All I was doing was working, flogging a dead horse. However, my life was a mess on all levels. But the results were always the same, I would get my work done no better or faster, my amazing ideas remained just that- ideas. This is where the real insanity started, for the next ten years I would consume copious amount of Cat while working ridiculous hours on all sorts of things, office work, personal goals and dreams, ideas etc. Basically it was exactly what I was looking for, staying awake working like a machine into the unpleasant long hours of the night when normal people were sleeping, I could design societies greatest buildings while understanding this in explainable habit of drug taking that caused people to go crazy and steal their mother’s TV. Here was a drug that I could apply to work/’bettering’ myself and to understanding the mysticism of why people get addicted to a little bag of powder. Going to Joburg to get back into architecture and taking Cat was the trigger. However I was still in control of my ‘teenage’ thoughts, drugs were bad, it was recreational and I could distance myself but the effects of drugs and alcohol had taken root- ‘they could change me’. Watching a friend spiral into cocaine addiction made me realise that the strongest people can get addicted but my mind still couldn’t figure out why. However, the stigma that it was cool and chilled made me try relentlessly to overcome and get on top of it.ĭuring and after varsity it was the powerful effects of E and cocaine that got me to realise the power of drugs. The effects of weed was something enormously powerful and one which I distinctly did not enjoy. Then it was drinking and smoking weed with my mates in my later teens. My stepbrother was smoking weed which too was wow. Wow, this was great I thought, every ‘normal person’ does it and it’s so cool unlike my parents who’ve never been drunk in my lifetime. For this reason the concept of drugs took root in my life- being in a different state of mind was what I was looking for because it would make me better that what I was.Īctually doing it though started at the age of around 14 at a Christian guest farm which we would go to each year on holiday when I got drunk for the first time. I was not these things though, I was just a normal person yet I wouldn’t accept this. These thoughts were scattered from healthy ones of being anything I wanted to be to unhealthy ones of wanting to be the best and be different and cool and and, a neutral one being that I needed to understand this drug thing, it had affected my mom and my brother- my actual response years later would be far from healthy. So now I was questioning my normal life and slowly questioning things like who I was and what I wanted to be and could be which are normal teenage thoughts. Things quickly changed with my parents getting divorced and before that the ambulances came to my house a few times after my mom had overdosed on pills, secondly my older brother (by 7 years) was seriously rebellious and by the age my Dad remarried (around 14) had embarked on a very serious drug addiction that would follow him for the next 20+ years. We grew up in a normal suburb in Cape Town and did normal things growing up and grew up a happy, satisfied kid. I came from a very loving, ‘normal’ family- my parents were strong Christians who made my childhood as comfortable as one could. It all started so paradoxically with my childhood. I slowly but surely got so attached to drugs that in the end it had engulfed me and I got to the end of the road where I had to choose, if I don’t change this now I’ll be one for the next 38 years or in other words for the rest of my life (knowing that if I continued I’d be lucky to reach that age). My relationship with drugs can best be described as a tortoise and the hare story with me being the tortoise.

Well, at 38 years of age I look back and realize I’ve been a drug addict for well over 20 years. What was the insanity of my life before recovery?

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