My Testimony part 3: Vanity

[Here’s a link to the playlist on YouTube]

In episode 3 of My Testimony we go to college and then throw it away to be a crackhead. It’s one of the parts of my life that I really struggle with: my attitude toward the period of time I was in what they call ‘active addiction.’ I want to romanticize it, to make it have been positive. Well, sure, you can get positive things out of most life plot events.

But for me, that desire to romanticize is just a desire to turn away from my actual experience. I got strung out for a while, then dried out and moved on. I didn’t do any rehab or therapy or anything at all to look into what was up and why I would collapse at 21 over breaking up with a girl. Nope, none of that I just turned away from myself and went back to living as a collection of personas. It doesn’t work forever. If it had worked longer or a little better for me, I might have just strung it out for ever and died waiting for my life to start, always figuring things would get easier for me any day now.

They never got easier. They got harder and harder and harder and then I couldn’t do it. That’s when I started to live my own life, even though I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing, or needed to do. That realization took so much longer. Is taking so much longer.