1. It all starts with hope.

Hope. It’s one of the most powerful emotions, and it can motivate us to believe the impossible. You start off having all of the hope in the world, and every inch of your body is filled with it. You live off of it. It makes you strong, and it brings about this overwhelming sense of comfort.

You’re optimistic for what the future has to bring, but of course, you tremble with weakness and fear at times. Overall, though, the weight you have carried for so long is lifted. You start to feel the warmth of relief, but don’t get too excited just yet. In the blink of an eye, your hope can be stripped from you, all because of one little slip-up.

All it takes is one weak moment, and all the glistening hope you have been living off of is robbed from you. The worst part about hope is that in many cases, it's a cycle. You go through stages of hope more than once, usually much more than once. People relapse; it’s inevitable.

But after a while of being built up by hope just to be knocked down by relapse, the warmth and comfort that hope once brought leaves you feeling cold and empty. You have believed in someone time and time again, and all you are left with is the hollow space that used to be overflowing with hope.

2. Soon after hope comes resentment.

That empty space is now brimming with anger. You have never felt such hate toward someone. You can’t wrap your head around it all. You're so angry, and you don't even know what to do because most of the time you can’t fix someone. Only they can fix themselves.

You may start to get angry with yourself and others because there is simply nothing else you or anyone can do to change another person. It’s so simple but so hard for us to comprehend, and we can't always grip the fact that you cannot mend someone back together again. You might begin to feel worthless and question your purpose here if you can’t even help this person.

3. Then Grief.

Yes, you grieve. Losing someone to addiction is like watching someone destroy everything and everyone around them without that person even being aware of the pain they're causing everyone else. Soon you realize that the person you once knew and loved is gone, and sometimes you realize they’ve been gone for much longer than you thought.

That’s another funny thing hope can do. It blinds us from the somber truth. You wish that everything could have been different, and you wish that somewhere along the way they found the strength inside of themselves to get better. But you don't hope anymore. The straining cycle of giving hope and having it taken from you over and over again has brought you almost as much heartbreak as grief has.

4. Through all of this you've been growing.

Time goes by, usually a lot of time. The anger that once filled your soul begins to drain out, and the hate that once left your heart feeling heavy is lifted. You begin to understand that there are a lot of broken people in the world, and you realize it is their job, not your job, to pick up the shattered fragments of their life and try to place it all back together as neatly as possible. It’s not easy for you to come to this understanding. It can take years, and for some even a lifetime.

5. Finally, acceptance.

Reality sucks sometimes. The sad reality of the word is that people do not always get better, and they do not always overcome their demons.

Life can be draining. Sometimes it leaves us in the dark, questioning why things are the way they are. Everyone has their own strategy when it comes to accepting the bitter truth that sometimes addiction wins. Even when you don’t want to believe it, deep within you know the ugly truth. Life is not supposed to be easy, and it’s not always supposed to have the beautiful ending where the good beats the bad.

Without times of weakness, we would not know how strong we really are, and without the heartbreak we endure, we would not know the immeasurable power of love.

These struggles make us human and more importantly, they make us who we are.