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[sentientaspic]

[sentientaspic]

[sentientaspic]

[sentientaspic]

Content ⚠️ ⚠️ Warning!!

This post and basically all of them, contain mentions of depression, drugs, suicidal ideation, homelessness, self hatred, domestic violence and relationship abuse, self harm, sexual assault and abuse and more.

I was born in Virginia, raised in the Midwest. I never had that attached sense of ownership, or is it belonging? either way I've never felt at home where I was placed...until I was plucked out of relative comfort, dropped carelessly into the Tenderloin, San Francisco, CA, where people will tell you it's completely dangerous and that no one should find themselves there at all, if they can help it at all. I had never been alone, period. Suddenly, though, I was a single drop of blood in an ocean, disappeared as quickly as I hit the surface and dissolved into the movement and noise of the city itself. Even though I had no one, and within days had been robbed and ripped off and tricked out of every last item I had to my name, I felt like I finally had something to hold onto. I had a home, and I couldn't fathom leaving now that I'd figured out where I should have been all along. Within just months, I knew the city better than I ever knew my hometown, because I was out there in it, living with it. The soles wore through on one pair of Vans, then another, and another, and I walked miles and hours and leaps across the peninsula, just allowing the city to guide my movement and my moves. I made friends. I made family. I became the person I truly felt I was, not the person who only existed within the very specific boundaries that the social hierarchy of my hometown would permit. I felt safe and comfortable in what is undoubtedly one of the most chaotic and unsettling and dystopian and gruesome places in the developed world. I didn't startle, shellshocked and shaking from just an uptick in voice pitch, like I had my whole life. I used to move hesitantly, agonizing over my weight and the sound I make when my body connects with the earth and the atmosphere, I would have happily disappeared into total solitude if it promised to protect me from the possibility of conflict or confrontation at all times. But in the city, I found myself sticking up for myself, and for my choices, my intentions, and my future. I actually acknowledged and accepted the possibility of my life continuing indefinitely for the time being. I may have even been excited to see where I landed next, I looked forward to being me and being where I was.

The only issue was, with my new life in the city, as I opened the door to my new self and all of my previously unrealized potential, I had allowed a creeping, suffocating, malignant and unavoidable force in with it. I had been using for the better part of 3 years at that point, and I had gotten to a place where I was spending all my time and energy and life force on locating, affording, and consuming heroin. In the Midwest, you can easily spend a couple hundred bucks a day just to get you through, not even to get you faded. That's just so you're not shitting yourself and clammier than nervous hands.

San Francisco ushered in an era of something much easier for me, gone were the days of having to steal and lie and shoplift and beg, and still come up too short to cop that day. Heroin was actually about 1/6 of the price there, you just had to know to tell the Hondos you want Chiba, and they'd give it to you if you really wanted it. But they also offered something even cheaper, dirt cheap, if you're a pretty girl or even halfway with it, you can get a gram of their other shit for $5. And its that shit that will knock you off your fucking feet and onto your back, gasping for narcan. But that's what you're gonna want. You're gonna forget what problems are, even. I mean, you'll still have a TON of them. But I assure you, you will not care. At all. All you care about is fentanyl, when that's what you're doing. It's drains you of your doubts and your insecurities and your morals and your will to live, but luckily it also drains you of your will to die, so you become more of a vehicle, operating solely to consume more fentanyl, without even a single stray thought forming.

So yeah, that's what turned my newfound home into my would be grave, and it's the entire reason I had to walk away from the first place I've ever felt like ME, probably forever. I'm going to process some of this here, just because I don't really have any other ideas. Drugs are wiping out a whole generation pretty much, and devastating the cultural climate and crippling the conditions for those who aren't dead or dying of this shit. It's so close to hopeless I feel a little silly for even bothering, but if I can help someone else, anyone else, than I would say the time spent was worth it.

If you're using, or struggling with wanting to, I promise there's another way. I didn't give a single shit if I died at any given moment, I just had to stay high so I could avoid looking at who I was and why. But that's where the keys to your well deserved freedom lie. You've gotta go through it if you want to get out of it. The only way out is through.