I have never touched a cigarette in my life. I first tried alcohol at age 21. My average yearly alcohol consumption can fit in your regular orange juice glass. Yet drugs have wreaked havoc in my life. Twice.
I used to live and let live. Having witnessed their consumption since high school, I have never felt any desire or curiosity around substances. I liked my peers, I had my own interests, and I respected their choices. I just wanted to be left alone for mine. What at first, and throughout my formative and university years, came across as a harmless mix of surprise, skepticism, and subtle pressure at parties and gatherings — “Oh, you don’t drink? Why not? But you’re missing out. Are you sure you don’t want to try a sip? Just one?” — I got used to. I brushed it off every single time effortlessly, never giving a second thought to these mildly annoying interactions and enjoying myself nonetheless with my friends and the music.
My head has always been full of excitement and connection. I have experienced a broad spectrum of human emotion: an intense awe and intellectual stimulation at complex ideas being intertwined and delivered with masterful and precise use of language. Deep emotion over a striking landscape, music, or a beautiful painting. I can forget about my ego, enthralled within my own artistic endeavors, for an entire day without the need to eat or use the bathroom. I have felt glaring rage at injustice and the mistreatment of my loved ones, intoxicating exhilaration at jumping off a plane or dancing to a song that felt so perfectly alive I could scream my lungs out. I have felt righteousness strong enough to want to move mountains to ensure proper care for a lover or a parent whose future life and wellbeing depended on it, and I have felt the warmest ecstasy in being wrapped in the naked hug of someone whose body, smell, and touch felt like home.
I love being inside my mind for these reasons, and it has been my personal choice to honor that by not altering it with chemicals that could blur, skew, or manipulate it and the way it interacts with the world.
I still remember the sound of my heart breaking over the echo of “You’re just too innocent, you only see the good in people” five years ago. The confusion, the helplessness. Too innocent? I am just me. I don’t understand. I hadn’t known the darkest side of human conduct. I hadn’t experienced how low someone can fall, how they can lose themselves in a world of substances and addiction. I hadn’t known darkness that black. So I was left alone with a broken heart. I thought I’d woken up from a nightmare into a second chance at love, just to find myself in some sort of dream-inside-a-dream, Inception-like chapter. Now, it's that I could never share the binding and connecting experience of EDM culture in industrial Berlin, the feeling of being high together. Those “Why don’t you drink? Don’t you want a sip?” voices had never rung louder in my ears, only this time they also echoed in my heart, breaking it for the second time.
It’s ironic how my patience and tolerance have not been enough. Perhaps they have been my downfall. Whenever there have been substances in someone’s past or present, the significance they hold in shaping that person’s understanding of the world and human connection has been strong enough to act as a wall between them and my sober self. It is a free choice. It is something I have accepted from others and respectfully declined for myself. Yet somehow that has never been enough.
So, I used to think I had a mind worth exploring and accepting, one that could find, provide, and maintain love without the need to alter it with chemical substances to create connection, or without the experience of having done so in order to provide a sense of wisdom strong enough not to be deemed “too innocent.” But the truth is I don't need anyone else making me believe that to understand the “edge” of human existence, to have depth or wisdom, I need to have destroyed myself a little inside, or need a chemical to connect with techno music and others in an industrial warehouse at 5 in the morning
I am picking up the pieces of my broken heart. And I am building my own wall with them. And this time, I am keeping out anyone with the kind of relation to substances that seem to provide a sense of superiority, supposed deeper knowledge of the human condition, and ultimately a disconnect from — and contempt for — someone like me.