callmeTheJournalist

Man, I've been prescribed a lot of pills, but I mostly didn't take them... until now, until I started seeing some kind of change, or rather, you can't see how someone changes, but I can feel how I have changed. And call addict behavior wanting to put foreign substances in my body, or not, these pills have been helping.

Can't you tell?

What a privilege to feature the story of someone who's allowed me to walk alongside her. Ira wants to share with us what it is to be influenced by those we love, and the paths we go down to reconcile broken hearts, hurt expectations, and missed opportunities. Struggling with illicit substances doesn't always start in our early years, but can come from poorly chosen men.

My name is Jonathan, but you can call me theAddict.

First mind altering substance that I consumed, besides a sip of wine at a family reunion, was weed. Looking back at it now, it definitely paved a way to, at least, mildly delinquent behavior, and a comfort with a sedentary, atrophied lifestyle. But I am a proponent of Harm Reduction... so weed of meth any day.

I only consider a single time to be a true overdose. Life ran away and took my sight with it, something I don't think has yet returned. But I still have breath, for what little that seems to mean.

After the Marines one finds themselves needing to reassimilate, but when what you're coming back to is what you were running from where do you find yourself? In the clutches of a meth addiction that'll take you almost 20 years to beat the war.

One thing leads to another, and tracing our addiction to its source is no walk in the park. Frederico starts at the beginning, working his way up to his present: a year and a half of not-always-so-easy sobriety.

"I definitely have a lot of respect for the Afgans."

- Frederico, on his 2009 deployment.

Merry Christmas Y'all.

He deserves a "Teacher of the Century Award" for being the first to tell me that I had a problem. Drugs do nothing more than turn us into what we never expected to be. In my case? At 12 I was robbing supermarkets of their cough medicine, smoking in classrooms, standing at urinals for hours a day trying to piss, and lying through my teeth when offered help.

My name is Jonathan, but you can call me The Addict, and if you ever doubted it before, I am, in fact, a drug addict.