I’m a fourth-year student at the University of Minnesota, and I’m an addict. I come from a middle class family and have two incredibly loving and supportive parents, but that didn’t stop me from experimenting with drugs and alcohol in high school. Around my junior year of high school, I developed a habit for prescription pain killers. I kept my addiction under wraps from everyone I knew, including my parents. When I moved away from home to attend the University, I quit the pills cold turkey. I didn’t seek help because I didn’t want anyone to know about it, and going through withdrawal alone was easily one of the most miserable experiences of my life.
Without really realizing it, I basically just swapped one addiction out for another. I turned 21 my junior year and at the same time got a job to try and get some professional experience for after graduation. The job was tough – it was every day, it was nights, it was weekends. Put 18 credits of classwork on top of that, and you’re left with an overworked, stressed out, and incredibly unhappy individual. Casual drinking with friends on the weekends turned to drinking every night, regardless of whether or not I had people to drink with. Eventually, I didn’t even bother to wait until the afternoon. Sometimes the only thing keeping me from drinking first thing in the morning was my inability to keep anything down.

My school work took a long walk off a short pier, and I almost never went to class. Work at my job suffered tremendously and relationships with people I cared about strained to the point of breaking. During one bender, I didn’t show up for work or come home for two days. No one could get a hold of me, and a group of friends, roommates and coworkers started calling around to try to find me. They called police stations and hospitals. And they called morgues. I came home that night with a dead phone and no money, not even realizing people had been trying to find me. Shortly before my 22nd birthday, I was stopped by a police officer while walking home from a bar. I was weaving on the sidewalk and when the cop stopped to talk to me I apparently couldn’t even communicate to him where I lived (though my house was only a few blocks away). The officer picked me up and took me to a detox facility, where I woke up unsure of where I was or how I got there. I spent two days there before I was released. I walked the couple miles home, took a nap, and then went to a bar.
I had no interest in getting help until one of my best friends sat me down and told me she was going to cut me out of her life if I didn’t make a change. She said she wasn’t going to watch me drink myself to death. With her help, I had a long conversation with my parents in which I came clean about my addiction. I think they had a pretty good idea of what was going on, but I don’t think they knew how bad it was. With their guidance and support, along with the support of close friends, I started seeing a substance abuse counselor at Boynton. I honestly loved those sessions. My counselor didn’t judge, and I was able to talk freely and openly about what was going on with me. She helped me identify and avoid triggers to my drinking, and with her help I got sober. She was a busy person though, with a lot of people to see, and I only got to talk to her about once every two weeks or so. I do wish it could have been a little more often, but I understand resources are stretched pretty tight at Boynton.
During my recovery, I also started attending AA meetings. Again, this was following a suggestion from someone else, and I probably wouldn’t have taken the initiative to start going without their guidance. AA is a fantastic community filled with wonderful people who will do just about anything for you to help your recovery. It’s incredibly refreshing to sit with a group of people going through the same things as you – to talk to them, learn from them, and know that you’re not alone.
I stayed clean and sober until the fall of this past year. I started school again (senior year round 2), started my job again, and took on a second job to help pay the bills. I thought I was ready, but I I think took on too much and it wasn’t long before I was just as miserable as when I started drinking heavily in the first place. I also had zero time to continue seeing my counselor at Boynton, and I was too exhausted at the end of the day to try and make it to AA meetings. About halfway through the semester, a good friend of mine from high school passed away (she overdosed on prescription painkillers) and I relapsed pretty hard. My grades took a nosedive and I missed the cut to graduate. I was back at square one.
The thing is, working long hours while trying to go to school full time certainly isn’t exclusive to me – in fact, I probably had it pretty easy compared to many of my fellow students at the University. Even in my group of immediate friends, I knew several people with more on their plates. College is an insanely stressful time and expectations of students are pretty high. I’m not necessarily saying the world expects too much from college students, but it certainly expects a lot, and it’s no wonder people need to blow off some steam every once in a while. The problem is, for a lot of people, the harder you work the harder you play, and sometimes playing hard can do a solid job of messing up your life.

I can’t stress enough how much a support network of people close to you can help. I think a lot of people struggling with addiction don’t really realize that they do have people in their lives who care deeply about them. In almost every case, these people just want to see you happy and healthy, and most of them would do just about anything in their power to help you out.

I’m currently going on five months sober (and close to five years clean of painkillers). I’ve got a good job, good relationships with friends and family, and I consider myself happy. There’s just no way I could be where I am without these kinds of people in my life. I think maybe some people struggling with addiction and substance abuse just don’t care enough about themselves to get help (at least that was the case for me). Not only that, but when you’re sober you have to look at yourself in the mirror and face the decisions you made during active addiction. If you’re lucky, you’re just embarrassed; a lot more often you feel a lot worse and you’ve got to live with the choices you made and their effects – lost jobs, deplorable grades, and broken relationships. But everybody has people who care about them and if you won’t get help for your own sake, at least do it for theirs. You’ll find that sober life is a lot less complicated than life under the influence. It’s a lot of work to get and stay sober, but you get to reap the benefits of not dry heaving every morning, not tanking your school and professional lives, and not alienating the people you care about. A bit of give and take.
Don’t try to go it alone. If you’re successful (you probably won’t be), it’ll suck really bad. If you’re not, you won’t have anyone to catch you when you fall. I had people to catch me, and they’ll never know how grateful I am for that. Some days are easier than others, but you just take them as they come. It’s cliche, I know, but sobriety is a journey you just have to take one day at a time.