How meth ruined my life

Meth Ruined My Life — And I Knew It the First Night

I didn’t think I was the type of person who would ever try meth.

That’s what everyone says, right?

I thought I was curious. Experimental. Open-minded. I told myself I was just exploring consciousness. That’s how it started — not in some dark alley, not with strangers — but at a friend’s house, late at night, chasing a feeling I couldn’t quite reach.

Earlier that night, I had taken DMT.

I had heard the stories. Ego death. Machine elves. The universe unfolding in geometric perfection. People coming back “changed.”

But I felt almost nothing.

I was on SSRIs at the time, and I didn’t fully understand how much they can blunt psychedelic effects. Everyone else in the room seemed shaken, quiet, wide-eyed. I just felt… sober. Left out. Disappointed.

It wasn’t spiritual.

It was frustrating.

I remember thinking, Why doesn’t anything hit me the way it hits other people?

That question has followed me in more ways than one.

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After the DMT fizzled for me, the energy in the room shifted. Someone casually mentioned they had something stronger. Something that would definitely make me feel it.

Meth.

Even writing the word now feels heavy.

There was a split second — a quiet internal warning — where I knew I should leave. Go home. Sleep. Forget the whole thing.

But I didn’t want to be the only one who didn’t feel anything again.

I didn’t want to feel numb.

So I said yes.

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The first wave hit fast.

And it was like someone flipped on the lights in my brain.

Warmth flooded my body — not chaotic, not overwhelming at first — just smooth and powerful. My chest felt open. My thoughts felt sharp but calm. My anxiety, which had been background noise for years, vanished.

Vanished.

I remember sitting there thinking, So this is what normal people must feel like.

It wasn’t just euphoria. It was relief.

Deep, chemical relief.

My body felt weightless but grounded at the same time. My jaw relaxed. My shoulders dropped. I could talk without overthinking every word. I could exist without analyzing myself from the outside.

For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t at war with my own head.

And that’s what made it dangerous.

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People think the hook is the high.

For me, it was the silence.

The silence of self-doubt.

The silence of shame.

The silence of that constant inner voice telling me I wasn’t enough.

Meth didn’t just make me feel good.

It made me feel free.

That night, sometime in the early morning hours, I had a terrifyingly clear thought:

I understand why people ruin their lives for this.

And even worse:

Mine might never be the same.

It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t emotional. It was logical.

I knew I had crossed something.

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The days after were restless. My brain replayed the feeling like a highlight reel. I told myself I wouldn’t do it again. That it was just a one-time thing.

But my mind had already cataloged it as the solution.

Bad day? There’s a fix.

Tired? There’s a fix.

Lonely? There’s a fix.

Ashamed? There’s a fix.

It didn’t take long before “once” became “maybe just one more time.”

And then again.

And again.

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What no one explains is how subtle the shift can be at first.

You don’t wake up instantly ruined.

You slowly rearrange your priorities.

Sleep becomes optional.

Food becomes irrelevant.

Real joy becomes dull compared to the chemical version.

Conversations turn into performances. You feel invincible while you’re high — confident, sharp, driven — but underneath, something is eroding.

The crashes were darker than anything I’d felt before. Not just sadness. Emptiness. Irritability. Paranoia creeping in at the edges. My heart racing for no reason. My thoughts turning against me.

The same brain that felt like heaven on the way up became hell on the way down.

And each crash whispered the same lie:

You know how to fix this.

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Relationships started straining. I became unpredictable. Either wired and overly intense or completely withdrawn. I stopped showing up fully. I started hiding things. Lying about small stuff. Then bigger stuff.

The drug that made me feel socially perfect slowly isolated me from everyone.

My goals shifted too. I used to think about school, career, stability. Suddenly, my planning revolved around access. Timing. Recovery days.

I told myself I was still in control.

Addiction loves that sentence.

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The scariest part wasn’t the chaos.

It was how normal it started to feel.

Staying up all night? Normal.

Ignoring responsibilities? Temporary.

Heart pounding in my chest? Probably fine.

I could feel my body wearing down. My mind becoming less stable. But the memory of that first euphoria — that first clean, warm silence — kept convincing me it was worth it.

Except it wasn’t the same anymore.

It never is.

The first time felt like being handed the key to peace.

Every time after that felt like chasing a ghost of it.

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Eventually, the consequences stacked too high to ignore. My mental health deteriorated fast. Anxiety came back worse than before. Paranoia wrapped around ordinary situations. Sleep became fractured. My emotions felt jagged.

The drug that once made me feel powerful left me fragile.

And somewhere in that mess, I remembered that thought from the first night:

My life might never be the same.

I was right.

It wasn’t the same.

It was harder.

Healing wasn’t instant. Getting clean wasn’t cinematic. There were cravings. Rationalizations. Shame spirals. Days where my brain begged for that artificial quiet.

But here’s what I’ve learned:

The euphoria was rented.

The damage was owned.

Meth didn’t fix my numbness. It postponed it — with interest.

It didn’t give me confidence. It borrowed it from my future stability.

It didn’t make me free.

It chained me to a feeling I could never fully recreate.

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If you’ve never tried it, I won’t romanticize it for you.

Yes, the first rush can feel unbelievable.

Yes, the relief can feel like a miracle.

But miracles don’t dismantle your life piece by piece.

This one did.

I sometimes grieve the version of me who walked into that house just curious and insecure and wanting to feel something. I wish I could tell him that numbness is survivable.

Because addiction is so much harder to survive than emptiness.

My life isn’t the same.

But not in the way I feared.

It’s not the same because now I know how thin the line is between relief and ruin.

And I choose, every day, to stay on the side that hurts less in the long run — even if it doesn’t glow as brightly in the moment.