Hey people, it’s my first post and I just want to have this as a kind of self reflection. A reflection of my early onset addiction whise and my several tries with stopping and to use this platform as a kind of diary for myself.
Right in the beginning, english is not my mother tongue and I’m really sorry if this text is not easily read. But I had to write it down after I was looking through the community section now for some time.
I’m 24 years old and I started using cannabis when I was 14. I can remember the day I have smoked my first joint really well and I can also remember the things that have let to it.
Since my sisters are older than me and I’m having a very liberal family, I have had my first contacts with cannabis long before I knew what it actually was. When my oldest sisters (the children of my father) still lived with us in one house they were in the age of around 15-16 and had startet using cannabis. My mother was pretty liberal like I said and they were often smoking outside our house and in then garden when me and my “real” sisters where playing outside. As a child I never thought about drugs and I never knew what they were. This shifted when my “real” sisters started to use cannabis. I was around 12-13 years old. I asked my sister’s questions about it because I have allways been interested in everything that surrounded me and in my school I had made contact with cigarettes and alcohol. So the first barrier of taking drugs was gone already. While writing this, a thought came into my head. There is a picture of the 3 or 4 years old me at a bonfire, holding a smoking stick up to my lips and pretending to smoke. And since I can remember I have allways been attracted by these things that a lot of the adults around me where allways holding in they’re hands and inhaling.
But my story gets out of hand if I get to much in detail here.
Like I said I have allways been attracted of smoking and since my puberty, when my sisters started to smoke cannabis I allways wanted to try it. But luckily they never allowed me to try it. But at some point this topic got closer to me, because some friends in school who I hung out with a lot at this time, started smoking cannabis too. One day they asked me if I wanted to join them and take some puffs. I did it and I haven’t felt a lot of it that day, but my curiosity didn’t went away.
So one day when I knew my sister had something in here room I sneaked over, got like a tiny bit out of the bag and stored in my desk. The next time I visited my best friend who lived in a different city than me, I brought it with me and I was super hyped to try it out with him and another friend of us. So one evening we sneaked out to the next playground and I tried to roll us a joint. I had stolen some tobacco and a paper from my mother and did my best with rolling. And I guess it was this evening when my craving for these kind of feelings began. I was used to doing things that I shouldn’t do. As I kid I was allways doing stuff that I haven’t been allowed to and I allways sneaked into places where I shouldn’t have been. I guess this was just the next step with doing forbidden things and since it had some kind of normality for me and was almost always available for me, as long as I stole it from my sister’s, it was just another forbidden thing that didn’t really had a bad outcome for me. Because I’ve always got away with the things that I did. I’ve got often in trouble but I was so used to do the wrong things and to get “punished” for them, there has not really been anything in my mind that said “wait a sec, that’s maybe not the best idea”.
So from that day on my friends in the other town smoked more regularly and I visited them more often. I loved to visit them before that event but afterwards I was even more looking forward to it. So you could say I’ve got hooked quite fast. But it got out of hand when I started to invest my own money and took some of that cannabis back with me to my hometown. I was 15 when I was smoking alone for the first time. I can still remember it, I bought a pipe on one of our holidays in Spain. When I bought It I was just thinking “nice now we don’t have to roll these weird joints anymore” but I was also pretty sure that it will also be easier for me to smoke at home if I wanted to.
I guess at first I only smoked on the weekends but pretty soon I started smoking on week days. My mother was working a lot and my sisters have been outside with friends after school. But I rarely had friends after an incident with one of the people of the group with whom I had first tried it.
