What do you do when you find out someone you love is doing drugs? You go through a grieving process that has to be rushed because this is a time sensitive situation. If you meet up with an acquaintance and you had no idea they were using, the normal response is to high tail it the hell out of there and not look back. But when you pick a loved one up from a friend’s house and you instantly notice the way they look (some of you may know the look I am talking about), then what is the normal response at that moment? Fight or flight? The choice is really not that simple. When you love somebody, whether it be a sibling, a parent, a friend, a significant other, etc. you want the best for them, you want everything in their life to be perfect and you would bend over backwards to make that happen. When you find fresh track marks on them after looking into their eyes and knowing and feeling the same things you have known and felt before, then what? I know some people might be the type to stick around and try to help the situation themselves, and others will say that they would leave them to figure it out on their own because they have gotten themselves into this mess and they should get themselves out of it. Drug addiction is messy. It leads to health problems, overdosing, and death; it is an epidemic.

I have been there:

I have been the person picking up friends and significant others from places that I would never step foot in otherwise.

I have been the person to lend someone money knowing I would never see it again, knowing what it was going towards even though that person gave me an elaborate excuse on why they needed $120 on a Wednesday night.

I have been the person who has stayed up worried, stayed up crying, stayed up sick to her stomach because you know that while the rest of the world is asleep, the person I love is getting high and possibly overdosing for the second and third time.

I have been the person who was sick to her stomach every time the phone rang or heard his name mentioned in “casual” conversation because I thought I was going to hear that he had died from a drug overdose.

I have been the person to go weeks without eating because I was sick to my stomach every second of everyday when he would just stop talking to me because I knew he was out shooting up.

I have been the person to have nightmares of finding him with a needle sticking out of his arm after things were going so well.

I also was the person who didn’t say anything when I knew that I should have because, “He is strong. He can stop. He’s done it before. I CAN HELP HIM.”

When people say that addicts can only get help if they themselves want it is 100% true. There is no amount of caring, love, money, time spent in rehab, detoxing and everything else to help someone who truly does not want it. Someone who doesn’t love themselves will not love you. These things I wish I had listened to before getting involved with someone who could have potentially ruined my life, all because they were ruining theirs and I love and care so strongly that I wanted to be the one to help. Sometimes the best thing to do is tell someone who really can help. Someone who will be able to get them to the place that they need to be, and then you pray. I have never been one to push religion on anyone because I never really knew where I stood with it. And then something like this, someone so close to you, your best friend is addicted to heroin; that is the point in my life where I had no other choice but to get on my knees and cry and beg relentlessly.

Nobody really talks about it, and I can’t blame them. It breaks my heart every time I hear of something like the situation I was in. It breaks my heart every time I think about the last thing I said to someone who was using and it wasn’t “I love you”. Nobody talks about the others; the people behind the addict. The people who love and care and hurt, but we’re out here. We’re struggling too, and you telling us that it was their choice is not the conversation we want to have, but we will fight. Because that is what you do when you love someone. We will fight, always.