I'm gonna speak from experience, personal experience and not because I want to talk about me per se, I've never really shared this with anybody. But in the hope that you might take something useful.
In my very early 20s, probably 20, 21, I was going to raves and taking a lot of drugs on a weekend, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. In fact, I thought I was just a weekend drug user, recreational user, until I realised I was using 4 days out of 7.
I decided to quit one day. Now, I always was very kind of digitally oriented, like I was either on or off. So when I decided to quit, I just quit. And that's when the problems started for me because from a feeling of euphoria and thinking everything was great, all of a sudden everything turned to shit. And I went through hell.
I was anxious through the roof, I was fearful, I was seeing the world and people differently. And it scared me. I didn't know what to do. So my mum actually found a local clinic where they had drug counsellors. I went to speak to a counsellor and he asked me what I'd been taking and etc, etc. And then he asked me to explain what was going on for me.
There was a little room, and in the room there was a flip chart, I saw the pen and the flip chart. So I got the pen and I drew a little stick man at the top of the flip chart in like a horizontal position. And then at the bottom of the sheet, I drew a line across the sheet. I turned to the drug worker and I said to him, that's me up here. And this is reality down here. And I need to get to reality because I can't deal with it where I am now, I don't know what to do.
And the gift that seemed like a curse at the time was that that simple explanation I gave to that guy, I realised in that moment that he had no means of helping me get to reality. And I decided there and then that the only person really able to help me was me...
From that moment, I started looking and trying to find out what I could do to stop the spiral in one direction and turn things in another direction. And slowly but surely I started to do things and I started to get clearer and clearer thinking, started to calm down, started to reassess things. And over a period of time, things slowly and surely came good. I also had something there to reflect on that I knew I'd be able to help others in that position.
Also, it is something in terms of experience that I would never ever give up for any amount of money because it taught me so much about life and it helped me so much in terms of trying to find out and discover things that were true about the world.
Up there, where I was in the top corner in my Stickman sketch floating with my feet dangling, nothing to stand on, nothing concrete, was really helpful because it taught me that reality is available regardless how far removed you may feel. It just takes a little bit of hard work and it just takes some simple choices.
Basically, there's a fork in the road and you can choose to do two things. You can continue on your current path, to take the drugs and see where that leads (which you have every right to do) or you can stop and start to do things differently and take a different likley more difficult path.
That's the first crucial opportunity you face to start to take a hold of things for you, and for your own interests, so that you can choose to go in a direction that's different to the one that you've been heading. And although it might seem a mammoth task, the worse it is sometimes, the better opportunity you have to turn things around quickly.
You know, I don't say that lightly.. and I don't say that to make for a feel-good factor or anything like that, because It's not about feelings. Feelings are barometers sometimes that can be way off and we rely on them too much.
The more you start to understand, the more you'll realise that. So I hope that's useful.