So most of the time I sat home alone in front of my tv or Laptop and watched YouTube or played video games. Basically everything that shut myself of from the fact that I was really alone. So cannabis came in handy. And pretty soon I was smoking almost every day. I read a lot about cannabis in that time and I was really enthusiastic about it, I guess most users know this kind of behaviour. In my reaserches about cannabis I also stumbled across other drugs and what people wrote about them really fascinated me. But I was allways sure that I don’t want to try anything else. But my friends in Rostock, the town where my best friend lived in, started taking other drugs at some point. And my best friend also did. So I really read into the matter and listened to his story’s that he told me. And in the same year when I was 15 I took my first exctasy pill on new years eve. I was really anxious so I only took a quarter at a time. It was not enough to feel anything but again a barrier which I had set myself dropped that night. In this friend group it was really normal that everyone was taking anything. These have been mostly people in my age but apart from that there have been like 3 or 4 almost 20years Olds who allways hung out with them and who where the people who connected them with the dealers brought the drugs into that group of kids. So on that new years eve there have been plenty of drugs around. Again using drugs was normalised and my fears regarding synthetic drugs got smaller. It took almost half a year until I did my second try with using exctasy. But in that time I knew I had a problem with cannabis and that something got out of hand. Because every time I didn’t had anything I had this intense cravings and I was almost every weekend in Rostock to take something home with me. But I was really short on money because I was a teenager and I wasn’t working.
One time between my first and second consumption of xtc, my mother hurt her back and got some opioids prescribed that she couldn’t take because of the side effects. So I wanted to stop using cannabis in that time because like I said it got out of hand and I had really bad cravings and hoped it would get better over time. So I did n’t went to Rostock that often and after I googled what my mother got prescribed and found out that U could miss use these pills, I started “treating” my cannabis cravings with these pills. But what actually happened was that I at first was really cautious about how many I take out of the box. But like cannabis, I started taking these pills almost daily, sometimes even before school. Around 3 months went on and I had the same problems then the ones I had with cannabis. But I had used all of the pills in that time and the cravings for any anesthesia of my feelings got worse again. So I started smoking weed again. Looking back to these times I am shocked that I always got away with consuming that much and that no one ever really talked with me about it. And when they talked about it it was always “you shouldn’t do this” and never “what is going on inside of you. Is there anything that we can help you with?”
I was so lonely in that time and didn’t had any contact to my feelings. I capsulatet myself from almost all of my peers and my family and no one got up to me into my room and asked “how can I help you, is there anything you need” I would have really needed someone who looked after me at that time.
But it didn’t happen and so I moved on with my stuff. Luckily I didn’t had any chance to get more opioids so these kind of drugs just fell down on my using schedule. But like I said, party drugs where on the rise and I once again visited my friends in Rostock almost every weekend and now we didn’t only smoked cannabis but we also took xtc, amphetamine and magic mushrooms. But mostly MDMA. I knew that people get really bad hangovers from them but back then it was most of the time just one day, that we all spend together smoking cannabis. But with the time we took like 2-4 times a month xtc and for me who always went back to my hometown on Sundays and had a week of loneliness waiting for me, it pretty soon got worse than a one day hangover. I have been depressed before that time but with the depression that comes with MDMA it got even worse. During the week I was just looking for an option to smoke weed and on the weekends I had my best time in Rostock. The weekdays got worse and the weekends got more stressful and flooded by these party drugs. Even though I got around 200€ pocket money per month, I was always running short on money and I even sometimes stole my mother some money. She was right at her burnout peek and didn’t seem to notice anything apart from studying, working and doing stuff around the house for us kids. Now that she is not working anymore and had her own therapy I can see the stress she was under and its no wonder that she didn’t see how I was struggling. But I would have needed something different in that time. I mean we had our talks and she asked me about the things I was doing in Rostock and how I was feeling and why I didn’t meet up with anyone in my hometown. But I knew that she had “bigger problems” how I labelled it for myself and I didn’t wanted to make them even bigger with my stuff.
I have to say that I’m the youngest of me and my siblings and that my father wasn’t around when we grew up because my parents separated when I was really young. And with me being the youngest and allways doing dumb stuff but never arguing with my mother and my sisters on the other side who never did stuff like I did but who were arguing a lot with my mother, I always had the mentality that I will not put my personal problems on top of all that stuff that my mother had to handle. And because of my ADHD I often got signalled that I’m basically too much (because I always made noises, always talked a lot, and never really sat quite).
