Drugs, alcohol, and young adulthood

Pushing past my shame and stigma to talk candidly with you guys

Hi all! This post was requested by a lovely paid sub Aïcha, and I so desperately want this post to be on public because I think it’s so important, but I do talk about me doing drugs in it so I literally can’t put it on public. I’m so sorry!!! Aïcha asked if I could talk about addiction and navigating drugs and alcohol in young adulthood.

I have done a lot of research and reading on alcoholism, the opioid crisis, synthetic drugs, etc. and could approach this question empirically, but I think that would be doing it a disservice. Addiction is a public health crisis, and the people who need to hear someone talking about it the most don’t need to hear stiff statistics or detached reports. They need to hear that they are not alone, they need to see people they look up to sharing that they struggle with the same thing. So I will spend this post talking about my personal experience. This is pretty much the only topic in the entire world that I have some difficulty talking about (Aïcha don’t feel bad at all, I’m so glad you asked - I love sharing, I am an open book and I’m really just grateful that someone gave me the opportunity to talk about this), because I have so much shame about it. But I know that the simple act of sharing has the transformative power to palliate some else’s shame, and I am eager to have a platform with which to do so.