Day 8 - "Fighting for a future"

Friday, 1 December 2006 - Day 8 - "Fighting for a future"

I won’t lie to you – I want to take Heroin, badly! I wake up in the mornings and it is the first thing I think about. Nights, when I lie in my bed waiting to fall asleep, it is the last thing I think about. Occasionally when I sleep I dream about taking heroin again. I don’t normally remember much of what I dream, but these heroin dreams are so vivid that they lie printed in my mind in the mornings when I wake up. Thinking about heroin is an obsession that only slightly faded over the eight days of my recovery.

I didn’t think it was possible, but yesterday the thought of taking heroin spinned in my mind even more than usual. As an addict I have been hiding from real emotions for more than a year. Suddenly I’m faced with all these mountains of emotions and the temptation to silence them with heroin is very big.

I heard some troubling news yesterday that made me question if I can be successful with this recovery. A person close to a friend of mine is also a recovering heroin addict that spend a year in a Rehab Clinic trying to get and stay clean. It now looks very probabable that this person relapsed after more than a year of staying clean. The thought of that scares me so much that I almost gave up the fight. At 8 days I won’t even dare count to 365. Imagine spending all that time fighting, only to finally loose the battle.

It reminded me of another young guy that managed to break the cycle of his heroin habit. He had been clean for four months when his girlfriend found him dead in their apartment. But he didn’t use again – a blood clot caused by his previous using is the source of his death months after he decided to live a better life.

The whole of yesterday afternoon I thought about it – was this the future I was fighting for? Luckily, even those cravings and thoughts eventually disappeared and my optimistic nature showed its face again. I made a promise to myself when I started this blog and logging my progress: I would be completely honest about my feelings and my drug taking. So, friends, if I should suddenly disappear from the blogging world and the day counter should unexpectedly stop – think of me, because I might be in trouble!