How Addiction Creates Karma

How Addiction Creates Karma

At first, everyone tells themselves they have control.

I remember the first time I got dope sick.

I had enjoyed many blissfully high spring afternoons up until that point. The scariest thing was that it only took about a month of once daily doses to start feeling withdrawals in their absence.

I thought I was just sick at first. When I realized that my body was now crying out for opiates, I was terrified. It felt like a panic attack; one of the many that had landed me in the ER for lack of better understanding. I’d feel comforted as soon as I walked inside those doors and saw the nurses. I knew they could save me from the death that felt ever imminent.

They couldn’t save me this time. My legs ached, directly into the bone. My nose was runny to the point that I had to hold my head back for a hint of relief. Then the stomach cramps came. They rocked the inside of my GI tract. Diarrhea followed after 15 to 20 minutes and continued for a week. I’d been studying meditation and how our mind perceives pain. I was fascinated by its power. Trying to reign in my own mind, I had attempted many things to keep from fixating on the hell my physical shell was experiencing.

Eventually it became a nightmare on spiritual, mental, social, and financial levels too. Long days and longer nights putting myself for the situation I was in. I felt so useless after so many failed shots at going without opiates. I always came crawling back to them. I did not want to feel the pain of living without them.

I know from firsthand experience that addiction is not all black and white. It starts because of mental illness or life crises. A breakup from a largely toxic person helped spur the emotions which caused me to start taking them frequently. It perpetuates largely due to inability to withstand withdrawal. If you look at the studies done on opiate addiction, a person going without their opiates and entering those dark stages of coming off the drug, it is akin to starvation.

If you were starving and had no resources to get food, what would you do? How would you survive?

Believe me, every damn day was focused on survival. It affects your ability to hold a job. If it’s coming out both ends for days at a time, you can’t just miss work. You get corrective action and sometimes fired.... if you stay long enough.

I mean it when I say every day felt like trying to make it one more day in the Wild West. There was no time for hobbies as I quickly found out. I had been successfully gaining interest and engagement on my photography Facebook page (back when that type of marketing worked better) and I struggled and fought so hard to try to stay out of withdrawals so I could go to the shoots people booked with me. Or shoot an event. I tried to keep painting as that was one of my therapies, but ashamedly, some days I only painted so that I could sell it for drug money.

Everything centered on getting more pills in my hand. As tolerance skyrocketed quickly, so did the amount I had to spend. I could easily spend a hundred bucks a day on my habit at one point. And I wasn’t getting high anymore; I was simply avoiding the sickness.

What a price to pay. When an addict steals for drug money, it haunts them forever once they get clean. It doesn’t feel good even when they’re doing it. They are merely trying to survive. In any other circumstance in life, I never stole. I never pawned my things. I never lost a whole laptop due to being so dope sick I couldn’t get up to walk into the pawn shop to make the payment. Being “too sick to do this” became my norm.

You might be wondering how someone could spend so much money and time on an addiction. Why anyone would choose that. It’s complicated. Your tolerance goes up fast so you are forever needing more and more of the drugs, and once you get them you take way more than you should, and way more often than you should. No matter how many dealers you meet, somehow you’re always searching for the drug.

That’s the pinnacle of addiction: a lack of control. You cannot stop yourself from taking it. Even if you spent your last $30 on pills and you know you need to make them last a day or two, or god forbid more, you can’t. You want them again. Your body and mind push so hard to take more. That last dose didn’t hit hard enough, I know if I just took a few more that would amp it up. There is a point where that stops being true.

It doesn’t just keep you broke and most likely unemployed— it ruins your relationships. You spend so much time trying to avoid withdrawals that you miss out on all the fun. Couldn’t get pills to stop puking? Motivation in the negative because you can’t get the opiates? Then you’re S.O.L. Your friends start to wonder what’s up, and the ones who know what you’re struggling with get sick of it. They don’t like being asked if they know “where to get anything” just because your legs hurt and can’t keep still or you haven’t eaten for days because you need the drugs.

Everyone becomes disappointed. Eventually you are just a screwup who keeps choosing the wrong thing completely freely. Someone they can’t trust, someone they do not like anymore. What happened to you?

If only they understood.

And god forbid someone who DOES understand and has empathy— they’re caught in the middle. Those poor generous souls who are only truly trying to help. The ones who can’t stand to see you hurting and suicidal so they give you a handful of their own pain pills that they could really use, and not abuse. The ones who toss you whatever cash they can manage to save up. Who sit and listen to you cry and scream and be the most negative, ugly version of yourself you’ve ever been.

Those are the ones addicts owe the most to.

The friends, family members, lovers who became therapists, crutches, drug dealers.... against their will. The heroes. The ones we hurt the most. When others were coldly shutting out our cries for help, casting us out not as human beings suffering from a condition but as corrupt lazy people, the heroes jumped in the trenches to get dirty alongside us and hold space for us. Enablers, they were called.

Well what would you do if someone you loved was starving to death? Remember, the brain thinks it’s starving during withdrawal. It creates the same sensations in the body. Even worse in the spirit. Addiction is alienating. So to have anyone at all offer hugs, patience, understanding, CONNECTION, help... that is tremendous kindness.

And it shall not go unrewarded.

For every person like myself who has reclaimed their life slowly but surely, one grueling step at a time, we owe it to ourselves to pay off our karma accrued by accepting the energy and help of those who love us. We owe it to them to show them we appreciate so much every time they worried for us, helped us in ways they were told they shouldn’t, who held us as we cried, who stayed.

We owe them so much that we may not be able to give back fully in this life.

But we owe it to them to try.

An afterword for those who are struggling with addiction to opiates or anything else right now: GIVE THANKS. Every damn day. Tell the people who hold you that they make the difference for you today. I know I personally would not be alive without the love of one very special person. To that person: I love you, you ARE my hero, and I hope the guilt you feel for helping me during that dark time in our lives is alleviated by the knowledge that you SAVED my life. Hands down.

If you’re struggling, ask for help. Fight tooth and nail to get help the way you fight to get the daily dose. I pray you get the help you deserve.

Here is a resources to start you on your journey toward a better life:

Https://www.samhsa.gov

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

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