ON THIS SIDE OF OCTOBER

The pain started on a early October morning. Darkness was still desperately trying to hold onto the morning sky when I awoke and found myself gently rubbing the side of my mouth. There was a slight pain that really didn’t hurt but it was noticeable and it was a cause for alarm. I stuck my finger into the back part of my mouth and rubbed against my gum. The entire bottom part of my jaw felt like jelly. I knew what this meant; my final wisdom tooth was preparing to break through my gum and show itself. I had gone through this ordeal before and I was not looking forward to the pain that I knew would continue to get worst. Over the next several days I couldn’t stop picking at the tender area in my mouth. The pain was obviously becoming more acute and without the benefits of health insurance I knew I wasn’t going to be able to have it removed any time soon. I would have to wait this one out.
The days went by and the pain was becoming worst. It actually got to the point where I wasn’t even able to concentrate enough to read a simple book. A constant headache had developed that was pounding the right side of my face. At first, I would have these pounding episodes for a couple of hours, three to four times a day. However, as time went by, I would wake up with these pounding headaches and they wouldn’t let up until the moment I fell into unconsciousness. Sleep was something that was becoming more difficult to obtain. It would take me a couple of hours to get to sleep after hitting my bed and I would wake up several times throughout the night from the pain.
In a matter of three days after the constant pain had started, I had gone through an entire bottle of aspirin. I was popping the pills like candy throughout the day and didn’t even realize how many I had taken. The only thing that mattered to me during these days was numbness. I didn’t want to feel anything; the only desire I had was to be numb. I was lucky enough to have a couple of connections and I was able to obtain Vicodin. I know that I would take the Vicodin at least four to five times a day but sometimes I would double up on the dosage. I would sustain myself on this through Christmas which is about the time I started to take some other nerve/anxiety pills that I’m still not sure what the name of the other pills I was taking at the time. It was usually random things that I would find or people would give me.
The latter part of the year I had found myself heading for depression. When the toothache had started in October, I had already found myself having severe mood swings and constant tiredness. It was getting harder for me to get up in the morning and it took so much energy just to get the strength up to take a shower. I’m still not sure what caused this depression, I think it was a number of things like loneliness, stress from work and finances, my relationships with friends and family, my lack of direction in life, my loss of purpose. I personally felt that I hadn’t accomplished enough in my life to be worthy of anything. The toothache exasperated all of these problems and I got to the point where I just didn’t want to handle anything anymore. I have never thought about suicide but it’s clear to me now how some people could take that path without even realizing how they got there. I never thought I would be addicted to drugs but here I was grasping at every pill I could get my hand on.
I had smoked weed only a hand full of times in my life. It never really appealed to me like it did with a lot of my friends in high school and college. However, at this period of my life where it seemed to me that I had failed as a person; I found weed to be a comforting salvation. I don’t know why I have always been hard myself but the attitude I’ve had about myself might have done a lot more damage then I could have possibly imagined. My toothache had long been gone but I constantly wanted to find myself dwelling in the numbness of nothingness. If I didn’t feel, then I knew that I wouldn’t hurt. Smoking weed took care of that for me.
Something happened the following February that took me further into the direction of this pill-induced culture that had become my life. I had started sleeping with a guy that was a slave to Queen Tina. I admired him on so many levels; on the way he was so comfortable with himself; his confidence on who he was; the successes he had professionally and romantically. He came into my life during a period where I felt so isolated from everybody and everything and I thought of him as a savior. This White Horse had a dark side to his character that I didn’t want to face as well. He was already in a relationship with another individual and they had been together for more than a decade. I knew that he would not break things off with this other guy, leaving me to be nothing more than his dish on the side. I was constantly watching him snort coke in his car, at the club, in his home and in his bed. At some point during one of our drunken nights at the bar, in a dirty bathroom I took my first snort of cocaine. It wasn’t something that I wanted to do or that I planned to do but it happened, and it happened again… and again… and again… I would dwell in the afterglow of the coke that sometimes would last a couple days at a time. I was on top of the world and then I would be down again so the cycle would restart. I found myself going to work high like this and it kept me in a constant, stable mood until it wore off. Everything was becoming more and more of an roller coaster ride; every detail of my life was a roller coaster and I wasn’t quite sure how, or if, I wanted to get off.
April found me becoming more isolated from most of the people in my life. I was constantly fighting with my roommate, I would go days at a time without having any contact with my family and I had just stopped hanging out with most of the friends that I had in my life. I would get high before going into work and afterwards I would walk uptown to a bar to have a few drinks. I also found myself crying a lot over the smallest of things. I cried a lot those days without any reason or logic. I just found myself dwelling in sadness all the time.
I’m not sure how the realization came to me that I was not suppose to be in this position but I think it had a lot to do with everything that was building up inside of me. I was so angry that I had given up on everything in my life. I couldn’t understand why I chose to give up. So I called the one person that I could rely on, even if I didn’t want to hear her advice she would know what to do. I told my mother everything that was going on and that I didn’t know what to do. She urged me to go to rehab but I was too ashamed to check myself into any facility and even if I wanted too, I didn’t have health insurance that would cover it. So, I did the next best thing and I left my life behind and moved back home.
It took weeks for the need to take pills, snort coke, and smoke weed to go away. There were days that I just sat in my bed thinking about how I could get high and how I wanted to pick up the phone and just call someone to bring me something. However, even with the urges tugging at me I resisted the notion. I was better than this, I took this negative energy and I turn it into something useful like exercising and eating healthy. By the end of June I had dropped twenty pounds and I found myself enjoying the person I was. I felt for the first time in a couple of years that I had direction again and that I could stand on my own two feet and be proud of who I was.
My journey in this life isn’t the one that I planned for myself but I claim it has my own. I don’t believe in mistakes and I don‘t have any regrets about anything I have done in my life, I just believe in situations and experiences that make you the person that you are today. I have not always chosen to take the path of virtue but I chosen to at least take a path which as lead me here. To anybody that is out there, reading this, be strong in who you are, put value in your character, and always know that it’s okay to go home again.