Prelude
it all began at some point between the ages of 5 and 7. i was falsely diagnosed with ADHD (evidence and more info later) and fed stimulant medications for years, causing me to become dependent on them (although this wasn't an issue since i always had my prescriptions). everything was fine for another like 6 years until the age of 13 when i became anorexic and compulsively researched weight loss methods for hours on end. this is when i realized that stimulant medications made me lose weight, so i began abusing them for that purpose. i'm not exactly sure how this turned into recreational use but by the age of 14 or 15 i was abusing them recreationally. i talked the psychiatrists up to adderall and immediately fell in love with the effects it produced when insufflated.
Amphetamania
my adderall abuse probably lasted 2-3 years before my prescription was taken away (more on that later). this is the last point in time where i was relatively functional or normal. i pretty much spent all of high school on the edge of failing or dropping out. after a while, as teenagers naturally do, i began experimenting with other substances (weed and dxm). this was relatively harmless, all things considered. even if they were a better option i always preferred adderall, because it made school so much better. it's ironic how the drug college students use to write papers made me less productive, usually just making me spend more time on my hobbies and whatnot. about a year in it started to alienate me from all of my friends and i began to spend more and more time alone with my thoughts. this quite obviously had a detrimental effect on my mental health, as i began experiencing mild psychotic symptoms and became generally an erratic and unpleasant person to be around.
Hit The Fan
3 years of amphetamine abuse came to an end during a rather bizzare confrontation after i was caught smoking weed in the bathroom at school with my friend. she told the school basically everything because she was worried about me and wanted me to seek help for my growing addiction. my memory of this part is a bit spotty but they took my prescription away and shipped me off to a mental hospital for 6 days over some threats i made. the withdrawal was terrible and made a million times worse by the fact that i was cut off of it cold turkey and forced to withdraw and have panic attacks in front of people. after being released from the hospital i became a recluse, nearly dropping out and cutting off everyone i knew. even when i came back for my senior year after moving house i still never made any friends. during this period from mid 2024 to late 2025 i mostly subsided off of weed and occasionally dxm, except for one fateful day.
The Nightmare Begins
june 27, 2025 was the night i tried oxycodone for the first time. i was only ever able to do it once because of the circumstances of me obtaining it, but i was completely in love. i didn't get to try any opioid again for quite a long time after this, but the memory of that night remained burnt into the back of my head for probably the rest of my life. i went back to the usual routine for another several months before i finally got a taste of my old favorite shortly after landing a job as a cashier. i ended up meeting someone at the train station who got me a few capsules of adderall. i ended up burning thru it all in like 2 days and was left crashing with nothing to mitigate it and felt absolutely horrible.
No Return
upon losing access to adderall after my dealer conveniently had his script taken away, i made the second worst decision of my entire life; i stopped having a preference. and because of that, i made the worst decision of my life; i took to the streets and started looking for whatever i could get my hands on. in this city, the main 3 drugs you can easily get off the streets are crack, meth, and fentanyl. there's a reason it has such a bad reputation for that sort of thing. eventually i found someone who got me my first bag of what was advertised as white heroin but was pretty obviously fentanyl. it was extremely low-grade and cut with god knows what but there was just barely enough of some kind of opiate to where i immediately fell in love. despite the immense shame and self-hatred for what i was doing, the minute that ran out, i wanted more. and more i was easily able to get my hands on. i knew i was hooked but i genuinely couldn't care less.
An Old Favorite
all wasn't well with my drug of choice, though. i still deeply missed stimulants and by this point i felt so defeated that i didn't really think twice after buying meth for the first time. as im sure you can tell, my addictive personality absolutely loved it. i began both using fentanyl and meth separately and speedballing them for about a month. by this point in my addiction, i was almost constantly on something at home or at work and people seemed to notice something was seriously wrong with me. nobody ever said anything, but it was obvious i was going down a very dark path. my performance at work wasn't nessecarily hindered much, since the meth made me extremely efficient and good at my job. the few times i wasn't on it, though, i would be a complete wreck nodding off at the register and generally making everyone around me uncomfortable.
The Night of Shame
on the night of december 28, 2025, my parents found me strung out in my room in a general state of disarray, and immediately after i knew there was no getting out of it i felt nothing but a shameful rage directed at myself. i didn't even try to make up some bullshit excuse as to why i was slurring my words and nodding off. i just stared at them with a defeated yet angry expression on my face and showed them my foils and crystal. i knew i needed help, i wasn't oblivious to my addiction. i didn't want the help or feel like i deserved it, but i also felt too guilty to reject it. i knew what i was doing was wrong, i never tried to deny it. that night i called a couple places looking for detox and fell asleep on my couch a broken shell of the woman i was just 2 months prior.
End Of The End
the morning after i went to the hospital for detox but the hospital i went to didn't have their own detox so i was to be transferred to a dedicated detox clinic. they forced me to wait alone in a hospital room for 6 hours with nothing but a tv with nothing of note to watch besides reruns of ancient aliens. it felt like i was sitting there for days and by the time i was in the ambulance to be transported to detox i just wanted the ambulance to swerve off of an overpass and plummet to my death. once i arrived i was subjected to an extremely humiliating strip-search and UA-tested. this test somehow came back negative for literally everything which wasn't medically possible but im also not a doctor so i hav eno idea how it happened. at this point i had been through so much trouble that i really didn't even want to go through with detox, i just wanted to jump in front of a bus. since the place was an at-will facility i was told that i had the chance to just go home, it honestly seemed like they didnt even believe i was really doing any drugs. i ended up calling my parents which broke out into an argument, leading me to angrily storm out of the clinic into the frigid night.
Ten-Forty-Two
apparently after i ran from detox, they called the police on me to track me down and perform a welfare check. unbeknownst to this, i kinda just roamed around for a bit before finding a gym to charge my phone and get out of the freezing cold. the only employee of the gym seemed to be sympathetic when i explained what was going on, as he let me stay and even offered me water. meanwhile, the police department was combing the nearby area to try and find me. Eventually they made it to the gym and knocked on the door. the gym employee pointed to the door and told me, "i think someone is looking for you". i turn around to see an officer knocking on the door, and my face went white. it triggered my fight or flight response, and i chose flight. i took off running through the back door into the alley behind the gym. there was a massive snowbank in front of me that i had no chance of crossing, so i could only go left or right. i turned left but was stopped in my tracks by 2 police cars. by this point i didn't really even know what was going on, all i knew was that i needed to run. i turned to the right and began running only for another 2 cars to approach, completely surrounding me. my only real option was to surrender myself, so i threw my hands in the air and they slowly approached me. they told me they just wanted to see if i was alright to which i said "i'm not going back to the hospital, if you're going that route you'll need that taser of yours", prompting the officers to grab my arms and handcuff me. they called an ambulance, threw me in the back of it, and shipped me off to a nearby hospital.
Involuntary
it was at said hospital that i found out i was being transferred to a mental hospital several miles away to be placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold. the psych ward wasn't actually as bad as the 2 previous times i had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. they actually treated me like a human being for once, and the food was honestly better than what i was eating at home (mostly instant noodles and fast food). that being said, it didn't really do much to take away from the fact that i was being held against my will. after 5 days of desperately trying to prove to the hospital that i wasn't a threat to myself, i was released back to my family.
Present Day, Present Time
as of writing this, all of this happened just a few days ago, and i've only been out of the hospital for a couple days. i have an appointment with a rehab clinic in 2 days and hopefully i can stay off of fentanyl at the bare minimum, hopefully meth too. i have no idea what the future holds for me, but what i do know is that it's not going to be easy.