The Fog

The first time I got high I was eight years old. Lying in a hospital bed with a swollen and painful stomach, my dad assured me that I wasn’t pregnant as a nurse ran her ultrasound wand over my distended belly. Watching the two of them share a look of amused endearment at my illogical concern, my embarrassment was quickly overshadowed by the sharp pangs poking at my insides. I can’t really remember what the diagnosis was, all that stands out is what they gave me for the pain: Morphine.

Injecting what looked like nothing more than two measly drops of liquid into the cannula in my arm, the nurse looked at me and said, “that should make you feel better real soon sweetie.”

And holy fucking shit, was that bitch right.

So great was the rush of euphoria that inundated my system that if I had of been standing, I would’ve collapsed. An angelic symphony filled the room, as the healing light of God coursed through my veins. My legs felt like warm jelly. The hospital bed felt like a bosomy cloud. My father and the nurse seemed like transcendent beings of infinite love. And all my pain and worries vanished in an instant. It was pure bliss.

The second time I got high I was thirteen, and it was slightly more traditional. Sitting in the back of this beat-up old buggy, the front of which had been fitted with some sort of golf-ball-collecting-contraption, my friend handed me a joint. My friend’s job was to cruise around the driving range in that buggy picking up all the errant golf balls. And for reasons that would only make sense to a couple of dim-witted thirteen-year-olds, we’d decided it was best to do this stoned.

Puffing on that spliff a little too hard, I was seized by my first marijuana-induced coughing fit.

“That’s good bro, coughing gets you higher.” My friend said, as if such a thing was an inalienable fact.

“Cool,” I spluttered, before asking, “has a golf ball ever hit the buggy while you’ve been driving it?”

“Nah, not yet bro, but don’t worry man, that’s what the cage is for.”

Peering through the smoke-filled air at the bars on the windows, I started to feel strange. If, in that hospital bed I’d heard an angelic symphony, then what I heard this time was much closer to the sort of distorted guitar rift Jimi Hendrix might play. Time seemed to slow down. The hard edges of the world fell away, making room for a blurrier and more connected whole. Watching the plumes of smoke billow from the end of that joint I felt giddy, free, and totally enamored by the depth of the moment. Winding their way to the dilapidated sky of that buggy’s roof, the patterns those plumes painted seemed to be communicating with me. Curious, I reached out to touch them, but they evaded my grasp – a subtle reminder of the transitory nature of all things. As the weed took hold, I found myself chuckling at the absurdity of that experience: sitting there in the back of that buggy, trying to communicate with smoke, while golf balls rained down all around us – fuck, drugs were awesome.

The specifics of the third time I got high elude me. Same with the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth… In fact, from then on, the next fifteen years appear in my mind like a spotty fever dream. Random snippets of a much larger story jump out at me, and most of the time, I have no idea where they fit into the timeline of my life.

I’m in a toilet somewhere snorting a line of God knows what. I’m sitting at a Poker table watching the other players faces bend and shift like something out of a Hunter S. Thompson tale. I’m stumbling down a back street swearing at the top of my lungs after being kicked out of another nightclub, or pub, or casino. In most of these snippets I’m alone. I can only really speculate as to why. Maybe I carried on partying long after my friends, or perhaps I lost them. Most likely, however, is that I bailed on my friends, because for some strange reason, when I was really twisted, I used to enjoy turning myself loose on the wee hours of the night like a drug-fueled werewolf.

I’m pushing through a kaleidoscope of dancing bodies as laser lights illuminate a sea of blown-out pupils. I’m ordering drinks for me and some girl I don’t know at a bar I don’t remember coming to. I’m handing over cash in the backseat of some shitty car. I’m running along another back street, maybe away from people, maybe towards people, but always from myself. Steeped in a mess of ill-defined emotions these snippets often leave me feeling unsettled. And it’s no wonder when, unplaceable fights, broken windows, bleeding body parts, and crashed cars also weave through these seemingly disparate snippets to create a drug-addled reel of disquiet.

