I always prided myself on my ability to handle my drugs. Now that I’m making my first clutches at sobriety, I’m beginning to see that I’d much rather be able to handle me.

On the plane from Albany, New York to Portland, Oregon, I deleted my heroin dealer’s phone number. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that—more like the 15th—and each time I’d felt a strange resistance. I knew that I would miss my heroin dealer that had been oh so accommodating in terms of helping me to ruin myself. I loved people that enabled my irresponsibility. In hindsight, he was my doctor. And I was a happy patient.

I was stupidly optimistic and naive and cocky enough to think I’d be okay once I landed in Portland. All I’d have to do was sweat the toxins out in a few yoga classes like I’d done in the past. Then I’d be new. Like a baby. I was amazing, possibly even talented, because I could maintain a drug problem better than other people. Watch me go! I can go to yoga and do heroin. None of you can even tell. It’s because I’m more functional than you. More stable. I can maintain a drug problem better than you. It would be like nothing had even happened. No track record. No consequences. No nothing.

Because I’d never really had a problem before. I slipped through life doing as I pleased with no major consequences, mental or physical, from my drug use. Unlike other people, I was able to dabble. Now I realize that there had been an issue with semantics; the word actually wasn’t dabble, it was replace. I replaced weed with mushrooms. Mushrooms with acid. Acid with ecstasy. Ecstasy with Adderall. Adderall with Cocaine. Cocaine with speed. Speed with Oxycontin. Oxycontin with morphine. Morphine with heroin. And when drugs weren’t available? Alcohol. Food. Sex. I was a grabber. I was addicted to everything and nothing. I reached for anything that would keep me away from being with myself. I realized something when a drug dealer asked me, “So what do you want?” I went in never knowing what it was I wanted.

“You’re like William Burroughs,” a friend told me when I was in my early twenties. “You can do all these drugs and not get addicted!”

But when I stepped off the plane in Portland, my reality was not matching up with my ego. Jake, the guy I’d been seeing long distance for six months, was there to pick me up. I’d swallowed one Klonopin that morning and taken three Adderall XR throughout the plane ride. And I learned an important lesson: never show up anywhere on Klonopin and Adderall. (I love the part in the movie Silver Linings Playbookwhen Bradley Cooper snorts: “Klonopin! It’s like, what day is it?”) I was wearing a shirt from Banana Republic (wearing something from Banana Republic has always made me feel like maybe I’ll get my shit together rather than wearing something from, say, Rue 21). But clothes can only do so much; Jake later told me he knew it wouldn’t work from the minute I got off the plane since my eyes were red and glossed over. But when I was on drugs, I didn’t care how I looked. That was just a sliver of their charm and drugs charmed the hell out of me. Plus, I was convinced they made me charming. After I swallowed or snorted, I was more fun, more interesting, more attractive. Less edgy. Less human. That night at Jake’s apartment, I poured my multi-vitamin container out on the bed, chock-full of orange and green and white pills. He told me I took a Klonopin before having sex, but I don’t recall it.

I’d told Jake on the phone one night before I arrived that I was coming to Portland to get sober. “You’re coming to Portland to get sober?” he scoffed. Maybe it made no sense to him but it did to me. Portland may have had a bunch of junkies on every street corner, but my drug dealer wasn’t there. I was convinced that it was all about convenience for me. Really, I was going to Portland for a six month yoga teacher training and because I had a community of writers and friends there. Getting sober was just a back-up plan, a distant and glamorized idea, something that wouldn’t be difficult since my problem was more casual than a true drug addict’s.

Shockingly, things with Jake did not work out. I was smack in the middle of a stupor, a spiritual crisis, a quarter life crisis, an identity crisis, an anxiety disorder and he wanted a grounded girlfriend that would watch football and reality cooking shows and drink beer with him. On my second night in town, Jake came home from work and asked me to open a bottle of wine while he showered. I sat on the deck drinking it and he joined me. He quietly told me that he wanted to invite me home with him for Thanksgiving but that he felt apprehensive because ”I know you’ll just bring a bunch of benzos.” It was like a sucker punch. It was only then that I realized perhaps I did have nerves. I thought of how my senior year of high school, when I had to give a speech in class, my friend Anna said, “Chloe’s lucky. She doesn’t get nervous.”

That’s right. I don’t get nervous. I don’t have fear. All you freaks with your orange prescription bottles full of anxiety medications—I feel sorry for you. I was 17.

But if I didn’t have anxiety, why then did I take two or five Klonopin the next day? Why did I constantly hit people up for pills? Why did I take any drug handed to me and always check medicine cabinets for more? Why didn’t my boyfriend feel comfortable taking me to meet his parents? Why did I need to go to my grandmother’s on cocaine or to a bridal shower on heroin? Why did I need to have pills in my pocket like worry stones? Why did I need to have that seventh drink? Why didn’t I want to remember things? Why didn’t I want to be present for my own goddamn life?

Fear. Anxiety. Fear. Anxiety. And so on—ad infinitum.

Whenever I popped a pill of any kind, I’d lose track of how much I was drinking and popping. It always reminded me of a line in Jillian Lauren’s memoir Some Girls: “Now, I am the kind of person that never turns down pills. And if you are the kind of person that never turns down pills, then you must always, always turn down pills.” Drugs motivated me. They got me out the door. I thought this was adventurous of me. I thought, in short, that I was hot shit.

While I packed my suitcases for Portland, I listened to two Aimee Mann songs over and over: “Save Me” and “Long Shot.” I liked singing the words “Save me” and also the chorus in “Long Shot” that begs, “Please love me.” “Save Me” opens with: You look like a perfect fit for a girl in need of a tourniquet.

In Portland, without my drug hook-ups, I was beginning to bug the shit out of myself. Was I a drug addict or a binge-eater or did I have borderline personality disorder? My anxiety was through the roof. I couldn’t get through breakfast without crying. I remember once, while living in a house with roommates, opening the fridge and seeing syringes for their cat’s medicine and also narcotics for the dog and I stood there truly considering using these things. I shut the fridge door reluctantly. This was one of the hundreds of times I realized I needed to get help. Other times: falling asleep alone and drooling midday in the park with homeless people, having a cop drive behind me while I had a deck of heroin in my bra, having people tell me that I looked high in my Facebook photos. So I called a health coach and asked for help. I called The Grotto, a Catholic Shrine and botanical garden that offered free counseling. I called Cascadia, a drug and alcohol behavioral center. I started seeing a therapist and getting drug-tested. At one point, I went to see the movie Smashed with a friend and sobbed through most of it, gasping for air. It was the scene where the main character is hammered and offered crack. I knew that moment too well. My life seemed to be made up of those moments. The moment where you say yes instead of no. It haunted me. The next scene showed Mary Elizabeth Winstead at dawn, speedy, high and babbling on crack to homeless people. I knew that feeling well too—the one where you think you’re so sly and that no one knows you’re on drugs. You feel on top of the world. I see now how obvious it is. In January I published an essay about my heroin use and a minute after posting it on Facebook I got a message from a woman I’d done a reading with, who wrote: “No wonder you were such an insensitive, obnoxious asshole when I met you.” I didn’t have the same memory as her. I’d had a fantastic night, but ruined hers. Read More…