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No, I didn't grow up like he did, and I'm much older.
But I understand him & what he is dealing with.
I too have a problem with alcohol & weed. I KNOW that I have a problem. My problem has impacted my motivation, my work ethic, my employment, my relationships & my parenting.
When I was exactly Josh's age, I tried cocaine for the first time. I basically became an insta-junkie & my already precarious life came crashing down around me. Luckily, for me, I had a father who was willing to give me one last shot after 5 years of addiction struggles & failures (during which time I always worked by the way, despite leaving college & working shit jobs in large part because of drinking & smoking as well as clinical depression I refused to face realistically). So after approximately one month as a cocaine addict, I headed off to rehab for the second time, knowing it was my last chance as my family would cut me off if I failed). I succeeded, mostly. I have not touched cocaine in nearly 16 years. For a year I did not drink & I did not smoke weed for over a year. I turned my life around, met my wife who got pregnant and I prepared to return to school after 6 years. I did, and I finished, with much better grades. But I continued to drink & smoke weed, and I still do to this day.
Part of me knows that I shouldn't. But part of me resents that I can't get certain jobs because of how society views my habits (while popular culture continues to celebrate them). I know that on many levels I fail my children with my use, but on other levels I am a more loving, supportive & caring father than most & that LOVE is more important than money when it comes to raising children. Plenty of rich people with no substance addictions are terrible people and parents. But their money shields them. That's not an excuse, it's reality. Addiction is a much stronger barrier to those of us towards the bottom of the pyramid than it is for those towards the top.
So that separates me from Josh, but what I understand deeply is the struggle and inability to stop doing something you know you should stop even as it affects my ability to earn what society deems God: money. I can't even begin to explain to you how it feels, but I can say that, despite my struggles & inabilties, I AM a good person. I AM a smart person. I AM a loving and good father, husband, son and brother. I have value as a person and my inabilities are not permission for any of you or anyone else in the world to judge me, to hold me in contempt, or to speak on my value as a human being.
I am often ashamed, but I refuse to despise myself in a society like this that places value on what it places value on. I refuse to let the success of others erode my self esteem. I refuse to let the judgment of others beat me down. What you or anyone else thinks is irrelevant if you have not walked in my shoes or lived in my mind, felt with my heart or heard with my soul. I refuse to see my life as less valuable because of my bad habits & the hypocrisy of a society built on death, destruction and substance abuse, a society that wages a hypocritical war on "drugs" while leaving those of us with certain dispositions and behaviors behind because they do not serve the interests of others. In a society whose financial bloodstream is fed by cocaine addled millionaires, whose social life is driven by alcohol soaked gatherings and whose ultimate demise will come from the most dangerous addiction of them all, power, I refuse to allow you to call me stupid, to call me a bad parent or a person or to stand in judgment of my choices.
And hopefully this refusal will eventually help me set aside or mitigate my habits & do better. But even if I die a drunken mess, I lived and I had value. ________________________________________________________________ whenever you did these things to the least of my brothers you did them to me
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