Couldn't that be said of the drug abuse in general? Obviously I didn't want to be strung out, and I was more or less forced into the situation. I could have left, yes. I could have told him to fuck off, I also could have never started using heroin in the first place. But once you are deep in an addiction, and living with and supporting another addict who you yourself are in love with, I feel logical choices kind of go out the window. I definitely wasn't in my right mind, and the constant push to "hustle" and make as much money as I possibly could was exhausting and wore me down a considerable amount.
Everything you're saying does sound exactly like the worries that my current boyfriend has with it. He has actually said, " why couldn't you just work a normal job or busk or fly a sign?" I didn't just wake up one day and decide to strip. And once I was stripping I didn't just wake up and decide to turn tricks.
And trust me, I still regret it. I still feel like a whore who is probably used up and not worthy of love from a wonderful man. l'm shocked my dude even stuck around after I told him. I do feel like I'm an inherently good person, and I care deeply for him and want to spend my life with him. I just don't know if as you put it my lifestyle choices, are valid and deserve to be overlooked if we are to move forward in our relationship.
What you've said is very helpful to hear because I think that's exactly where my dude's mindset it. Thank you.
Absolutely. But not everybody who abuses drugs turns to things you decided to do. Away from any stigma, dehumanization, general toxic stuff that doesn't actually help someone, there was a decision to do what you did. Why that decision was made is entirely down to you to comprehend and then determine what you want to do going forward. There will always be people who support you, love you, care for you, want the best which can really prevent things really falling apart. Having said that, all the love and care in the world, the best relationship, anything that you see as being amazing and brings you everything you need - cannot fill the voids that makes up the life you chose to live. And it won't transform your future all it/themselves. When it comes down to that, that's why I would be concerned because it's whether the person actually really understands themselves and has made sufficient progress to understand the past doesn't have to be the present or the future. We are doomed to repeat the things we never learn from. The question is; have you learned from your experience(s)? Is this the line in the sand and the other side is the life you really want to live where you don't have to do the things you previously did to get by? As someone who really would take someone seriously and give them all the time in the world, I'd want to know at the very least how much awareness this person has. I've experienced my fair share of drug use/abuse. I got brought up in a really shady area where drug use was a rite of passage for most kids, as was causing as much mischief as possible in the area. Anyone from the North of the UK who lived in isolated rural areas will tell you what the nineties brought in terms of possibilities for kids. This was before social media connected everybody, before decent internet existed (for us anyway). We didn't get digital TV until the very last roll-outs began. You towed a fine line between a dark and small world and being a 'good' kid in the eyes of society and nobody seemed to win regardless of how good you were meant to be.
You could say there was lots of trauma and suffering at the core of the culture I lived my childhood in. I went through self destructive spirals where I'd sell everything for a bag of weed. I'd not eat properly and then take a sh*t load of speed and then I'd ask to borrow small amounts even while I was still loaded on the last stuff. Pretty much spent a long time unable to function without basing my daily reality on drug induced experiences. It all sent me away from a fairly brutal childhood where I was, you could say, abused to the point where I'd have been taken from my adopted family and put back in the system until I was given a suitable home. Drugs were my way out. I never sold myself. But I sold my soul for a very long time.
What I'm saying in all this is... if I was to meet my previous self right now and have a relationship with that person, would I? No. Not a million years. Back then I thought I was doing everything right and lived in the mindset that it was someone else or something else's fault other than my own. I couldn't realize in those times in my life that I was the one CHOOSING to continue living a life that was destroying me. Even though, shit, of course loads had happened to me and people understood that and saw why I was like I was. It might have been even been an excuse for a while for me to go off the rails. It didn't actually make the reality of me being like that any different nor did it change anything. It simply made the people I should have been around who were better in mind and body and on a better path run a mile from me. All that was left was the pieces of sh*t that wanted me to stay in the ghetto, gutter, bottom of the barrel forever where they could laugh at me while refusing to accept they themselves were in the same very position as me they were just so lost they couldn't even see it anymore.
It's owning these choices you made and accepting responsibility for them.
No matter how much you've been hurt. No matter how much you've been through. No matter what you've done you can ALWAYS change the trajectory of your life. You could sell car insurance or sell yourself. Both people go home and the only person whose left to deal with what remains in their mind is themselves. The difference is which one is actively attempting to listen to themselves, do what needs to be done and working on making the past exactly that - past, who sleeps soundly. The past is not the past if it keeps repeating itself. It's just the present on repeat. You could argue the present is really on repeat if you want to get deep but you get my point (I think, maybe I'm rambling..).
You need to own your shit. That is a very attractive trait to have in anybody who is healthy, present and available to all life has to offer. Someone who owns their shit so much that it actually becomes what defines them in all the best ways. You could use what you've been through as the foundations for how strong you are, how courageous, how passionate, how committed you are to things in your life and then utilize all that energy in smashing through your goals. What 'broke' you (if you want to say that) can now be used to fix you because all that you did and were capable of doing in those dark times is still the same stuff you need when shit isn't broken. It can be turned around and make you, instead of break you, if... you let it.
That's when your past doesn't define you today because people can change, you can change, we all can change, and so who you were back then is not who you are today. Of course, the dilemna with this is the evidence of that change. And that I firmly believe is what anybody in sound mind and self respecting, self loving, and with grounded values and principles wants to see. Having said that, you don't even need to bring your past up in relationships moving forward, or in any situation. Again, if you have changed and things are different, the past remains where it is and people will see you how you appear to them. You might be surprised to find that people see you completely differently to what you see yourself. The last relationship I had was with an amazing woman, a psych nurse, so loving and committed and lively, confident, innocent (compared to me anyway) and it was just what I needed to get myself out of the mindset that I can see, and people will only see me, based on my past. Coming from a dark upbringing in a rural town in North UK where there is lots of deprivity and where I witnessed most relationships being based on toxic, abusive, superficial foundations, to meeting someone who at one point I would have thought was out of my league and completely grounded compared to how I had been for most of my life. It really put into perspective that I had a choice to be f*cked up. Someone else was able to see something I never saw in myself. And I guess it's based on the fact that if you've actually got it in you to get beyond your past and not be defined by it, other people will see that and even though they may not see what is beneath it, they will see the goodness, the positivity, the potential, the person you are beyond your life story.
I lost that girl, and I deserved it. My head was all over and was still reeling from some serious family issues that I got around by essentially being a prick. That was enough for her to leave, quite rightfully so. But it made me realize that I was capable of having the things I never thought were possible. One woman had come around and made me feel love for the first time in my life and made me see why I did what I did and I did everything because I was hurting. That hurt then poured out onto her, as well as others in the past. People don't want nor like that, not good people anyway.
Piece everything together, do the work and whatever happened in the past doesn't spill over into today. Which means that relationships with others are not defined, moreover, dictated to by that past of yours. In which case, a mans feelings for you will be based on how he sees you in this very moment, not based on the creeping up of your past if your past dictates your present and this relationship with him.