Now I can say that the drugs always had a function for me to fullfill. For cannabis it was quieting my mind and putting like a shield around me from all the things that I had burried inside me. But because of the cannabis I got really out of touch with myself and I got really shy, I guess the lack of interaction with peers also had their part in it. That’s where the party drugs, especially MDMA got in handy. I used them as a chance to get out of my isolated self and to feel again, but only the “good” things (who actually have not been good at all because they were just produced by the drug itself), at least that’s what I told myself in that time. The biggest effect these drugs had on me, have been that they put all the problems and worries that in had in this time, away from me for just a few moments. But at this time it was all that I had just wanted, I didn’t wanted to feel my actual feelings and at some point after almost 2 years of doing drugs almost daily and not talking about any of my feelings, I forgot how to talk about them and how to be true to myself or anyone else. I had lied so much about how I felt and about my drug use at this time. Like almost anything I said didn’t showed how I was feeling inside. This was one of the lowest I have ever been and it is actually still not easy for me to talk about this time with anyone. At least not so detailed as I am right now.
And I’m really thankful for the possibility to do this absolutely anonymous.
But my story isn’t over yet. At this time I was around 16-17. After that really hard time of doing xtc almost every weekend I only took it really seldom and got back to smoking more cannabis instead. I don’t know how but I managed myself through all these times and through school. I did my a levels were I got to know some people out of my hometown who I hung out with sometimes. Things got a little better but I was still heavily addicted to cannabis. After I graduated from my a levels with quite a not so bad NC I moved to Rostock, because I didn’t knew what to do with myself and I thought at least I’ve got some friends over there.
I moved in with my best friend, the one who I was allways visiting back then and I started working at a bakery shop. Again we went clubbing every weekend, I smoked even more cannabis then at home and we did a lot of amphetamine, mostly on the weekends. But the parties got longer and the afters also. So basically the cycle started again but with amphetamine instead of MDMA. I lived in Rostock for 2 years and in that time I also started consuming cocaine and ketamin. I had a really intensive phase of doing cocaine, especially when corona came it went from on the weekends too 3-5x a week, sitting in someone’s flat and doing drugs. But basically everything I could get into my hands apart from Methamphetamine and Heroin. These two years have been really intense but also the first time after my childhood where I didn’t felt alone and all by myself. I had really good friends and still have them and I experienced a lot of things apart from taking drugs. These two years even though I was consuming way to much, showed my that life can be worth living. But I still struggled really hard with depressions, now I know that the biggest part came from the drug use. One of the biggest gifts that these two years in Rostock gave me has been my girlfriend who am am still together with after a lot of hard times. She luckily quit taking anything shortly after we met each other and be the time we got together she was sober for almost a year. She was the one who, with a lot of patience and talking, showed me that life can be manageable without drugs and that happy moments can be way more rewarding when you are sober.
After these two years i moved to the city where I am currently living in. My struggles with cannabis abuse again have been really bad, I was in a training in which I haven’t been happy and which really put a lot of stress on me and also COVID and the lockdowns didn’t made it easy to feel at home in the new city. I was again smoking a lot and taking something every weekend. When my girlfriend and I had a really hard time because I was cheating on her, cocaine again had a big place in my life. But since around 9 months I really started working on myself, I got to know new people who showed me how to really open up and communicate in a way that connects you with your feelings. I started to open up with my girlfriend from whom I always had many secrets. I got my ADHD diagnosis and I am currently on treatment and this was also something that helped me a lot with getting distance to drugs. Currently I am waiting for my therapy to start and I am visiting a self-help group (similar to NA). I still have struggles and cravings and I still relapse sometimes. But the distances always get bigger and when I smoke something (cannabis is my preference drug and the hardest to stay away from) the amounts and the days that I use it get less and less. And I’m really happy to look back on the last 10 years and that I’m able to say that I am the happiest that I ever was and the most stable than I have ever been in these 10 years. I know that things will not always be easy and they aren’t right now. But I’ve got the feeling that I can close a really big chapter of my life and start being myself and that I am now able to influence the people around me again through my positivity, greatfullness and love that I am finally feeling and that I am enabled to live again.
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Your story in a lot of ways sounds similar to mine only i started later in life.
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Wow what a beautiful share. I read it all! Welcome to an awesome sober community of people from around the world.
I could relate to the lonliness you felt and how drugs were an escape and also a bond with friends.
Its exciting to read youre finding longer and longer periods of sobriety and this 
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