While addiction can hit when you’re older, young people can be especially susceptible to it as well. Now in Cosmopolitan, a woman talks about how she became hooked on cocaine at 19, and finally overcame it at 34.
As “Alice,” who tells her story under a pseudonym, tells Cosmopolitan she first tried cocaine from a boyfriend who was using it at the time. She was in college and doing well in school. “Growing up, I always felt like everyone had the manual to life and I didn’t. I felt empty inside- like something was missing. As soon as I snorted that first line, that hollow feeling went away. Drugs became my solution to life.”
At first, she used drugs socially, but within two years she was using cocaine every day. She started blowing off school because some days she couldn’t get out of bed, and she was “much more interested in staying at home and using.” Eventually, she dropped out of school and ran up a huge debt from cocaine. “My student loan had been spent on coke, and I had credit cards run up to stupid amounts just to fund my habit.”
Alice would have periods of sobriety, then go back to it. She eventually got married and had a child, then went back to cocaine. “That old empty feeling I had as a teenager became very apparent in motherhood. The coke numbed it.” Then she got pregnant again and was using during the pregnancy.
Finally, Alice hit the “pinnacle moment” for her. “My heart was through my chest and I thought I was dying. I wanted to die because I didn’t know how to stop my addiction and knew I was hurting everyone around me.” Soon after, she went on Google looking for a treatment center.
“It was a relief to go to group therapy and have all these people who knew what I was going through,” Alice says. “I finally realized that I was really sick. I wasn’t this horrible, disgusting human being I thought I was; I actually had an illness that needed to be treated.”