Good day to all! Hope everyone is safe and well. I am sure there are some of you who cannot tick either of those boxes, so to those people I pray and send positive thoughts of hope toward…may you be blessed with knowledge and guidance and strength 
I am writing now from the best place mentally, physically and spiritually I’ve ever been in my life, and I wanted to share some of my story with you all in the hope maybe someone somewhere may take something helpful from, even if it’s one line or word.
I was a multi drug and alcohol user and abuser from 13 years old. Back in the days a lot of it was fun and went hand in hand with being in a band and DJing, putting on raves etc. My dad was an alcoholic and when I was 14 he had a brain hemorrhage and lost 4% function on one side of his brain and was made redundant, never to work again. My parents had a rough marriage all my childhood and I was moved countries and schools at least 10 times before high school/secondary school (I am from London and grew up between here and Australia, my mum is from Sydney my dad was a musician from London). I had a rough rough time in school, bullied and beaten up constantly for years. I remember around the time dad nearly died from cocaine clearly thinking almost outloud to myself, that if dad could do all these drugs and party on, that was my cue to completely go nuts. The years that followed up until 20 were the most heavy when it came to “party” drugs and psychedelics. Everything you could name in droves. I failed all my education and was immersed in the illegal raves of London and Northern Europe. Most of it was fun at this time but I hurt my mum a lot and she worried about me. In the end of that period I had some troubles with my first love at the time who introduced me to chemicals, and after a crazy weekend in a field at a rave I ended up beating the absolute sh*t out of myself after discovering my partner was sleeping with my best friend. The next day I fled to Australia, and didn’t come back to the UK for close to 20 years.
My life got a lot better in Australia and I found decent work, became more focused on music and continued that with a new group of people in Sydney. These years were beyond doubt the best. However under the surface as events unfolded in life, the apparence of my potential serious addictions became more and more obvious, when sudden shocking life events occurred such as they death of friends, also related to drugs, occurred, I’d go into benders etc. I always managed to maintain work and relationships and somehow hold it all together, however I wasn’t meeting my potential and often lost jobs, always to find another but had little focus which made me unreliable and unstable.
In 2016 my first child was born and life really took on a new meaning, I got healthy for a good while but was still drinking and occasionally getting on it, but felt happy. 2017 my second child was born. I won’t go into my partner but she had her own issues and we were happy half the time but disconnected and in and out of our own past issues and out of sync.
In 2021 after the pandemic, as planned for some years, we moved back to the UK due to having little support with our kids and family issues back home, sickness etc, my father hasn’t got long to live. I lost my nan after we left and didn’t get to say goodbye. Upon resettling in south London my head had never been so sideways. One thing lead to another and I found myself smoking crack and unexpectedly becoming addicted to heroin, quietly with no one having any idea for some time. I’d had a long standing habit with benzos on and off, heroin at the time I felt allowed me to push all the stuff I was suffering with to the side so I could appear to have my sht together. Obviously, I really did not have my sht anywhere close to being together…
Forward to Xmas 2022 and I’d walked out on my family after they all found out about what I was doing, I got fired from my job, had ran up 5k worth of driving fines and wrote off my car. The spiral of despair culminated in spending all of Xmas in hospital about to be sectioned after trying to go out with a bang and consuming more drugs and alcohol than I thought was possible to survive. But I did, by some miracle the doctors couldn’t believe. I spend the first 3 weeks of January in my sisters family holiday home on the sandbanks by the sea with my mum going cold turkey. It was the single most horrendous few weeks I had ever gone through. You would have thought this bottom point would have been enough to make me just stop. I’d lost my partner, wasn’t close to or in much meaningful contact with my 2 children, my partners family wanted to kill me as I’d spent thousands secretly, and my family were close to disowning me, I hadn’t a penny to my name and no income and was about to be homeless. But I was still blessed in so many ways, at the time my head was still up my backside and I couldn’t see it for myself. I was locked in darkness and self pity, guilt, blame, resentment, denial. I luckily got a place to stay back in my area and continued to drink. As I said I was still blessed but couldn’t see it. I had a roof over my head and the chance to rebuild my life, but I had not accepted how powerless I truly was and in hindsight it was more about appearing to be ok so people would stop worrying. The drinking got so heavy I didn’t know what I was doing most of the time and inevitably, the drugs crept in again. This time was different though, none of it was enjoyable and I found myself in increasingly dangerous situations doing ridiculous things for money. I ended up selling half of my 30 year long collection of vinyl and all of my studio gear, stealing, lying and manipulating people for money. Doing anything I could just to stop my feelings. Every day for 8 months I woke up in absolute pieces, ready to end it. Toward the end I was subconsciously crying out for help doing things that were obviously deliberately careless, my family were preparing for the worst. The final event in the trainwreck of my life one night, was flipping my uninsured car over hitting a parked car at 4am going out to score completely bent sideways. I fled the scene to score and was arrested on return, taken to hospital having been found bleeding and shouting at the sky in the road with a pipe in my hand. My front door had been rammed down by police thinking I was hiding inside. Things were clearly in need of serious attention.
As I said I am blessed, beyond words. My sister had quietly arranged treatment for me and I am so unbelievable grateful now, for my family, for God, for my life. I know how lucky I truly am having met so many people in rehab who never had that kind of support and good fortune in their lives. I felt guilty for this as well, humbled and embarrassed at myself.
Over the past 3 months in treatment and now into temporary accommodation, I’ve gone through what is undeniably a spiritual awakening on a level I never imagined. The rehab where I found myself had a book by Ajahn Sumedho, “the sound of silence”, Buddhist teachings. I’d always taken an interest but could never really connect with anything spiritual on a real level, always chasing that escape or connection whatever you want to call it, through drugs. It turned out the book was distracted through the monastery where Ajahn Sumedho practices at Amaravati, in Great Gaddesdon which is just down the road from the rehab. The weeks that followed upon release from residential I began visiting the monastery regularly. Later I decided to start the steps. There are plenty more coincidences and connections I have made to greater intelligence I could go into but I won’t ramble to much, but needless to say something was shifting on a great magnitude for me.
I just wanted to share some of my story and to say to anyone in early recovery struggling with what to do or where to go next, listen to what the universe is telling you and try and always be grateful and remember you’re human. I’ve seen so many people I’ve met in such a short space of time, with addictions and things in their lives incomparable to my own, come through the other side and in their own ways, figure it all out. When you’re deep in the worst of it, it can be almost impossible to see any hope. But even if you find one small thing, one reason to imagine a better life for yourself, go with that and be kind to yourself, you’re all worth it and needed and loved in this world. One day at a time, life can be beautiful again. I didn’t believe it for so long I thought I had ruined the chance of ever having life back again and it being so full of joy again, but in a relatively short space of time and work, it already is. Wishing you all the best in your recoveries from the bottom of my heart. Love 
