The Years I Lost

There’s a part of my story I used to leave out. Not because it wasn’t true, but because it’s the one people judge the hardest. So I’ll just say it plainly: I was an addict. Heroin, speed, ice, pills — whatever was going, at various times, I was in it. And I lost years to it that I’m never getting back.

I’m not telling you this for shock value, and I’m definitely not romanticising it. There’s nothing romantic about it. I’m telling you because the silence around this stuff is part of what keeps people stuck in it, and I’ve decided I’d rather be honest than respectable.

Where mine actually started

People imagine addiction as a choice someone makes one reckless night. Mine started in a hospital bed.

After the accident I spent six months in hospital, and for most of it I was given pethidine and morphine more or less without question — day after day, for half a year, my body learning to expect the opioids. Then, when the infection made me more trouble than I was worth, I was discharged. No taper, no follow-up, nothing for the dependency they’d quietly built. Just out the door, and good luck.

So I went looking for that feeling somewhere else. That’s the part people miss about a lot of addiction: it doesn’t always begin in an alley. Sometimes it begins in a system that hands you the hook and then walks away the moment you’re on it. I chased that high for years — off the heroin and onto party drugs, with cannabis running through all of it — not because I was weak, but because something real had been started in me and then abandoned.

The trap is that it works, at first. That’s the cruel part. If it didn’t work at all, nobody would ever get caught. It delivers exactly what it promises, just long enough to take everything in return.

What it costs

I won’t catalogue the wreckage. If you’ve been near it, you already know: the relationships worn thin, the trust spent, the version of yourself you catch in the mirror and don’t recognise. The worst cost isn’t even the dramatic stuff. It’s the ordinary time — the years that just quietly disappear while life carries on for everyone else.

For a long while I believed the lie that I was only hurting myself. You’re never only hurting yourself. That’s one of the first honest things you have to face on the way out.

Getting out

Getting clean is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Harder than the surgeries. Harder than the chronic pain I still live with. And it didn’t happen the way the films show it — one rock-bottom night, one decision, credits roll.

It was a thousand ordinary decisions. It was help I had to swallow my pride to accept. It was relapsing and starting again, more than once, and learning that starting again isn’t failure — it’s just the shape of the thing. The people who make it out are rarely the ones who never fell back. They’re the ones who kept getting back up after they did.

The line that finally held for me was my kids. I gave up the heavy drugs at thirty, when I became a father, because for the first time there was something that mattered more than the high — someone who needed me to be a person, not a passenger. That didn’t make it easy. It just made it worth it.

Why I’m telling you

If you’re reading this and none of it is your world — good. Maybe it helps you be a fraction gentler with someone whose world it is. The bloke you’re quick to write off was somebody’s kid, and is still a whole person under the worst chapter of his life.

And if you’re reading this and you are in it: I’m not going to lecture you, because I’d have hated that. I’ll just tell you the one true thing I wish I’d believed sooner. It isn’t weakness, and you are not beyond reach. The shame that’s telling you to keep it secret is the addiction protecting itself. Reaching out — to a mate, a service, a stranger on a hotline — is the strong move, not the weak one.

I lost years. I’m not getting them back. But I’m here, clear-eyed, writing this — and if that’s possible for me, it’s possible for more people than the shame would have us believe.