It is every day.
And it never ends.
Addiction is a lifelong process for me. And as much as I do love my life today, I still wouldn’t wish this thing on anyone. Being an addict sucks.
When I go to high schools and talk to kids, I always tell them, you know, it may look like I went through everything and came out the other side okay and even successful, but that’s not how it is at all. Every day I suffer from the decisions I made and from this addiction thing that I allowed to get so out of control.
From the ages of eleven to twenty-six, I’ve been wasting my life trying to figure out a way to not have to be sober. I just did not want to accept the fact that I have this alcoholism thing and it is a death sentence—no, worse than a death sentence. It’s worse than a death sentence ’cause it manipulated me and made me crazy and delusional and it altered my brain chemistry so I am left permanently damaged.
For so long I tried to blame my addiction on my family or my childhood or my depression and bipolar disorder, but that was all just bullshit.
It’s taken me a long time to understand what’s really wrong with me.
You see, there’s a scientist—some lady in San Francisco—who’s been able to breed an entire strain of addict flies. That is, flies that are drug addicts/alcoholics. The way I understand it is that this scientist created an alcohol-and-cocaine vapor that the flies could inhale if they chose to walk down a certain corridor in their cage. And she, the scientist, found that, while all the flies will, from time to time, go down the corridor to get drunk or high—a smaller percentage of the population will go down the corridor over and over again—abandoning all food and water—participating in a cycle that seems eerily human. They get drunk or stoned, wobble around for a while, have trouble flying, and pass out for twenty or thirty minutes, and then they wake up and do it all over again.
And so by examining and dissecting those particular flies more prone to addictive tendencies, that scientist has actually been able to isolate some of the genes linked with alcoholism and then breed those particular flies with those genes together in order to create an entire, like, brood of alcoholic/addict flies. In fact, these flies are such hard-core addicts that even when the corridor leading to their drug supply is replaced with a highly electrified metal panel, the flies will still walk down it to get their drug of choice. Sure they’ll be getting shocked to all hell, but it still won’t stop them. Whereas the nonaddict flies will put one little fly foot on that electrified surface and then back off immediately, never to go back.
The addict flies, just like addict humans, will go to absolutely any lengths to get their next fix—even when that is in direct opposition to what is every living creature’s natural instinct for survival and self-preservation. In other words, once an addict is an addict—that is, an active addict—whether you’re a human being or a gross-ass fly, getting high is the only thing that matters. We will do anything it takes to get more. It becomes what we live for. And that is not a moral or rational decision. It is encoded in our DNA. And, yes, it can remain dormant for your whole life. Or it can awaken like it did for me—you know, back when I was twelve years old and I’d started smoking pot every day.
So that means the drugs actually were the problem—well, the drugs and my goddamn genetic code.
It’s ridiculous, really, to think about how long I’ve fought to deny that simple fact. And, honestly, I’m not even sure why that is exactly. Maybe it just seemed embarrassing to admit that it was the drugs themselves that totally fucked up my life. Like, it seemed cooler or whatever to be able to blame my addiction on my messed-up childhood, or my creepy stepdad, or my mom leaving, or something like that. And, while I’m sure all that stuff did play a role in terms of why I started using drugs in the first place, my actual addiction had nothing to do with any of that. ’Cause obviously a ton of people have a hard time growing up, and obviously they don’t all turn out to be drug addicts—even the ones who do end up doing drugs.
The only thing that made me any different was that I had this messed-up genetic whatever, just like my new little fly friends. And then the drugs did the rest. The drugs changed me. They changed my brain chemistry, and they even changed the way I thought about myself and my past.
Back when I was eighteen and I first tried crystal meth, I remember having this feeling like, wow, this is the first and only time I’ve ever been happy. And I believed that. Hell, I believed that for most of my life. I believed that before crystal meth I was never happy—and that without crystal, I would never be happy again.
But that was a lie.
That was a lie that the drug told me.
That lie was the drug manipulating me and changing my brain chemistry. And, yeah, like the flies, I learned to walk across an electrified panel just to get another fix.
It’s pathetic, I know.
I take a drink or a drug and instantly I start to turn.
I become a man becoming a fly.
Me and the flies, operating from the same place of blind, insatiable hunger.
There’s a scene in that Cronenberg movie—you know, The Fly—where Jeff Goldblum (midway through fly transformation) tells Geena Davis, “I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is
