I got addicted to drugs because I wanted to be cool. The cool kids in high school, the ones who listened to Dead Kennedys and Current Joys and wore their pants cuffed and talked about communism all smoked cigarettes. So I started to smoke cigarettes. I still remember the smugness on my face and sense of superiority as I walked into class smelling like Camel Blues.  

Drinking and smoking weed quickly followed suit. You’re only young once and once you’ve opened one door you might as well open all the other ones, the windows too! At least, that’s what I thought at 15. I was allowed to do drugs. I understood “culture” in a more advanced way. I took classes dedicated to books and writing poems. All great writers smoke cigarettes and drink water bottles of Svedka in their chemistry class. 

I was just, “ahead of the curve.” But weed and cigarettes and alcohol soon wasn’t enough. I moved to pills and nitrous gas and little white crystals on a microwaved plate. I traded my friendships for people older than me, people who gave me easier access to not only drugs, but attention. It was easy to make these friends, less so friends and more so people I just got high with. 

They were upperclassmen, who went to New York and had fake IDs and older sisters who “knew a guy.” Eventually, I knew the older sisters, and the guy they knew as well. 

I was too young and too naive and too overconfident to realize I was destroying my life. Drifting further and further from who I felt I was and what I wanted to do and more into a person that was less concerned with my art and my being and the stories I wanted to tell, and more concerned with the people around me and the timing between adderall dosages to get the maximum effect.

I wasn’t  a “drug addict,” I was a party girl. I didn’t sit on the street dozed out of my mind. I never used a needle. I just smoked a little weed and needed a pill to get through the day. It can’t be bad for you if it’s prescribed! I wore Fenty Beauty eyeliner and covered the stench of vodka with Killian Love Don’t Be Shy. I went to a school that was ranked number one in the country. Who cares if I was in the bathroom crushing up Focalin on my geography binder?

My grades were good, my outfits were cute, I had a revolving door of people who wanted to be around me. I was able to shed the preconceived notions of what it meant to be black and queer in the South, and don the costume of the party girl who got along with all groups of people and could get you high if you asked me nicely.  It didn’t matter that I was black or queer when everyone I hung out with was high out of their minds. 

I wish I could say I wanted to get sober sooner. After my friend overdosed, or after my other friend and I both went to rehab together on New Year’s Eve.  I wish I could say I had some major epiphany. But it never came. I just remember, shortly after entering my 20s, I discovered that I had wasted so much time. So much time being high. So much time being separated from the world around me. I had big dreams and plans about my life. I had fantasies about being a writer. About the stories I wrote being read in classrooms. About traveling and speaking and living in a way that only makes sense to ourselves. And all those dreams and ideas were crushed by no one except myself. I realized everything I wrote was tied to something superficial, and fueled by stimulants.

Vacuous and long winded pieces I thought were baring my soul and telling “the truth of being” were nothing more than the ravings of a lunatic. I was a loser. What made it worse was I had convinced myself that what I wrote was better because I was on drugs. That I was somehow more authentic in my words cause I had smoked a joint before. When I began the path of being sober, I realized I had separated myself from authenticity altogether. I was allowing drugs to fuel my art. I was stuck in the idea that I needed drugs to connect with people. I convinced myself that I needed drugs to be able to write, a lie I told myself to be comfortable and to continue to use. I visited a friend, an actual one.  A scrawny white boy with “Stay Gold” tattooed on his back. 

We had spent the day talking about the things we did in drug use. We laughed as he explained him crashing a moped high off fentanyl. We talked about our delusions of grandeur. We talked about how we don’t mind people doing drugs or drinking around us, because we both had the understanding that if we didn’t want to stop doing them, we wouldn’t go sober in the first place. 

It takes tremendous strength to begin the process of being sober, but it takes just as much strength to find and surround yourselves with people who respect your sobriety, and who actually cares for you. There is a stigma within the queer community. A stigma that drug use is rampant and drug addiction is as well, and I agree. While it may be true, there are also people in the community who actively look out and understand what you’re going through. There is a code, at least in my circles, that drug use is not pushed onto others, that everyone is sober until otherwise told, that drug use will not be met with judgment but with neutrality. In a world that already makes it difficult for sober people to stay sober, this is an attitude worth adopting.