It’s a strange thing, how the very thing that nearly ends you can also be the thing that saves you, if only by accident. Addiction is like treading water in a sea with no shore in sight. At first, the water feels warm, inviting, a place to escape, to forget, to numb the noise.
You don’t notice how far you’ve drifted until your limbs are heavy, and your head barely stays above the surface. That morning, I remember it in slow motion. I was inebriated again, floating in fog, as I had done so many times before, but something about that day was different. I shouldn’t have made it. Logic says I shouldn't be here to write this, but somehow, in the chaos of that toxic ritual, something held me up, like a broken life jacket that still managed to float. I was too high to die. They say grace doesn't always look like light from the sky.
Sometimes it comes in the form of a delay, a wrong turn, a hesitation at just the right moment. Or in this case, being too intoxicated to follow through. I was the drowning lifesaver: the one people thought had it together, the helper, the one who made others laugh, the one who poured from an empty cup, but inside, I was quietly slipping beneath the waves, pretending to swim while swallowing mouthfuls of pain. It’s a terrifying realization that I could’ve vanished without anyone knowing how close it came.
But it’s also a gift, because surviving that day taught me the truth: you don’t have to hit the bottom to rise, but sometimes you do have to see it. To feel it. To know you never want to be that deep again.
Addiction didn’t save me, but the pause it caused, the strange twist of timing, it cracked open the door I would later walk through on my own. I’m still healing, still learning how to swim without sinking, but I’m above water now.
Breathing. Alive, and that, I think, is the beginning of everything.