Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over drugs and alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.

Hi I’m Ais, I’m an addict and an alcoholic.

Two and a half years ago, it was spring break and I’d begun to realize that I had absolutely no control over cocaine. I grew up in LA and I went to a little college in the middle of nowhere. I chose it precisely because it was little and in the middle of nowhere, which I thought would make it hard to get drugs and would keep me out of trouble. It didn’t. I underestimated myself, I had a dealer in a week. But my coke dealer was hard to get a hold of and my stash never lasted as long as I promised myself I would make it last– So I turned to alcohol and whatever other drugs I could get my hands on. 

It’s spring break and I’m visiting home. Being in LA meant unfettered access to all the cocaine I could want, and I wanted so much. It should have occurred to me a long time ago that I had no control, but I’d never wanted to stop so I never realized I couldn’t. But it had been years since drugs had taken me hostage and my nose was always bleeding and my heart was always racing and I was so very tired. By no means did I want to stop for good, I just wanted to do less… or stop after a certain hour of the day… or take a little break. Turns out… I couldn’t! I was scared. I felt powerless. The whole point of coke was it was supposed to make me feel powerful!!

An old friend from high school unexpectedly reached out and we made a plan to go to dinner. He had recently gotten sober. He told me about AA and I found myself asking a lot of questions. I didn’t know why I was asking so many questions. You’d think that realizing I couldn’t stop doing coke would mean realizing I was an addict, but the thought had never occurred to me. He started asking me questions about my drug use. I tried to laugh it off like I always did. He didn’t laugh with me. Instead he told me I was going to die. That certainly wasn’t the first time I’d heard that, but it had never scared me. I wasn’t scared when EMTs were lecturing me after I awoke from overdosing on some “mystery pills” my dealer gave me as a gift. I wasn’t scared when friends cut me off because they couldn’t watch me slowly kill myself. I wasn’t scared when I was getting called into the dean’s office about “community concerns about my alleged substance misuse”. For some reason, this time, I was scared. I knew he was right. 

I agreed to go to a Heroin Anonymous meeting with him. I don’t know why I went. I was still certain that I didn’t belong there. I was sure that my inability to stop doing drugs was very different from anyone else’s inability to stop doing drugs. Yet something was drawing me to that meeting. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was the desire to confirm that I was in fact different. Maybe it was God. 

A few days later I show up to the park and stand at a distance watching the people smoking and laughing outside of the rec room. There were so many of them and they were all so different. What I knew about the 12 step programs came from brief references I saw in movies and I had expected a group of sad old men who would sit in a circle in a church basement reminiscing on the glory days. But everyone looked so cool and they looked happy too. It scared me. If I hadn’t been a little drunk I would have turned around and left. It hadn’t even occurred to me that maybe I shouldn’t drink before a meeting, I was sure it was sufficient that I wasn’t on heroin. 

I found my friend, we sat down, and the meeting began. The speaker was an older man who lived a life very different from mine, but somehow it was like he was telling my story. He talked about his resting state being restless, irritable and discontent. He talked about how when he used drugs for the first time he had figured out the secret to tolerating life. He talked about how drugs eventually stopped making life tolerable and relieving him of himself but then he couldn’t stop. How by that point, he used drugs because he had hated himself and he hated himself because of how he used drugs. He understood me. I watched the room nodding at what he was saying and I realized they all understood me. By the end of the speaker’s story I had cried off half the rhinestones I had glued around my eyes and I knew now that I had what these people had and I felt something that I hadn’t felt in a very long time: I felt hope. 

The speaker began to call on people to share and when I looked up I saw my hand in the air. I didn’t know how it had gotten there and it wasn’t coming down as hard as I willed it to. He called on me and I sat still, gripping my seat for a moment before walking to the front of the room and behind the podium. I stood there for a whole minute, willing words to come out, but all that came out were sobs. Fifty faces stared at me with complete understanding. They started to clap as I stood there sobbing. 

I finally spoke. “I need to say this now before I talk myself out of it.” I said in a shaky voice. “I think I’m an addict”. I looked at the poster outlining the steps and said, “I am powerless over coke and my life is so unmanageable and I’m going to try to stop… I promise I’ll try”.

Afterwards people swarmed me in the parking lot. They hugged me and gave me their phone numbers and told me to call. They said all sorts of ominous things like “YOU can’t get sober but WE can”. I thought they were insane, but I nodded like that made perfect sense to me. They told me that I was inspirational and brave and that they believed in me. I did not believe in me and I don’t think anyone who knew me did either so it felt good to hear that somebody did, even if it was a bunch of seemingly insane people. They told me to keep coming back. I lied and told them I would, but I was pretty sure I could figure this thing out on my own without going through the psychological torture of apologizing to people and telling someone all my secrets. 

I’d love to tell you that I never used again, but I did. Many times. In fact I used that night. As I was dumping the rest of my stash down the toilet, I got a little bit on the toilet seat and I am embarrassed to inform you that the next thing I knew, I was snorting it. That’s far from the most disgusting thing I’ve done in my addiction. Cocaine addiction is really not as glamorous as Lana Del Rey had led my tweenaged self to imagine.

What I can tell you is I kept my promise. After that night, I never stopped trying my best, even when my best wasn’t enough to keep me sober. What I can tell you is that after that night, drugs stopped working. The delusion was shattered. Every time I relapsed I knew exactly what I was doing and all I could think about were all the faces of those people who believed in me. As soon as I got high I wished that I wasn’t. 

Eventually I got sober. I’d love to tell you that as soon as I did, it was happily ever after. I feel like that’s what I’m supposed to say, but it’s not true. It wasn’t until I stopped doing drugs that I realized exactly why I started doing them in the first place. That’s the thing about addiction, the drugs aren’t the problem. The drugs are the way that you are attempting to cope with the problem. 

The problem was that I never grew up. Underneath it all, I was still a 10 year old girl–terrified of everything and everyone. The problem was that so many people have had sex with my body while I was too drunk to notice, and I remained too high to notice that it had traumatized me. The problem was I had never felt like I belonged anywhere, and I felt like if I didn’t put on a show to mask my true self, nobody would ever accept me, much less love me. The problem was that when I looked at what life had to offer, it didn’t feel like enough to make it all worth the trouble. The problem was that while everyone else was learning to regulate their emotions and interact with other people and learn how they are, I was getting high. Suddenly I was 20 years old but I was also kind of 15. The problem was that all I could ever think about was my fucking self! My problems and my resentments and my self pity and what everyone thought of me and what I wanted and what I wasn’t getting and how unfair it all was. The only way I knew how to stop thinking about myself was to get so drunk or high that I couldn’t think at all. 

I came into AA thinking they would pity me and coddle me and nurse me back to health like the helpless little baby that I thought I was. They did not. I remember calling my sponsor when I had about 3 weeks sober the first time around and whining to her about all my problems. I asked her what to do and she told me that to feel better I’d have to stop talking about my problems. She suggested I call someone and help them with their problems. I told her I couldn’t possibly be helpful to anybody, I was only 3 weeks sober! She said “then call someone with 2 weeks sober, you know more than them”. I thought that was the rudest thing I’d ever heard. But I did it. As always, she was right, it did make me feel better. It took a while for me to be humble enough to just follow all of AA’s simple instructions, but after a few relapses I was sufficiently humbled and willing. Now it’s been a year, and everything they promised me is coming true. I am living a life beyond my wildest dreams. 

I go to a meeting almost every day now and I introduce myself as an addict and an alcoholic again and again, and I believe that so long as I don’t forget what it was like to say it that first time, I’ll have 1 year sober on December 19th. 

Thank you for letting me share.