Reconstructing Rick

Hello everyone, my name is Frank and I’m a drug addict.

Rick was kind enough to welcome me into his blog as a individual poster, I have been thinking of writing down a diary of some sort for sometime to help me vent my thoughts and also to look back at the progress i’ve made throughout my recovery. So i’m going to do so for now without any hope of recognition or promises of consistancy. Starting things and giving up on them is the story of my life, simply because i want to help myself today and keep myself aware.

I’ll start with a brief background and using history, I’m 27 years old and I’m from Montreal Canada. When i compare myself to addicts in general i consider myself pretty lucky and pretty pathetic at the same time. Before the age of 20, the idea of drugs was something I considered stupid, I even looked down on people who used them, I was raised in a pretty “Ordinary” and “Stable” family. Though my father was a little bit of an alchoholic and mother was somewhat distant and communication was relatively non-existant throughtout my teenage years with both my parents, I have nothing to be really resentful as to the way I was brought up, no one to blame for my downfall but myself.

Everything wasn’t always smooth, for some reason I always was a trouble maker at school always the center of negative attention, never did homework, always skipping out and in detention but no drugs or anything like that. I was never abused, and i’ve commited very little crime and when i did it was petty. A couple of issues with my parents and self esteem that i could bring up Dr. Phil, like divorce of my parents, trouble fitting in, teen depression, normal stuff that people get over and move on to having “fulfilled lives”. Basically no indicators (Or in my view) that i would become a self destructive, suicidal drug addict.

My first contact with drugs was around the age of 19-20. During that year I fell into a “severe” depression. At the begining of that year I had a decent job as a computer salesmen and was going to school part-time.  Among my favorite activities at the time was the martial arts, i would train 5 times a week and it was really fullfiling, I harbored a childhood dream of becoming “The Stongest fighter in world!!!” I had been working at it for a couple of years and I would go to bed at night dreaming of opening my own school and acheiving my goals by the end of my late 20s. At the same time I was/am a little bit of a nerd, I would spend my leisure time playing video games and watching cartoons. Another one of my dreams was to become a video game programmer and wanting to make my own video game company.

I had plenty of close friends and almost no interest in the things that most people my age were doing ; Clubs, girls, cars, going to parties and getting hammered and laid. Anyways, I look back and try to recap what happaned that year and this is what i remember: Working at the computer store on day, they hired a new worker, a girl lets call her Anna. I remember being incredibly attracted to her from the moment I saw her basically over a short time i became infatuated with her and thought i was in love. All i would talk about with my friends was Anna, the truth was i was really inexperienced with girls at the time, in fact still a virgin. I had little flings with girls as a kid but i never really had a real girlfriend so i didn’t know how to approach her. Anyways looking back she was all over me, but i was too naive to see the signs and little by little she got distant and things started to become ackward. I didin’t have the guts to just ask her out and in the end she ended up going out with another older guy at work, to me this became torture since she was the first REAL crush i’ve ever had. So i intensified my phiscal training to try to appeal to her, and got in incredible shape running through the snow for miles in -40 weather to lose any trace of body fat, putting myself through sick diets. My training was no longer motivated by self-acheivement, everything was revolving around Anna.

Needless to say it had no effect but to wear me out and make me even more vulnerable. During around that same period, one day when we were training at the dojo, we has a sight exercise closing all the lights and training in the dark, the Sensei said our eyes would adapt and eventually everybodies did, except mine, shortly afterwards i was diagnosed with “Retinitis Pigmentosa” a genetic disease that causes the death of light receptors in the retina. In short they told me i was going blind. I didin’t realize it then but something inside me snapped.

In a very short period, I started to change, and I started to slack in my training and over a few weeks all the while being heart-broken and have the feeling of my dreams being crushed, I started to be more”Stupid”. I experienced my first drinking binge, and got involved with Anna’s current boyfriend in a stupid credit card scam which ended up in me getting arrested for the first time. So anyways eventually things got out of hand at work I could’t focus, I ended up getting fired, losing Anna and a whole lot of pride, this was the beginning of the depression, by coincidence I was exposed to marijuana for the “first time”. So me and my two best friends at the time decide to try and see what the fuss was about. Had this been a year earlier i would’ve never done it by fear of compromising my training, This was no longer an obstacle, so anyways we got really baked, one of my two friends badtripped and started running around looking very much like a panicked chicken.

We had a good laugh about it the next day and that was that, but it wasn’t. I found it very different than alcohol, in fact when my friends went home, I lied down in my bed I very much enjoyed the feeling of randoms thoughts and emotions running through my head. Over the next couple of weeks I got around to getting some more, by then I was completely in love with it, I would smoke in my room by myself in a haze and would write down random thoughts, it seemed like I was getting answers, to everything; my life, Anna, the martial arts.

It was by now a common sight to see some idiot practicing karate moves at the park late at night, high off his mind and very much into it. Oh yeah I had also picked up cigarettes, and slowly i was getting addicted. Soon afterwards came the brutal realzation that I was, I could no longer enjoy myself sober, anything I did before I would want to experience whilst stoned, and it worked for a while, when one day a few months later I was sitting by the computer alone as usual a thought entered my head, I can actually remember hearing the voice of my own subconcious saying:” after this high you will never get anything out of this drug, your “enlightenment” will cease and you’ll fall in to dark spiral of nothingness. And so it was, I never wrote down thoughts anymore, all I did was getted baked out of my mind and looking for some kind of media to numd my brain out like video games, Tv, porn, whatever. And just like that before i knew it I was just another stonner.

I’m going to stop it here for today, in fear of clogging this blog with my personnal stuff, I’m aware this site wasn’t intented to write my personal diary, I don’t want to bore anyone with my life story. I intent to try and recap the events that led me where I am now in the next couple of days, so if this isn’t the place or if anyone has a problem with that let me know and I’ll stop.

 Thanks for listening ppl.