false self destruction

One aspect of the stupidity of drug use I got a grip on in my drug-free years, that hasn’t proved to be thin air, is false self destruction. This criticism can be leveed against people who use drugs to escape or to heal. I can only effectively cite my own experiences, so I will.

I had 2 girlfriends before I had a drop of alcohol. They left me. Both times, it took me a while to get over it, but I had no sensation whatsoever of being “damaged”. I felt confused, and some longing, but I was not “hurt”. The bad feelings simply appeared less and less.

1 girlfriend left me since I started drinking. I crawled inside of a bottle. The initial reasoning is simple enough: “I want to feel better”. But what many people who do this don’t realize is that they actually want to feel worse. “She left me, and I feel bad, so now I need to use this drug”. It adds a reality to it. That is what I call false self destruction.

Because I had no “chemical escape plan” for my previous heartbreaks, I was left with my unaltered brain and circumstance. My ultimate conclusion was that when I examined everything carefully, I was not really that unhappy. With booze by my side, I could have a physical manifestation of my “pain”. Because I had that, the conclusion was that I was indeed unhappy, and that I had to use a drug to not be.

Here is where the falsity presents itself. If I hadn’t used alcohol, I wouldn’t continue to carry grief with me forever. A black-out night of drinking simply gave me an event I could point to and say “see!, I was in a deep, dark hole!”. But I never was. And if you’ve had a similar experience, neither were you. You just wanted the event to mean something, and it didn’t.