Then there’s the everyday stuff. Fifteen years blurred into the same day. Two or three bongs as soon as I got up. Cracking my first beer on smoko at 10am. Sneaking off to my car to rip a few more cones at lunch. Pulling into the closest drive-thru bottle-shop on the way home to stock up for the night ahead. Chopping up a ‘fat sesh’ as soon as I got home. Downing my third or fourth beer in the shower before the sun had even set. A constant flow of beers and bongs would span the rest of the night, the exact amount is impossible to say as the part of my brain that would track such things usually packed it in around dinner time. Then, just as my consciousness was about to buckle under the weight of all the abuse that’d been thrown its way, I’d boot it into the stratosphere with a final flurry of four or five bongs, because, to quote my former self, “I can’t get to sleep any other way.” A black dreamless sleep followed, before I awoke the next morning to do it all again.

A drug-fueled werewolf, indeed.

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The trouble with recounting any path to sobriety is that the story can only be told after the fact. After the internal work has been done. After the light has been shone on what the drugs had left obscured and ill-defined. The problem with recounting things in that way, however, is that it does not accurately convey what the experience was like. Nor does it capture one of the hardest things about addiction: not knowing you’re lost.

I’ve heard it said that people who truly lose their mind don’t know they’ve lost it. They think everything is okay, but everyone around them can see there is a problem. In that sense, addiction can be thought of as a form of insanity. At least, that’s what it was like for me. I didn’t think I was using substances to run from my emotions or my past. I didn’t know that by constantly numbing out I was masking the depth of my discontent. And I certainly didn’t believe I had a problem with drugs and alcohol. After all, for the first two or three years, I didn’t have a problem – I had a penchant. Creeping up on me that penchant slowly turned into habits. Habits that, by then, I didn’t question. They were just what I, and the people around me, did for fun. All the time. I knew, of course, that I could break these habits whenever I wanted, if I chose to do so. I just didn’t want too. Besides, there was no problem, so why would I? Committing to these habits for more than ten years with ardent dedication, somehow, I ended up lost in the fog of addiction. By that point I’d lost all control. Like a drunk driver still turning the steering wheel of an up-turned car, the command I had over my life had become illusory–to everyone but me.

Habits start as cobwebs and end in chains – Spanish proverb.

Later, once the light had been shone, I came to think of my former self as a ‘functioning addict’. I could, just barely, cobble together what looked like a normal life. I went to work, paid rent, saw my friends and family, and even rode my skateboard relatively well. Sure, I did all this stuff blazed out of my gord, but the point is–I did it. I functioned. Maintaining that quasi semblance of normalcy was part of what kept me lost for so long. It’s easy to believe you don’t have a problem when your life isn’t a complete shit show. It’s even easier still, when most of the people around you are also lost. Functioning in this way, left little room for the type of introspection that would allow me to truly see the reality of my situation. And so, I continued to stumble about in the fog.

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As of today, the 5^th of July 2025, I have been sober for five years. I don’t really know how to conceptualize that statement, as it doesn’t feel real. Nor can I properly explain how I got sober. To say I found my own way out of the fog doesn’t feel right. As it felt more like I was pulled out by a confluence of cosmic forces too numinous and ineffable to squeeze into words. However, I want to offer something to those who may be seeking a way out. I know that finding purpose and meaning, a belief in something greater than myself, and a deeper connection to those around me – all played an instrumental role. But it was more than that. I mean, in some strange way, it feels as though a part of me is still lost in there. And that whoever’s writing these words was both ruthless and compassionate enough to leave that part of me behind. As if a severing of the Self took place. But that’s not entirely accurate either. Because I know that part of me isn’t truly gone. Still stumbling about lost in that ethereal nowhere, I can hear it call out from time to time. A lonely ghost echoing the siren song of my wayward past. And so, while I wish I could shed more light on the specifics of how I got sober, I can’t. Instead, illuminating that I did, despite how lost I once was, seems to be the best I can do. But maybe that’s enough. After all, hope is its own kind of guiding light.

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