I had my first puff on a joint when I was 13. I remember feeling like I was having the best time in the world. Probably partly running on adrenaline because me and my friend had snuck out of my house and met up with my boyfriend and his friend, and I always got a buzz off being a little rebel. My poor parents. When I was about 17, synthetic cannabis became the hottest new trend. Everyone was doing it. You’d literally see men in suits going to buy it. People of all kinds. Because people couldn’t be drug tested for it in their jobs. And it was considered “safe”. I can tell you now, there was nothing safe about that stuff. I can’t tell you how many times I heard of someone I knew being locked in the mental ward because they had gone into full drug induced psychosis. Some of those people are still struggling with long term effects to this day. When I was using, I thought I was one of the lucky ones, I just got high, I’d never experienced psychosis. Looking back now I can see how wrong I was. That stuff was nothing but toxic, and I was 100% addicted. If I didn’t have it, I’d wanna die. When I did have it, I just spent all my time sitting in my spot smoking bong after bong, I’d nod out, I passed out a couple of times, and I was not a happy person. I fucking hated life, unless I was high. You could say my world revolved around it. When I got with Abuser #2, I moved towns, he and I got a house together (which was about 200m away from the nearest synthetics supplier) which became a hang out for half the smokers in the town. Then when I found out I was pregnant to Abuser #1, it all sort of came crashing down. I was all of a sudden forced into trying to make adult and responsible choices, of which I honestly didn’t think I was capable. Tossing up between taking on the massive task that is raising a child or choosing the unimaginable, I went for a dating ultrasound to discover the baby didn’t have a heart beat. And I was absolutely devastated. It threw me into such a whirlwind of self hate and destruction, that I couldn’t have cared less if Death himself came and scooped me up in his arms and delivered me to hell. By this point I’d already gotten into the “junkie” circle, because A#2 was on a ritalin script. Everyone around me was using drugs intravenously, I’d been around it for a couple of months so in a way it had become normal. And in my desperate attempt to forget what I’d just been through, I had my first shot of morphine. And it felt fantastic. The rush was unlike anything I’d ever felt before, like a full body orgasm, and I felt great. “Comfortably numb”, if you like. And that’s when it started. My fear of needles turned into an obsession, and just like that I had another addiction. I started using more and more. Ritalin. Morphine. Methadone. Whatever we could get. I had decided I wanted to move back to my home town, so after 4 months we packed up and made the move. This is going to sound absolutely ridiculous, but the first thing we did was ban ourselves from being able to buy synthetics from any shops in my town, and we substituted them with weed instead. Sounds like we’re sorting our shit out to a point, right? Nope. That script was still coming in, we were still associating with the same crowd, and I was still sticking needles in my body at every opportunity. Life was an absolute mess, and it stayed that way for the next 6-7 months. I hid it from everyone. Not one single soul outside of my drug circle knew about my habit. It was a secret I was extremely ashamed of, one I was going to take to my grave. That was all about to change, when baby #2 made its existence known. So the drug use became a thing of the past, and becoming a decent mum became my number 1 priority. But my history of drugs wasn’t done haunting me yet. In fact it hadn’t even begun.
The Beginning.
I was always a bit of a worrier growing up. I can remember being scared something bad was going to happen all the time. Its not something I was really open about, if I was open about being scared I was told to harden up, stop being a sook. So I thought I just had to be tough and hide my fear, because I felt like letting it show would make me look pathetic. This probably sounds like i had a crappy and traumatic childhood- really it was quite the opposite, I had no more drama in my life than your average kid (other than the fact I was relentlessly bullied from age 8 til I hit my early 20’s), I was just scared alot. Then my teenage years, the ones i like to call the dark years, was when i was introduced to depression. I was self destructive, I self harmed, at times I was suicidal and I threw away my education, and I started doing drugs and drinking alcohol. To be honest I thought I was just going a bit batshit crazy from all the crap I’d put up with over the years, until I spoke to the doctor about my moods, and after asking multiple questions, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. For the first time I had a valid reason for the way my brain had been working. Over the years I thought I was learning to deal with it, but in actual fact my drug addiction was just taking over to the point I wasn’t feeling anymore. And then I got into my first abusive relationship. This was a man 20 years my senior, I was 19. We got along great at first, but it didn’t take long for true colours to show, and the fact he had a drinking problem turned him into a rather nasty person at times. Him holding a 20cm blade to my throat threatening to cut me was the most terrifying experience I’d had to date, I actually for a second thought he might do it, and if he did, I was done for. Thankfully he didn’t and I got away from that relationship, but in trying to manipulate me not to leave, he pushed me right into abusive relationship number 2, a man my age who I’d met through my ex… What did we have in common? A love of drugs. Only he was far deeper in the drug scene than I could ever have guessed. 3 weeks into this brand new relationship, I discovered I was pregnant. He said he’d stay and support me, I said he couldn’t promise that, but I didn’t know whether I was going to keep it because I didn’t know if I wanted to be tied to my ex for life.. but I didn’t know if I could go through with an abortion either, because I’d always wanted to be a mum. Before I could make a choice, it was taken from me. I’d had a miscarriage. It was a really tough period of time, and if I thought i was broken before, it was nothing on how i felt then. Within two months, I went from someone who’d said she’d never do drugs beyond smoking and snorting, never ever needles, to injecting drugs into my veins at any chance I got. I’d spend days awake, blowing my veins apart and spending hours trying not to miss my shot. All the while, spending 24/7 with a person who said he loved me, but did everything to show me otherwise. Pushing, punching, kicking, choking, when his eyes turned black you knew what was coming. A year into this relationship, a week before my 22nd birthday, I realised I was late. I had to wait 2 days to get paid to get a test, but I was pretty sure I knew what it was going to say. It was a long wait, but finally I was peeing on the stick and awaiting the results…. Positive. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I told the dad. He was excited? Maybe this would be what we needed to motivate us to sort our lives out, to get settled and on the straight and narrow, to give our little human the best life possible, the life they deserve. And that’s when my world tilted. I went from this broken wreck who could barely look after herself to this fierce Mama bear who was going to anything and everything to do what was right by her baby. I was no longer going to do drugs. And I wasn’t going to allow that lifestyle to continue around me anymore, meaning he’d have to change his ways too. Neither of us wanted to bring a baby into a toxic and broken home, so we both promised to put in our all. But it didn’t stop. I had stopped taking the drugs but he hadn’t and we fought alot over it. He was still physically violent towards me, pushing me around and punching me in the face, he did this thing where he would force my chin down onto my chest, making it impossible to breathe. He even kicked me in the stomach once. So I knew I had to get out, I had to grow up and accept that this wasn’t right, I couldn’t live like this anymore, I felt like it was either escape that life or end mine. I had no other options. Then a huge bombshell was dropped on me. I was 7 weeks pregnant by this stage, and I’d had my first lot of routine blood tests, they’d tested me for hepatitis C. I had tested positive. And it was at this exact moment my anxiety kicked into overdrive, and I’ve been fighting it ever since. It’s been 6 years now, I’m cured of hep C, but I’m definitely not cured of my anxiety. This is the start of my story.
Real Anxious Mama 