I was selling so much weight and doing so many drugs that my life began to spin widely out of control. Everything was completely fucked. I had become an erratic lunatic, a lot of people were angry with me and I was injecting heroin – meaning most of my days were spent in a confusing opiate-induced fog. If I kept this up, I knew I was either going to lose my mind or end up overdosing on heroin and dying.
I had no other choice but to flee the life I had built for myself, so I ran away, left everything behind, and headed down south. I told no none.
I treated this move as a massive detox. I stopped doing coke and heroin cold turkey and I went into major withdrawals. For two weeks, I felt like I was being physically torn apart. My skin felt like it was on fire, I was constantly writhing in discomfort, I became incredibly paranoid, and was in awful shape. It took an incredible will, but I made it through the other side, got sober, and returned back home to Lawrence that spring.
When I got back, everyone I knew and cared about was using needles and shooting up, including my brother. Heroin and Fentanyl enveloped my hometown worse than ever before and it broke my heart to see. Within just a couple of months of being back, the people I loved and cared about began to die off one by one.
Being surrounded by all of this misery and addiction, caused me to relapse and dive harder than ever before into shooting heroin. It got so bad that if I didn’t shoot up every couple of hours I would get dope sick. The suffocating grip of my addiction transformed my home into a strange sort of prison where I could never be more than an hour drive away from my dealer in Lawrence, otherwise, I would risk going into withdrawals.
It wasn’t until one of my best friends took his own life and my brother passed away from an overdose that I really started to get my shit together. Those two passings ripped my soul apart and changed my outlook on life. I was never the same again. I knew that If I wanted to have a better life, one that wasn’t consumed by suicide, death, and drugs, I had to make serious changes.