Forged in aluminum: The Trek

The beginning

In some small town in the west, where the hospital no longer exists, I was born. A strange looking baby, with nothing but screaming and a significant lack of understanding of the world, with a dose of autism. Skipping over the minutiae and details I don’t even really know. My family moved. We moved a lot. I have lost friend after friend at key developmental periods in my life. Stripped again and again. All over the country in several states until finally finding myself now in New York. The stages of my life in New York have had ups and downs. That’s when anger started to appear in my life. That sweet boy turned into a very bitter boy who could barely concentrate.

I do not feel obligated to any of my readers to explain my family life. I have an amazing, loving mother, brutally honest, but amazing nonetheless.

The Empire State

I have lived in Western and Eastern New York for most of my life, about 18 years. It hasn’t always been as easy as I’ve had it in the last 5 years. Which sucks to think that the last 5 years of my life have been the best. In Western New York I was on the massive drug trafficking lanes (not involved at all). The streets that fed New York City with many of its drugs. Because my ‘hometown’ was so far away and across the Alleghany Plateau, it was difficult for the police to catch a lot of these really horrible people. I, for one, see heroin and fentanyl dealers as murderers.

One morning while working toward my associate’s degree, I was awakened by gunshots and a helicopter overhead. Shortly after, the news broke that the DEA had captured and detained 47 people and I recognized more than half of them as pedestrians on my street.

When you’ve seen what a drug den is really like, it’s burned into your head. Aluminum foil everywhere, bongs, garbage, dark, creepy people, barely conscious, vomiting. There is also this smell that you would have to experience to understand.

Drugs have put me in the position of having seen someone go into a heroin rage and then die, kill one of my best friends, and almost kill another of my best friends.

The consequences

For some reason that didn’t deter my own temptation, which brought its own consequences. Starting to smoke marijuana when I was 16 was a precursor addiction that taught me: «do this and you’ll feel good without working for it.» Wow, if I had the ability to read my future with my smoking habit, I would quit a lot of my own self-destructive habits. Fortunately, I managed to quit other drugs, but not marijuana for over 16 years of my life.

In college I smoked between two and three ounces in a month, literally smoking marijuana in a front (I’ll pay in drug slang). Using it as an escape from some of the stressors of having a difficult childhood and my own personal struggles. Thinking about it, if I hadn’t taken marijuana so early, I probably wouldn’t have tried to hang myself when I was a teenager or when I was 19. The struggles of fighting marijuana or any drug dependency are serious, if anyone is struggling, reach out to professionals, you have to figure something out. Marijuana, especially now, is not understood enough for us to abuse it.

So, let’s talk about the complications of cannabis use disorder; Psychosis, Anxiety, sleep disorders, bronchitis, Cannabis hyperemesis syndrome. I love marijuana, but everything I mentioned has happened to me. I am still dealing with the long term effects of CHS with hiatal hernia and ulcers. On top of that, there are links between aggression and cannabis use. I love the effect of marijuana, but I didn’t love it. The same goes for alcohol to a lesser extent, that bucket stretched quickly.

The mission

What is my objective, the goal I have, the mission? What I feel is that my mission is to heal. Talk about it and take responsibility. Not playing the victim and putting others as the reason I chose what I did. My goal is just to help myself here and my mission is to be sober for the rest of my life. This trail is an accumulation and representation of the work I did to get here. If I help no one but myself, I have succeeded. This walk is about me and being responsible for my addictions. I choose to write about it for your entertainment. Take you with me in the struggle and ideally in my success.

Maybe you can cover 200 miles in a single session and plan trips that require incredible logistical efforts. I overcame intense pain, but I have not been able to leave that thing that silences everything. It’s not the path that haunts me, it’s doing it sober, and that’s why I follow the path.

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