By Wesley Lodder, Author, Learning to Stay: From Instability to Responsibility
My experience with drugs didn’t begin when I was an adult.
It started when I was still a preteen.
At that age, I couldn’t possibly understand where the choices I was making would eventually take me. Drugs became part of my life, and so did the people and places that came with them.
I spent more and more time around the wrong crowd. I hung around bars when I had no business being there. Stability disappeared.
Eventually, I was living on the streets.
There is nothing romantic about homelessness. There is nothing freeing about not knowing where you are going to sleep or who you can trust.
Your world becomes very small.
You stop thinking about what your life might look like five or ten years from now. Sometimes you are simply trying to get through that night.
And when most of the people around you are living the same kind of life, things that should frighten you can slowly begin to feel normal.
Drugs felt normal.
The streets felt normal.
Trouble felt normal.
Even jail eventually became part of that world.
I went from youth detention to adult jail.
I still remember my first transfer to Maplehurst Detention Centre.
It was the dead of winter, and I was transported there in a prisoner transfer truck.
I was freezing cold.
But more than anything, I was scared.
I had already been around drugs, the streets, bars and trouble for years, but this was different.
This wasn’t kids’ jail anymore.
I was being taken into an adult detention centre, and I had absolutely no idea what I was walking into.
Sitting in that transfer truck, cold and frightened, I wasn’t thinking about recovery or what I wanted my life to become.
I was thinking about what was waiting for me when those doors opened.
Some of that fear was justified.
I remember being jumped in a washroom simply because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There wasn’t some profound lesson in that moment that suddenly changed my life.
I was scared.
I was a young man whose choices had taken him somewhere he never imagined himself being, and I didn’t know how my story was going to end.
Looking back now, that is important for me to admit.
It’s easy to tell my story today knowing how it eventually turned out.
The young man sitting in that prisoner transfer truck didn’t know any of that.
He couldn’t see the husband he would become.
He couldn’t see the father he would become.
He couldn’t see himself caring for his wife through cancer.
He couldn’t see himself becoming responsible for another human being.
He certainly couldn’t see himself writing a book about any of it.
All he could see was the inside of that truck, the winter cold and whatever was waiting on the other side of those doors.
That’s one reason I’m careful about deciding who somebody is based only on the worst period of their life.
My journey with drugs continued until I was 20.
And recovery wasn’t a movie ending.
I didn’t suddenly become the person I am today.
Stopping drugs was one part of recovery.
Learning how to live without that world was another.
I had spent important years of my life learning how to survive.
Now I had to learn how to live.
I had to change the people I surrounded myself with.
I had to leave behind a world that had become familiar, even though it was destroying me.
I had to stop living as though tomorrow didn’t matter.
I had to learn responsibility.
I had to rebuild.
And perhaps most importantly, I had to discover who I was when drugs, the streets, bars and trouble were no longer deciding that for me.
That took time.
Recovery wasn’t just about what I stopped doing.
It was about who I eventually became.
That’s something I understand differently now when I think about families dealing with addiction.
When you are the person using drugs, it can be difficult to understand what your family is experiencing.
You see your own problems.
Your own pain.
Your own immediate need to get through another day.
What you don’t always see are the people standing around you.
The parents who can’t sleep.
The family members wondering where you are.
The people who want desperately to help but don’t know whether helping means stepping in, stepping back, setting another boundary or answering the phone one more time.
Looking back, I understand something I couldn’t fully understand then.
My addiction didn’t happen only to me.
The people who loved me were living through it too.
When you watch somebody you love use drugs, get arrested, disappear, come home, make promises and then make another terrible decision, eventually you may start wondering:
Is this simply who they’ve become?
The people who knew me back then would have had every reason to ask the same question.
But my story didn’t end at 20.
Years later, I became a husband.
I became a father.
My wife, Emily, was diagnosed with cancer, and I became her caregiver.
When Emily died at 38, I became a widowed father responsible for raising our son without her.
A few years later, our son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.
There were appointments, insulin, food calculations and alarms in the middle of the night.
Another human being depended on me.
Sometimes I think about the distance between those two versions of myself.
The scared young man sitting in that prisoner transfer truck, freezing cold and wondering what was going to happen when the doors opened.
And the father getting out of bed in the middle of the night because his son needs him.
They’re the same person.
There are decades between them, but they’re the same person.
That doesn’t erase my past.
If anything, my past is part of why responsibility means so much to me today.
Recovery gave me more than the opportunity to stop doing something destructive.
It gave me the opportunity to become someone different.
That is part of why I wrote Learning to Stay: From Instability to Responsibility.
It isn’t a book about someone who figured everything out.
I haven’t.
And I’m not an expert telling other people how their recovery should look.
It is one person’s lived experience of what happened when someone who spent years running eventually learned to stay.
Stay accountable.
Stay when life became uncomfortable.
Stay when people needed me.
Stay when responsibility felt heavier than I thought I could carry.
And keep showing up.
There may be something in that story for families affected by addiction too.
When someone you love is struggling, you are seeing them at a particular moment in their life.
It may be a terrible moment.
They may be making decisions you don’t understand.
They may have disappointed you repeatedly.
You may need boundaries. You may need support yourself. Loving someone does not mean protecting them from every consequence of their choices.
And I would never tell another family that recovery is guaranteed.
It isn’t.
But I can tell you what happened to me.
When I was living on the streets, I couldn’t see the husband I would become.
When I was using drugs, I couldn’t see the father I would become.
When I was sitting in jail scared of what might happen next, I couldn’t see a future where other people would depend on me.
I could barely see past the life immediately in front of me.
But that life wasn’t the end of my story.
A terrible chapter doesn’t necessarily tell you how the story ends.
Sometimes there are many pages left to be written.
I know there were for me.
