Asking for help didn’t make me weak, it helped me achieve a future I might not have had otherwise

I am currently 18 years old and volunteer as a peer mentor at the same alcohol, drug harm prevention service that helped me overcome my early addiction. As a child I would often find myself sat alone in my room trying to distract myself from how low I felt. At 13 I started to smoke spice. Initially this seemed to be a good solution offering both escape and entertainment on weekends.

However, as most stories go this quickly escalated, by late 14 I was smoking spice every hour of every day, even waking up every few hours and needing to smoke more just to get back to sleep. It was at this point I realised I needed to stop; I was failing all my classes, had one of the worst progress trackers in my year and parents were giving up on me.

I had realised that my methods of escape had created a life far worse than what I wanted to escape from.

Escape seemed like a feat too difficult for me to undertake but through a friend also struggling with spice addiction I heard about the service I volunteer at now. At first, I had little hope; I thought the service would just be another lecture on why drugs are bad.

In my first meeting something surprised me; after I had mentioned a few times that I know I shouldn’t be taking the drugs I used, my worker stated that he was not here to judge or tell me to simply stop using, instead just to tell me about the risks and offer support if I ever did want to stop using. This instantly made me trust the service.

After a few months of meetings, I finally decided to quit. The withdrawals were rough; I barely ate or slept for two weeks but eventually cravings passed.
The service didn’t just help me quit but also gave me a safe space to speak honestly when no one else would listen.

However, while my spice use had stopped, the addiction to escape hadn’t. Half a year later, I was again struggling. I convinced myself that taking MDMA once might help reset my brain after hearing something about MDMA therapy online. This obviously didn’t work and just pulled me back into drug use. As my use worsened so did my mental health.
During my spice use I had started to develop some minor psychotic symptoms such as seeing things in my peripheral. This quickly went away after quitting. However, during this new addiction these symptoms came back much worse. I would get auditory and visual hallucinations throughout the day. Although at this point this didn’t affect my life too much, I realised there was a chance I could have a full psychotic episode.
I did not care.
After taking a large amount of what I knew to be laced LSD, I entered a full paranoid psychosis. I believed I had given myself permanent schizophrenia and instead of stopping my use, I used more to cope with the thought of ruining my own life. This only made the hallucinations and delusions unbearably worse.

At this point I realised that the only way I could ever escape from these symptoms was to stop using.

This time, I didn’t go back to the service directly as I believed I still had the tools I needed from my last experience. However, I still contacted the service occasionally with any questions and got a quick response every time. Knowing I had this support to rely on helped me a lot.

Today I am studying for my A-levels and have strong predicted grades. I still think about my past lifestyle, sometimes even with a sense of nostalgia, but I know where that path leads and I am far happier now.

Today I volunteer at the same service that helped me back when I was 14. Being able to do my bit to support people who are going through what I did means a lot to me. Asking for help didn’t make me weak, it helped me achieve a future I might not have had otherwise.