IDENTITY

I’ve always struggled with my identity
Ever since I was a child, due to cultural shenanigans, I was forced to conform to a societal norm and that really altered my perspective on my own personality.

What am I? Who am I? What defines me?

I think about that question a lot during rehab as I cope with withdrawal. High school got me thinking about self-identity a lot as that’s the time when the people around me tend to develop new personalities and/or a new identity for themselves. I really struggled to identify myself as I cared a bit too much about how others see me and all I thought about is that do people really care about what I’m actually good at, and everyone kept reminding me that I’m a junkie.

And I lived with that identity

For years, I struggled with substance abuse as I thought I found my own identity as an addict. I never found a reason to stop as I felt as if I stopped, what would people know me for? Or will I just be another nobody with nothing standing out for themselves, I’d be invisible, a leaf in the wind.

“You’re never going to get better so just die with it, dwell in your own sorrow, die in the hollow shell of a human being that you created and brutally destroyed, you’re not worth anything”. I always told myself.

That mentality kept me from reaching higher in life as I stop striving to become better and accept that my fate is to die alone, to die as a junkie, die with this identity that I never liked but I had to keep up with as people only knew me for that, or so I thought. So I developed several self-destructive behaviors to keep myself as fucked up as I was, didn’t know if it was I wanted other people’s pity or I just didn’t like myself. I’d hurt myself to feel like myself, I’d destroy whatever humanity is left inside me and live like a wild animal, without any morals or ethics, without any care for my future, I lived every day as if I was going to end it all by the end of the day. Woke up and the only thing I thought about was how I was going to fuck myself over and destroy whatever good that’s left in me, I had to be the villain. If I was never good, then I had to be the worst.

Ever since I moved to Melbourne, I wanted to change, I wanted to disappear from everyone I knew, to start a new me so that I can stop dwelling on my past. But thank god that didn’t happen, I finally have a place where I can be whoever I want to be without a constant reminder of who I was. I finally found peace within, without a voice in my head constantly reminding me that I’m a good-for-nothing, terrible human being.

I also met this person who made me believe in change. She accepted me for who I was, accepted me for my troubled past, made me believe that the past doesn’t define who I am and I am capable of change, and really made me believe that I’m better than who I thought I was. That made me stop all intentions of completely deleting my past, losing all of the things that made me who I was, instead she helped me to start learning from the past