Loving a drug addict is like hugging a cactus.
It hurts, and you hate it, then it blooms and the beauty of it shakes you. You don’t see the needles because the flower is so lovely, and, inevitably, you embrace it again.
I have loved an addict or two or three for the majority of my life. I’ve watched bodies waste away, change, crumble. I’ve seen eyes dark and sad, I’ve listened to the gritty sounds of detox, felt the tears of regret, hot and liquid that fall from their eyes.
I have screamed – cried tears of anger and pain, the begging, gut-wrenching pleading of my heart, the cactus loving addict hugger. I’ve hated them with a ferocity that can only be known to someone who loves an addict. With my hatred-love came the sinking, undeniable realization, that beneath the addict, is a person.
An actual, warm-blooded, living and breathing, person. Beneath the addict is someone’s child, husband, mother. Beneath the addict is a person with hopes and dreams, someone who is simply bound by an illness that too often feels so powerful, they can’t overcome it.
Beneath both the needle scars and the invisible ones, lies someone who was once a small child. That person was a pastor’s kid, a governor’s wife. That cactus was a minister themselves. Addiction sees no race, gender, or background. It cares not about one’s press page or list of achievements or Golden Globes. No, it sees only a person with a willingness to try.
In the midst of watching the addicts I love continue to choose their drug over me, in the throes of grief and pain, I would raise my hands to the heavens and cry out, “Why, why, why?”. Why won’t they change, why can’t they see, how do I fix them?
