. Then again, maybe I would just so someone else could walk a day in my shoes to know what the pain is like. I commented on a friend of mine’s blog about depression, saying:

Sadness and depression are two very different things. I have felt sat before and I struggle with depression. Sadness is the loss of a job, the feeling you have after a fight with your partner, failing that test you studied so hard for.

Depression is wanting out. There is nothing to life and you go along every day and wonder why you still bother in the first place. It’s feeling that nothing is ever going to get better and dreading the days ahead. It’s sleeping the day away because you can’t bring yourself to face it. It’s just not wanting to play anymore as David Foster Wallace said in Infinite Jest. Nothing brings you joy but the nothingness of being unconscious somehow whether it’s from sleeping or being passed out from the night before.

It’s why we choose things that are bad for us to handle the pain. We drink, we do drugs, we try to numb the pain anyway we can because it’s physical and mental. You don’t feel anything when you’re on drugs. That’s the feeling we want … the feeling of not feeling at all.

It’s why so many who suffer from depression commit suicide. They want an out. They’re done with playing and have realized this life has nothing to give them.

I struggle every day with the feeling of not wanting to feel. I lie in bed and sleep for hours on end because I just don’t want to know what the day holds for me and I don’t care. I just want to be out of it. I want to be put into a coma so I won’t have to be dead, but I won’t have to deal with what’s going on in my mind anymore, either.

Knowing this, how could you say you don’t understand why people turn to drugs? It’s easier, faster, and sometimes cheaper than therapy.

You can’t understand a user’s mind
But try, with your books and degrees
If you let yourself go and opened your mind
I’ll bet you’d be doing like me and it isn’t so bad