Blood is King

I met a woman this past Tuesday who is the personification of this entire blog.

She sat next to me on a park bench while I was having a cigarette. Literally right beside me. Inches away. That kind of closeness usually means one of two things. Either they lack any type of social awareness, or they want to be seen. I got the sense it was the second. So I said something. Nothing heavy. Just enough to open the space. She responded. Her name was Courtney.

We started off just smoking together. Then it went deeper. She told me she was coming from CAMH (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). If you're not from Toronto, that’s a rehab and psychiatric facility. She said she was addicted to ketamine, but ketamine wasn’t her first addiction. First it was alcohol. Then opioids. Now ketamine. One drug to fight another. And now here she was, smoking next to a me on a bench after another round of trying to get clean.

I listened. I’m quite comfortable talking to strangers. What she was saying wasn’t shocking to me. She was the living proof of everything I write about.

You cannot outrun your nature. You cannot outrun yourself. You can’t fake your way through what’s in your blood. The trajectory might change for a while. The expression might look different. But it will always redirect back to where it was supposed to be.

She told me her siblings were also addicts. Her sister is currently deeply addicted to fentanyl. She told me about their childhood. About the patterns. About how one addiction replaced another. Every time she thought she had something under control, it just transformed into something else. That’s how addiction works when the real issue isn’t the substance. The thing people point at and blame is never the root. The substance is just the most visible expression of something much deeper.

I told her this directly: the fact that you’re still going to rehab means the addiction’s not finished with you, and you’re not finished with it. You don’t keep going back to something unless there’s something in you that wants it to stick around. If you think about anything in your own life that you were ever deeply into, even if it was destructive, when you were done with it, you were done. Think about relationships you've ended, habits you've dropped, drugs you would do everyday, or interests you've outgrown. When you were genuinely finished, there wasn't this constant internal battle or need for willpower. You simply weren't interested anymore. You didn’t need recovery programs or accountability partners or elaborate strategies.

She didn’t argue this. She told me about how in her clean periods, she’d lock herself in her room and learn things. She taught herself to cross-stitch. She taught herself how to invest. Kept her hands and mind full. I could see why people around her probably thought she was doing better. But the impulse was the same. Obsessive. Focused. Narrowed in. The addiction was just pointing at something else for the time being.

Mind you, this was a professional looking, middle aged white woman. She had one of those office jobs. She said she hated it. She was planning to move out of the city at the end of August, like that would fix everything. But you can’t outrun a hollow existence. You carry that with you even when the skyline changes.

The story she is telling herself about her addiction being some war she is fighting is only a half truth. The other half is that she is an addict because the life she built is meaningless. If she removes the ketamine, she is left with the thing she was avoiding: herself.

She kept talking. I kept listening. No judgment. As you know, I will never offer advice or try to play God. I’ll give her a mountain of ketamine before I tell her to go to rehab. I wasn’t looking for a story. I wasn’t trying to “learn a lesson.” I was just watching a person come face to face with the reality that many refuse to accept: you are who you are. You can put yourself in rehab. You can dress yourself in ambition. You can throw yourself into religion or love or identity politics. But you will find your way back to center.

Some people will read this and say I’m being too fatalistic. But I don’t see it that way. I think hopelessness comes from pretending we can be anything and everything. That every version of ourselves is within reach or that effort alone can make us whole.

Courtney needs to stop pretending. She needs to stop aiming at some polished version of herself she was never going to become. She needs to see the truth of what she is, and make peace with it. And maybe then will she finally “get better.”

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