In the choaotic confusion and haze of pain I was reeling from, I wasn't thinking rationally anymore. After going from being a very successful 21 year old musician with unlimited possibilities, and a very high approval rating from almost everyone I knew...to a 21 year old musician who was considered a possible multiple personality psychotic killer, suspected of having committed two murders, including matricide, and who couldn't even keep a local band together anymore...and who many people were now afraid of...I guess that is just the only explanation I can come up with to explain my choices. I went from a person with a very healthy fear and respect for the destructive power of heroin...to a person who fifteen minutes after making a very poor choice, and deciding to try it...became totally blind to that danger, and was willing to be seduced by it, and embrace it like a best friend. I know that I have the disease of addiction...and addicts do not have "stop" buttons, like most people. One is too many, and a thousand is never enough for us. But with everything that was happening in my life, combined with that condition, I really didn't have a chance. Add the granddaddy of all narcotics to that already stacked deck...which just further distorted my thinking...and all I saw it as...was blessed relief. What I didn't see was the truth. For the next 25 years, many of my decisions were poor, and were made by the drugs, and my diseased perceptions. I did have some exceptions to that rule...moments of temporary sanity and clarity, and some very good things came into my life as a result of those exceptions, but ultimately, even those things were destroyed by the consequenses that resulted from my disease of addiction, and my inability to stop using drugs...as I tried to get relief from the pain. Pain seemed like the only constant in my life. I had been in so much pain for so much longer than I had ever imagined possible...from events I didn't think I could ever fix...that I just didn't think I could really treat the causes, and so I treated the unending pain instead, medicating myself in whatever way was necessary to feel OK. The causes of that pain... the unaddressed grief, the frustration, the guilt and the worsening self-doubt, and the rage that they fueled in me... just grew. And I was about to make another incredibly bad choice, and do something I had sworn I'd never do, and once I did, my descent into Hell was complete.
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