I lived on the streets in nyc from mid may to mid august it wasn’t anyone’s fault but mine. I generally just wandered around looking for pharmacies to shoplift air duster from, so I could huff my way into a brief oblivion.
I never thought I’d go back to getting high after the horror I put myself through over the winter, but I thought wrong.
so I gave up on myself… I just figured that my life was in a pit and I’d never be able to get out. My thinking was that I was built defective, unable to successfully live by nature and that there was no point in trying.
Inhalants are dangerous and they are supposed to stop your heart, but they never stopped mine. I discovered that 36th street between 7th and 8th avenue was an an open air drug marketplace/shooting gallery. It’s akin to Boston’s “methadone mile”. The cops don’t care and the sidewalks are littered with broken crack stems and the bodies of addicts too high to stand up. The dope is cheap, and I had no tolerance to opiates, so I’d panhandle up 12 bucks and get two bags to sniff. I figured it was all fentanyl anyway and with any luck I’d overdose and die. I overdosed a few times in the last week I was out on the street but always got narcanned.
the state of New York gives me 225 dollars in food stamps and 120 bucks in cash assistance every 2 weeks, it was deposited to my EBT card on 8/14. I took the long trip out to the bodega in bed-stuy, Brooklyn to sell my food stamps and get a few vials of crack from the chick there who was definitely going for the nicki minaj look.
I went back to midtown and bought some dope, some Xanax, more crack, a bit of meth and 2 cans of duster from the staples on 8th and 35th. I did all the drugs at once, and blacked out.
I don’t remember anything up until hours later I came out of the blackout with nothing but the clothes on my back. I was in front of the port authority bus terminal on one of the NYC internet kiosks chatting with a counselor on the nycwell program. I was pissed that I was still alive, but must’ve had a bit of hope since I was reaching out for help. The crisis counselor called me an ambulance that brought me to the best hospital in NYC (NY Presbyterian, Cornell).
I told the doctor that I had been trying to kill myself every day for a week and the truth of the situation had me sobbing uncontrollably. They admitted me to a locked psychiatric unit.. I think it saved my life. Something in me took over when I told the psychiatrist I needed substance abuse help, or I was going to go back to trying to check out in the garment district. It wasn’t what i normally did, I’d usually try to get discharged from the ER as quickly as possible so I could get back to my kamakaze death spiral.
so here I am, in rehab for the trillionth time. I’m in a great deal of emotional pain, but I guess I’m not as hopeless as I was 12 days ago. This is a 14–21 day program and my goal is to get placed in a long term (6 months or more) residential program. I have nothing but the clothes I had on when I took that rainbow of hard drugs, I have nowhere to go but I would still consider myself very fortunate to be alive, even though that’s not really what I wanted. People do what I was doing and die. Addicts die, that’s what we do best. I don’t know where I’m going but I know I’m not going to die today.
Originally published at https://www.tumblr.com.
