Ever since I can remember, I have always dealt with addiction in my family. While I am not one, I have never not been surrounded by addicts whether they be active or in recovery. This is both a blessing and a curse. This has giving me the opportunity to understand how addicts work in a sense, but not fully, so I can help them in the future when I graduate and go to school for social work. But the downside to it all is what I had to go through watching my father and sister as active addicts.

Active addicts are not very easy to live with. They make life very hard and sometimes you just want to escape it all. They leave without notice and don’t come back for hours or even days. You’re left worried sick that they may have been taken and trafficked, or overdosed and died.

They steal, lie, and sneak around. They aren’t who they were when they were sober and clean and that is the most heartbreaking part of it all. You try and break through to them but you can’t because they are so over taken by the alcoholism or the drug addiction that who they once were is gone. You try to break through but you get shut out and told to go away. You can’t save them until they are ready to be saved, and you can’t see them as how they used to be until they’re clean and sober.

Addicts in recovery are much easier to live with, sometimes. It all depends on how they handle sobriety. If they are very serious and have a grip on who they are and know they never want to pick up the glass or the needle again, they are easy to live with. If they are constantly relapsing, it makes life a lot harder. It is almost as if you are living with the active addict again. You see their patterns before you do. You see the pattern that leads to more self-destruction. You watch their patterns and can almost pinpoint an exact day that they’re going to pick up whatever they can never put down again. It’s almost as heartbreaking as watching them be active.

So to all the addicts out there, active, in recovery, or somewhere in between, I have a message for you: you can do it, you can get clean or sober, or both. You can be who you once were again. You can be the happy person who loved spending time with family again. Once in recovery, you are no longer the person that used to steal, lie, sneak around, etc. You are you again. You have to find yourself and your happiness. You can be you again, and once you are yourself, your family will be ecstatic. You may not be able to be the old you 100%, but as the sister and daughter of addicts, I can tell you that seeing your family members being clean and sober is better than any Christmas gift in the world.