Reading Everyone Else, Understood by No One

There’s a piece of psychology that’s been sitting with me: people who grew up feeling misunderstood become experts at reading everyone else. We had to. When no one understood our emotions, we started studying everyone else’s instead. We pick up on tone shifts, slight energy changes, that little pause before someone lies. We can walk into a room and instantly feel who’s upset, who’s faking a smile, who doesn’t belong. Here’s the irony in that: we understand everybody else, but we feel like nobody understands us.

That’s relatable to my whole childhood, long before I ever picked up my first substance. So here’s a little backstory.

My first substance was alcohol. I was seven or eight years old when my grandmother gave me my first sip. I’m not going to lie — I didn’t like it. I wasn’t like the people who instantly knew they loved it. My next move was stealing half-smoked cigarettes my grandmother used to leave in an ashtray on the dryer. I must’ve been eight. I remember riding up to the school, hitting the woods, and smoking one. Immediately I knew something wasn’t right. I had asthma as a kid — bad enough to be hospitalized a few times, though I grew out of it eventually. I rode my bike home after that cigarette and couldn’t breathe. It was so tight. My cousin and my grandma knew right away something was wrong and rushed me to the hospital, where I sat for days.

Fast forward to fifth grade — I was in the DARE program, where they’d bring a glass case into schools filled with either mock substances or the real thing, I honestly have no idea which. I sat there laughing because I’d already seen all of it, growing up around my family and my mother’s drug use. I thought the whole thing was a joke.

That summer after fifth grade was the first time I tried marijuana, and I knew immediately I loved it. I was rolling around laughing for hours in an alleyway in the city, smoking out of an aluminum foil pipe with kids older than me. When they asked if everyone had money, I thought they meant cigarette money, so I said yeah, let’s get some. Turns out they meant something else entirely. I went back the next day and got my real first experience with weed. None of my friends believed I’d actually smoked with the older kids, so I introduced the rest of them to it myself.

For years after that, I smoked weed, drank, and smoked cigarettes like it was the coolest thing in the world — because that’s what I was raised around. It had consequences. At 13, I was living in a group home with 18 other boys, ages 10 to 18. I decided to go on a home visit and grab my pipe, got caught with it at school, and it triggered the whole group home getting drug tested. A bunch of us failed. That’s how I ended up in my first outpatient program at 13, for marijuana. I lied and manipulated every test after that and kept smoking. My ego was enormous at that point in my life.

After the group home and a foster family, a relative introduced me to LSD. That same night, he didn’t have any regular weed — only weed laced with cocaine — so that was my first time smoking that combination too. I was maybe 15 or 16, it’s honestly hard to pin down. That night started my obsession with party drugs. It was my gateway. I didn’t try cocaine on its own until 18, and to be honest, I smoked crack before I ever tried straight coke, because I wanted to understand why neither of my parents were ever there for me. (That’s a whole other journal entry — we’ll get to it down the road. If I forget, someone nudge me.)

By the time I made it to college — broke, but somehow with my high school diploma in hand — my high school had talked me out of joining the Marines and into going to college instead. That was my first taste of freedom from a toxic, controlling household where I had daily chore lists and never got to just be a teenager. I was already living an adult’s life, miserably, before I ever moved out. That’s where my cocaine habit really took off — I started selling it just to make money, since nobody was helping me get through school.

After college, it got to the point where I was drinking constantly, and people started telling me I was overdoing it and losing money on it. So I’d do “just a little” coke instead to balance it out — that was the logic, anyway. A little became a little more, until I was obsessed with the combination of drinking and cocaine together, to the point I couldn’t do one without the other. Coke alone would eat my anxiety alive. Alcohol alone just put me straight to sleep — it’s more of a depressant for me. But the two together, plus acid, plus whatever else I could get my hands on — except heroin, which I always stayed away from because I knew I’d love it too much — turned me into a walking test tube. I consumed more in one sitting than anyone probably should.

I’ve still got pieces of this I’d love to get into more. But the way my brain works, I get stuck on one part of my story, tell as much of it as I can, and then just lose interest in it — or want to go off into sixteen different subsections at once. Honestly, I think I’d just confuse everybody if I tried to do that. So I’m doing this one piece at a time, just like I do everything else — one day at a time.

Hope everybody enjoys their Saturday. Thanks for reading.