We’d like to share this piece of writing about an existential experience of somebody who was in treatment with us several years ago and is now over two years clean. They have written about their experiences and time whilst in Broadway Lodge. This particular piece below reflects her thoughts during the detoxification process.
These lonely nights remind me of detox, when at 3am I had a broken soul and time to kill until medication hour; healing in agonising fragments; so many empty and harrowing hours without sleep. It was just me and rock music, a solitary book I retaught my focus on and vacuous night. It only hit me that I was “incarcerated” when I emptied my pockets that afternoon and handed over my weed skins. The door banged shut, and the madness which I only perpetuated with drugs descended upon me. The stolen puffs on cigarettes; the multitude of hot milky drinks; the aches in my calves which only the fire of tiger balm could relieve. I remember it so vividly, and yet this was only at the end of 2016. Drugs were my salvation. Drugs were my one and only solution. I let them erode me to bone; all they asked in return was that I give up my life, my spirit, my body. That is all. “A toe tag and a few trinkets.” And I was more than willing to give addiction that All, because I’d spent so long looking for an out. “A witch hunt for an exit”. Some nights my legs would not stop shaking, my whole body convulsed. I measured time in tablets – pop them – take the withdrawal away. Ad infinitum. And yet I can honestly say without a shadow of a doubt, that I too found my strongest self in that darkness. I was past being saved, I had manipulated chemicals to my near demise – I alone, completely broken, was left bereft. So that’s whom I’m looking for tonight. When there is no one to call. When it is my face alone in the moonlight. When my spirit is torn. There I find my hope; inside I find my courage. ~ Michelle B
