What Does Addiction Look Like?

Hello, Addiction.

Growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father, I made myself a promise early on: I would never drink.

I didn’t whisper it or carve it into my memory like some dramatic revelation. It lived inside me quietly, the way children make private vows to protect themselves when adults fail to. A secret oath shaped out of fear and bruises, made in the silent spaces between slammed doors and sobbing breaths.

Alcohol, to me, was the monster under the bed—except my monster lived in the kitchen, in a glass bottle that clinked like a warning bell every time it was set down too hard. I watched that bottle turn my father into someone unpredictable, volatile, dangerous. I saw the way fear could fill a house faster than smoke. Those memories left scars—emotional, physical, and invisible—and they shaped my idea of what addiction meant.

To me, addiction looked like a bottle, a fist, a slurred voice, a slammed door.

So I stayed away from alcohol with a kind of rigid moral discipline. If alcohol turned him into a monster, then avoiding it would keep me safe. That was my logic. That was my shield.

But trauma doesn’t simply disappear because you refuse one substance. Trauma is sneaky. It sits quietly in the corners of your life, waiting for an opening. And vows made in childhood don’t prepare you for the temptations that arrive in adulthood dressed as something else—something that doesn’t look like the thing that hurt you.

What I didn’t understand then was simple:

You can close the front door and still leave a window open.

By avoiding alcohol so fiercely, I left a door open without realizing it. Not because I wanted drugs. Not because I was looking for an escape. But because I thought I knew what addiction looked like—and drugs weren’t part of that picture. Alcohol was the enemy. Everything else seemed foreign, distant, harmless in comparison.

And so, the first time I used drugs, it wasn’t some dramatic moment of rebellion. It wasn’t even a choice fully made. Someone offered me ecstasy one night—offered it with the same casual tone someone might offer a drink. The next night it was LSD. I didn’t know then that those two nights were about to redraw the map of my life.

If alcohol had been the monster that chased me, drugs became the monster I invited in without realizing it had teeth.

I remember the feeling clearly—like someone had flipped a switch inside me. A warmth, a rush, a loosening of knots I didn’t even know were tied. After a childhood full of tension, that sudden feeling of lightness was intoxicating. I didn’t recognize it then, but I do now: I mistook euphoria for freedom. I mistook altered consciousness for happiness. I mistook numbness for healing.

Those two nights were the beginning.

The beginning of the version of myself who would seek drugs out for years to come. The beginning of the lies I would tell myself—just this once, I can handle it, I’m nothing like my father. The beginning of the erosion of the promise I’d held onto for so long.

I didn’t recognize that weekend for what it was.

Just as I didn’t recognize that trauma doesn’t always make you avoid danger—sometimes it makes you vulnerable to it. Sometimes trauma makes you crave anything that feels like relief. And sometimes, relief becomes the hook.

Addiction didn’t enter my life the way I expected. It didn’t arrive angry or loud or violent. It didn’t smell like whiskey or come with fists. It didn’t stumble through hallways or spit out hateful words.

It arrived quietly. Softly. Like a friend.

It offered me something I thought I needed.

And I took it.

The months that followed were gradual. Nothing dramatic at first. I still avoided alcohol with a religious fervor, proud of myself for keeping that promise, blind to the fact that I was breaking a hundred others. I tried different substances—some light, some heavy. Each one felt like a new answer to an old ache.

I told myself I was in control.

Isn’t that what everyone tells themselves in the beginning?

It’s funny, in a tragic way—addiction didn’t look like my father at all. It looked like me. It wore my face, used my voice, made my excuses.

And in some twisted way, that made it harder to recognize.

Addiction grew quietly, like ivy climbing a wall. It didn’t knock me down all at once. It crept. It wrapped itself around parts of me I didn’t realize were vulnerable. It fed on the pieces of childhood I never healed.

But the day I knew I was in trouble wasn’t the day I overdosed.

It was much smaller.

I woke up one morning and realized that every plan I had—every hour of the day—was organized around one question:

How can I get high again?

Not if. Not maybe later. But how.

Addiction had rearranged my entire life without me noticing. It became the sun I orbited. Everything else—work, relationships, sleep—rotated around it like planets around a star that was slowly burning out.

I lied to people I loved. I stole. I disappeared. I stopped recognizing myself in the mirror. My body grew thinner, my eyes darker. I chased the feeling I had the first time, not understanding that first highs are like first loves—you never get them back.

And yet I kept trying.

It was only when I found myself standing in the bathroom one night, hands shaking, staring into the mirror at a stranger—sunken cheeks, dilated eyes, lips cracked—that I finally whispered the question I had avoided:

“Is this what I’ve become?”

That question felt like stepping into cold water. It was the first honest thing I had said to myself in years.

That night, I didn’t get high.

That night, I cried for the first time since I was a kid.

I cried for the little girl who made promises to herself that she couldn’t keep. I cried for the ways I had failed her. I cried because I had tried so hard not to become my father and somehow ended up following him into the same darkness—just through a different door.

Addiction had many faces. His had looked like a bottle. Mine looked like a pill, a powder, a tab of paper on my tongue. The faces were different, but the hunger was the same.

He was running from something.

So was I.

His escape looked violent.

Mine looked euphoric.

But underneath, we were the same: two people trying to outrun pain.

Recovery didn’t happen in a straight line. It didn’t happen quickly. It didn’t happen cleanly. It came in waves—some strong enough to pull me under, some gentle enough to carry me forward.

There were relapses. There were apologies. There were days I wanted to quit trying. There were days I hated myself. There were days I understood, painfully, how my father had become the man he was—not as an excuse, but as a realization. Hurt people really do hurt people, themselves first, and others second.

But there were also victories.

There were days when the sunlight felt like a blessing instead of an irritation. There were mornings when I woke up clear-headed and grateful. There were moments when I began to believe that healing didn’t mean forgetting the past—it meant learning how to live with it without letting it swallow me.

I wish I could say the past never calls to me anymore. But that’s not the truth. Addiction is a shadow that learns your name. It doesn’t easily let go.

But neither do I.

And today, I’m stronger than the shadow.

Years later, when I visited my father’s grave, I stood in silence, not in anger and not in forgiveness, but in understanding. We were two people who had been wounded long before we knew how to name the pain. We coped differently, disastrously, humanly.

I brushed the leaves from the stone and whispered, “I’m done carrying this.”

I wasn’t speaking to him.

I wasn’t speaking just to the past.

I was speaking to addiction—the shadow that had trailed me, tempted me, shaped me, and nearly claimed me.

“Goodbye, addiction,” I said softly. Not with rage, but with resolve.

And then, as I turned away, something loosened in my chest—something that had been tight since childhood. The air felt different. Lighter. Like it belonged to me again.

I took a breath, steady and sure, and whispered into the wind:

“Hello, recovery.”

This time, it wasn’t a promise made in fear.

It was a promise made in strength.