Well now, loyal reader, can you believe I quit rehab? Holy flipping smokes, 13 years, and it’s done. It was a shitty ending, but hey, even Stephen King has those. The important part is that, despite feeling as if it were impossible, I managed to get out of a career that does not suit the parts of myself I wish to nourish. In short…it’s not you, rehab, it’s me. It’s always been me. I was never the girl for you. I had to shut down my gentler and sweeter sides, and grow calloused and hardened, and I hated it so. I was ravenous and starved for my witchy, hippie, holistic, happy, spiritual, joyous and weird self.

Fuck universal abstinence, by the way. Drugs have been in this world for the entirety of humankind, and they’ll never not be here…even if they’re, like, robot drugs in the far future. Drug are not going away. Furthermore, they really shouldn’t. I fucking love drugs. I hate addiction, but damn, drugs are miraculous.

Drugs aren’t all created equal. Please tell me your lil’ sugary coffee drink isn’t any different from a harrowing, life-ruining heroin addiction, I dare you. I’ve been the witness to some heavy trauma, things I cannot and will not ever share outside of my own therapist’s office. Seriously. My poor therapist. I will say, they haunt me, and that’s just vicarious trauma. I know, and I cannot overstate, that heavy addiction comes from heavy trauma. People, however, tend to over-correct, and when they drop their bad habits, they get gun-shy about chemicals in general. The people I work with, the difficult one, and by that I mean, the ones who ‘never want to use a substance again’? They’re cheating themselves out of some seriously powerful healing. They also are in danger of becoming recovery bigots, who simply won’t accept anything outside of straight-edge sobriety. They also vote trump, which is a big fuck you when you’ve taken the time to get them registered to vote. (He hates the homeless, y’all. He hates you. Stop voting for him.)

ANYWAY. With the knowledge that ALL drugs aren’t the same, hey, what if a few of them were really good medicine when properly utilized? What if, go with me on this, some of us don’t have the luxury of turning our nose up at chemistry, because our brains fail us? What if I would be dead without drugs?

I think that pretending that something you dislike does or should not exist, simply because you don’t want to deal with and work with it, is some grade-A level republican-style ignorance, and I don’t accept that bullshit. Do I want people to stop ODing and dying in the street? sure do. Do I think safe injection sites, needle exchanges, micro loans, suicide prevention, gay rights, secure housing, available and healthy food, continuing as well as early education, and employment resources are in dire need and must be prioritized above all else in the world of healthcare, to STOP early death? Um, yes. Yes. YES.

I also think that I cannot live a life I deserve without the assistance of therapy AND medicine. Drugs are medicine. Abusing drugs isn’t something to punish, it’s something to treat. They’re not well. Stop telling people to not treat their own trauma, when in a system that chooses overwhelmingly to punish and exploit those with trauma and accompanying addiction, people without resources will make bad decisions out of pure social poverty.* People are going to find an exit from pain in one way or another, and I promise you that my 6 pills a day beats the hell out of killing myself. I swear, no exaggeration. I would be dead without drugs. I’m repeating this on purpose. Take note.

I’ll probably be writing quite a bit about the rehab world in a while, but right now I’m in a recovery of my own, and it’s going to take a lot of energy. It takes energy to make energy, and I’ve been running on an empty tank for quite a while. Need to refuel my soul…………and take my meds. Talk soon, loyal reader. Soon, I swear.

*social poverty is a little expression I’ve coined meaning the state wherein someone has used all their social resources, burned every bridge, even the enablers are fed up, and they have utterly nothing else but the drug.