After my first love, I had bounced from boy to boy over the next year or so. Then, I entered my first serious relationship. Addiction was already part of my life. I didn’t know to call it that yet. I didn’t see it as dangerous. I saw it as how I survived. I had already learned how to quiet my mind. I had already learned how to disappear just enough to work. I had already learned that relief mattered more than clarity. So when I met him, the chaos didn’t feel new. It felt familiar.

That relationship began in ninth grade and lasted through eleventh grade. Those years should have been about discovering who I was.

Instead, they became years where everything blurred together: attachment, fear, substances, relief, and instability. Not to mention all the addictions being piled on top of each other.

The relationship started like out like any normal 14 year old girl would dream of. He’d come spend time with me while I babysat for people. He brought me gifts before we became official and even after. In a way, he love bombed me. After about a year it all changed. It was intense. Consuming. Emotionally volatile in ways I didn’t yet have language for.

Love didn’t feel steady — it felt urgent. Important. Heavy. Needed. And because it mirrored what I already knew, I stayed. Not because I didn’t see the red flags — but because my nervous system didn’t register them as danger. It registered them as normal.

At some point early on, he convinced me to stop using the Xan-bars. At the time, it felt like care. Like concern. Like someone finally looking out for me. What I couldn’t see yet was that this wasn’t an ending — it was a redirection.

He introduced me to something else instead, Loratabs. Something that felt more controlled. More contained. Something we framed as safer because it didn’t look like what I had been doing before. We used together on weekends. In that context, it felt almost structured. It seemed like part of the relationship rather than a problem. A way we were connecting.

That framing mattered. Because when something is shared, it feels less dangerous. When it’s relational, it feels justified. When it’s normalized, it stops feeling like a warning sign.

At first, it stayed contained to the weekends — the time we spent together. But as I got older, around 16, and started working, the lines shifted. Relief no longer belonged only to shared moments. It followed me into the week. Into school days. Into hours where I was alone with my thoughts again. What had once been situational became available.

And when relief becomes available, it becomes tempting to rely on it. I didn’t see myself escalating. I saw myself adapting. I saw myself experiencing a form of relief I hadn’t yet had.

I was still trying to manage the same things — fear, shame, grief, emotional volatility. Only now, the substances were stronger, the patterns were deeper, and the consequences were easier to blur. And then something happened that changed my body forever.

During my sophomore year, I became pregnant — and I lost that pregnancy. I won’t unpack that here. It deserves its own space.

Its own truth. Its own breath. But it needs to be named. Because that loss happened inside this relationship. Inside addiction (I speed using cold turkey when I found out). Inside secrecy. And it added a kind of grief that didn’t just live in my heart — it lived in my body.

After that, everything intensified. The attachment. The numbing. The urgency to escape. I didn’t feel like I was spiraling. I felt like I was surviving.

That relationship trained me to believe:

love is intense, not steady; closeness requires endurance, and relief matters more than clarity. When the relationship finally ended, it didn’t feel like freedom.

It felt like withdrawal. Not just from him — but from the structure that had held my addiction in place. The substances didn’t disappear when the relationship did. They simply lost their container. And without that container, everything accelerated.

Looking back now, I don’t feel hatred toward that version of myself. I feel compassion.

I see a teenager repeating patterns she never chose. I see someone whose addiction didn’t begin in this relationship. Her addiction deepened because chaos had already been normalized long before she ever loved him.

CLOSING PRAYER

God,

I bring You the seasons where harm wore the disguise of care. Where redirection felt like protection. Where love and numbing became tangled together. Untangle what I learned from what I deserve. Heal the places where chaos felt familiar. And prepare my heart to tell the rest of this story with truth and courage.

Amen.

XOXO, The Healing Wildflower