The Therapeutic Walk

Written By The Real Me

The Therapeutic Walk
Can addiction be treated successfully? Yes, addiction is a treatable disorder… but recovery is a lifelong process and many times the addict still needs all the support they could possibly get. Intoxication is the new trend amongst us youth. Is it the new cool thing or is the devil at work? I mean all it takes is “want to try some? C’mon don’t be a baby”, for you to turn into a junkie. Initiation, you’ve completed level 1 press enter to continue.

So how did I get here? Here I am taking a therapeutic walk which started off as more like a walk from hell. It feels like I have been walking forever….wait – what’s today’s date and how old am I? Drugs! What have you done to me? I have scaled down from a size 36 to a size 30. I lie awake like an owl at night. Sleepless days and nights have become my new craze and all I can think about is my next hit. Voices – that aren’t mine – keep talking in my head and suddenly I hear footsteps… wait am I going crazy? What have I gotten myself into? Take a walk with me.

People don’t become addicts because they get up one day and say, “Well, it’s Tuesday, I think I’ll go out and destroy my life.” Let me take you back a bit. TGIF. One Friday night, the energy in the city is electrifying: the streets are full, people are parading cars and blasting loud music. After a long week – its time to spend a few dollars. Is this a tradition or a passing trend as well? Who cares! I join the scheme. Beautiful melanin skin so smooth you would think she baths with milk and honey. I stare in the mirror and adore myself in my skimpy dress, natural glow, white sneakers; I have everything, ready for the night. We get to the club and its drinks and all fun until that hour arrives. The first time I smoked crack, I thought I was going to die when I remembered all that stuff I watched in the movies. It was an insane 5 mins.

Drugs deliver something at first, but the joy is short lived. You take a hit, and you’re high then a few minutes later you’re back to normal. So now you take another to get you back to the same spot, and that curve becomes shorter and shorter, and soon you find yourself putting copious amounts of effort to get to that spot again. I thought I could control crack “Gee, I can get high, and then I can get up and go to school the next day like nothing happened.”

Is crack addictive? Yes! Crack can be very addictive, even with short-term use. The first few months were exciting with money flowing around the streets. It was paradise for a while, and then it became very ugly: part of that ugliness is

1. Knowing you can be arrested,
2. Desperation to get more and you would do anything I mean anything to get the next hit, and part of that ugliness is
3. When you start taking stuff of your house and selling it.

So one would wonder what happens when you take crack. After using crack, people come down or “crash.” The crash makes the world seem grey and sad. People feel grouchy, edgy and exhausted. They sleep for a long time and wake up very hungry because once you take in the first hit you cannot eat and can go as long as 48 hours without food, hence the weight loss. Using crack changes the brain and consequently, behavior.

The only way to get clean is to chase rehabilitation as diligently as you’ve been chasing crack, junkies can relate. To me, a drug is a drug, no matter what I started off with whether it was marijuana or alcohol, I just went with it. Drug abuse can be likened to playing a video game: you move from level to level until you reach a point of no return because you’re so engrossed in it. Taking drugs is like opening a can of worms or better yet, Pandora’s box. I started smoking crack because of peer pressure, I had a fear of missing out. Eventually it became my new pastime and as a result I lost everything. At the age of 22 I was a university dropout, I had no interest in dating, and no vision for my life…I was just looking to score my next hit.  My mother’s words to me when she found out were “I am now waiting for the day you come back home in a body bag” those words echoed in my heart and caused so much agony as I realized that I had disappointed her.

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