Content note: this post talks about cocaine and heroin use and long-term recovery. No details on use.
Sixteen years. I don't throw a party. I'm not even sure I could tell you the exact day without checking. Which might be the best sign of all: it stopped being the thing my life is organised around.
People ask what life is like after sixteen years clean like there's a big reveal. There isn't. It's quieter. The drugs stop being the centre. Cravings are rare and short, and the risk of relapse is much lower than in the early years, though it's never zero. What doesn't magically disappear is whatever was underneath. For me, that's depression, anger, fear of going out, a brain I only started to understand when I was diagnosed autistic at 50. Sixteen years clean means I get to deal with those things sober. That's the deal, and it's a good one, but it's not a happy ending in a movie.
Is relapse still a risk after sixteen years?
Lower. Not zero.
The Recovery Research Institute, a research group at Massachusetts General Hospital, says that at around five years of remission, the risk of relapse drops to about the same as anyone else's in the general population. It also estimates that between 42% and 66% of people with a substance use disorder reach full remission, though it can take time.
I find that encouraging. I also don't lean on it too hard. If I went back to heroin after sixteen years, my tolerance would be gone, and that's how people die. I wrote about why relapse after years clean is so dangerous. I don't keep that post for other people. I keep it for me.
What do the cravings feel like now?
Like a stranger knocking once in a while. I don't answer, and he leaves.
Stress brings them up. So does good news, weirdly, because part of my brain still links success with the old way of celebrating, or with wrecking things before they can go right. A smell, a song. They're short. They pass. I wrote the long version in do cravings ever go away?
The boring part is the good part
My days now are honestly pretty dull from the outside. Coffee. Work. Writing. A walk if I can make myself go. The lake, the trees, the long Québec winter. Photos. Games I'm designing that may or may not ever see the light of day.
When I was using, there was always a plan, a crisis, a hustle, a crash. My nervous system got used to that, and for a while after I stopped, ordinary life felt like a punishment. Now it feels like a place I get to live. I didn't expect boring to feel like a gift. It does.
What didn't change
I want to be straight here, because the internet is full of recovery stories where everything is fixed by year five.
I still have robplosions. I still have stretches of depression. I still have a hard time leaving the house some weeks, and my close friends are still far away, none of them close enough for a coffee. Sandra, my partner, lives with all of this, and that's not nothing. I still start things with massive energy and then crash. I still sabotage good things.
The drugs were never the whole problem. They were how I was managing a brain I didn't understand. If your use was covering something too, look at dual diagnosis and was I self-medicating undiagnosed autism?. Getting off drugs gave me a chance to actually look at what was underneath. It didn't make it go away.
The shame doesn't fully leave either
There are people from those years who aren't in my life anymore. Some I hurt. Some I just lost. I think about that more than I let on.
Shame was part of what kept me using. Feeling like garbage, using to stop feeling like garbage, feeling worse. What's helped is learning to look at the guy I was back then with a bit less disgust. He was in pain and he had bad tools. That's not an excuse. It's just true.
Gabor Maté's book on addiction, written from his years as a doctor in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, was part of how I got there. I lived in Vancouver for years, so it hit close. Read it as one way of seeing addiction, not the final word:
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
Gabor Maté
My take. A Vancouver doctor who treated people the rest of the city stepped over. Compassion first. Hit close to home.
Good to know. His 'trauma causes all addiction' model is debated by researchers. Read it as one lens, not the whole truth.
What I'd tell someone at year one
Year one is not what year ten looks like. Don't judge the whole thing by how you feel now.
Keep the support going longer than you think you need it, whatever that is for you: a doctor, therapy, a group like Narcotics Anonymous or SMART Recovery, a person you can be honest with. Treat the stuff underneath. And when it gets boring, try to notice that boring might be the point.
In Québec, Drogue : aide et référence is there 24/7 at 1 800 265-2626 if you're struggling, at year one or year ten. In the US, the SAMHSA National Helpline is 1-800-662-4357.