There was a point where surviving wasn’t enough anymore. I had learned how to endure. How to stay quiet. How to stay alert. How to grow up faster than I should have. I knew how to live inside fear, responsibility, and silence — but I didn’t know how to rest. The abuse didn’t stop when I got older, it actually got worse, it changed shape.

From the time I was fourteen until the day I went to rehab at twenty-two, the chaos was ongoing. My father worked away for long stretches of time, which meant I was often home alone in my teenage years. No supervision. No guidance. No one checking where I was going, who I was with, or what I was doing. From the outside, it probably looked like freedom. It wasn’t. It was abandonment disguised as independence.

I was a teenager carrying grief I never got to process, fear I never got to release, and a need to be loved that felt urgent and desperate. I wasn’t trying to be reckless — I was trying to be chosen. I was trying to find someone who would see me, protect me, and stay.

So I looked for love everywhere. I let men touch me hoping it would turn into care. I stayed in situations longer than I should have because being wanted felt better than being alone.

I confused attention with safety and intensity with intimacy. And all the while, the abuse and fear were still there — waiting for me when I came home, living in my body even when he wasn’t.

I didn’t wake up one day and decide to become an addict.

Before drugs, there was loneliness.

Before substances, there was self-harm.

Before addiction, there was a girl who didn’t know where to put all the pain she was carrying. Drugs didn’t enter my life as destruction. They entered as relief.

They quieted the noise. They softened the edges. They let my body finally stop bracing — even if only for a moment. And when you’ve lived your entire life on high alert, that kind of relief feels like oxygen.

This is the part people skip too quickly — the years where everything was happening at once. The bullying. The self-harm. The toxic relationships. The escalation that didn’t look dramatic at first, just gradual. The way addiction doesn’t start as a crisis, but as a coping mechanism that slowly takes more than it gives.

I’m not telling this story to justify what came next. I’m telling it because addiction didn’t come from nowhere. It came from years of being alone with pain that never stopped.

From being expected to survive without support. From trying to build a sense of worth in places that were never meant to hold it.

This post is not the addiction story yet. It’s the doorway. It’s the moment where survival needed something else. Where endurance turned into numbing. Where coping stopped being enough.

This is what I did with all that pain — before it did something with me.

To Be Continued..

XOXO, The Healing Wildflower 🌻