I remember starting very slowly and things just sort of continued to escalate because I enjoyed it so much. Long ago my friends and I spent a weekend checking out colleges in a neighboring city and went to see a movie during a free afternoon, we saw Trainspotting (this was 1996), and that movie makes heroin seem like a funny sort of thing for a while, but also shows some terrible things too, but anyway I thought it was interesting. So my friends and I were always smoking pot but next year was my senior year of high school and I remember one day after school this one guy we were getting blazed with just sort of casually asked if any of us wanted to buy some heroin. I immediately said yes, basically just wanted to try it. See what it was like. I was a big fan of grunge music during high school and totally idolized Nirvana and Alice in Chains and after reading about heroin I just sort of decided that I wanted to get into it or whatever.

After graduating high school my friends all went to college and left town. I continued working in a restaurant but just changed to full-time work and made other friends. I knew I didn't want to start college right away, I wanted to keep partying and be young and cool or whatever, I wasn't ready to start college. I continued smoking pot and continued meeting various people who would offer to sell me all sorts of hard drugs. I remember injecting heroin for the first time after snorting it for so long. It was a game-changer, it was so much more intense.

I kept doing it as much as possible eventually getting toward having a several-times-per-day habit for a couple of years and somewhat unsuccessfully trying to keep it secret and probably scared the shit out of my parents until eventually one morning my mother sort of not-surprisingly died of a heart attack because she was extremely overweight and constant anxiety or whatever, and it was pretty crazy, and that changed a lot of things. Months later I was hanging out with some friends getting blazed in my dad's basement, had started dating a girl and eventually (maybe a couple of weeks into the dating relationship) then there was one evening that I remember injecting heroin for pretty much the last time. My best friend came over to buy some pot and watched me inject it and he told me that I really needed to stop, that nobody would ever really stay in love with me if I kept doing what I was doing, that the girl would break up with me if she found out, that my life would continue to spiral toward hitting rock bottom and the more I thought about it the more I realized he was right. I decided to try to be normal and try to get my life back on track, I quit cold-turkey and spent a month not using anything besides pot, going out hiking every day. And I definitely experienced some symptoms of what could be called withdrawal, getting the shakes and stuff.

Ever since then, it might be every once in a while somebody might offer me some coke or some meth or some xanax or whatever, and I've used things here and there, but never really let anything develop into a daily habit anymore. Except now that I'm halfway through my thirties and have sort of lost touch with many of those old acquaintances and I just spend lots of time alone and kind of watch movies in my apartment, and at this point I think I am an alcoholic now. So this is another hurdle to jump over, and when I eventually have another "moment of clarity" like that evening many years ago with my friend telling me that I need to get it under control, then maybe I will eventually be able to quit drinking too.

I guess I just have a very deep-seated desire to have some vices in my life, and alcohol seems like a somewhat socially-acceptable thing. Although pot is definitely making some strides toward being more of a normal sort of thing. I'm not really in a good sort of stable career right now, someday I might need to go looking for a different job and I would need to be able to pass a piss-test. So yeah, that's my story in a nutshell. Quitting any type of addiction is difficult, seems like first you have to make the decision to change/quit and then remove/distance yourself from people and situations that supported your habit/problem. And that's pretty much the opposite of what you do when you get involved with those drugs in the first place, at first you sort of seek it out and keep meeting others who will advance you further into having habits like that. Cutting those ties and dissolving those connections is definitely a big part of quitting.