An Overdose Story

Alive to tell the tale.

Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash

The night began like many in my world, with pockets full of pills and powders, a bar counter laden with bottles, and minds full of anticipation over the coming escape. Escape is what I lived for. It’s what drove me, what made me feel okay in my own skin, even if only momentarily.

That night it was just three of us. Or was it four? Five? Whatever the number, it was small, and small was my preference. Not that I avoided large parties or busy clubs, but I always deemed it necessary to get high or drunk first to stave off the crippling social anxiety that left me shaking and incapable of thinking clearly. Surely I could think more clearly after a few shots or a couple of pills. Surely.

Dan* was a stripper and so was I. We were always down for a good time together. In the pharmacy kitchen, we concocted a cocktail of a dangerous but entirely too common variety. After a few drinks and snorting some lines of cocaine off the counter, we added some ecstasy to the mix.

At the young age of eighteen, ecstasy had been my drug of choice for four years already. On it, depression was zapped away, I didn’t mind being touched, and love for myself brimmed over and out of me drenching everyone in my general vicinity. After the high ended…well, let’s just say the result was the polar opposite.

Dan’s house was a bachelor pad if I’d ever seen one. From the lighting to the bar to the beds to the indoor hot tub, it was designed for entertainment. We made our way through the house, dancing, drinking, snorting (and in my case vomiting), before landing in the hot tub.

As the trance music rattled our eyes into the backs of our heads, we found Ibiza on a giant world map behind the hot tub and talked about taking a trip there. An entire island known for raves, dancing, and drugs? Sign me up — it was just the paradise I longed for.

But truly, anywhere could become a paradise when I was on ecstasy. A classroom, my bedroom, with friends, alone, even during a trip to the ER. On this particular night though, certainly thanks to the combination of uppers and downers, paradise would soon be lost.

The hot tub seemed to get hotter and hotter and my face and neck began to flush. “Time to get out,” I thought, or maybe said out loud. Grabbing onto the edge of the tub, I pulled one leg over the side, and then the next. But then, as my feet hit the cold tile floor, my knees buckled and I fell to the ground.

Waves of hot and cold surged through my body. My heart raced and my thoughts became jumbled as fear filled my mind. I couldn’t get up. Dan carried me to his bed and laid me down. I recall crying loudly, but Dan later told me I hadn’t made a sound.

As I lay there shaking and sweating, or maybe just soaked from the tub still, something else happened, something all too familiar. My hands and arms started to curl in toward my body, and I flashed back to a scene from not many months earlier.

At one of my own small parties, my apartment buzzing with the same substances and then some, a neighbor fell to the floor. His face contorted, followed by his hands, arms, and feet curling up toward his body. As other party goers surrounded him, I had run to his apartment next door and hid. I couldn’t handle death — and I was fairly certain we were all about to witness it.

Thankfully not everyone there was as wretched as I, and someone far less selfish took him to the hospital. He lived to tell the tale, but as I waded through the foggy memory of that night, with my own arms and hands contorted toward my body, I wondered if I would. Dan asked if I wanted him to call 9–1–1. I shook my head.

Despite severe depression and my affinity for self harm and abusing whatever drugs were put in front of me, I didn’t want to die, in general. Unsure of what was to come, I closed my eyes and tried to slow my rapid breathing. Then I noticed the song that was playing, it was one of my favorites.

The radio was just to my right, on the bedside table. The line, “Do you know that I love you? When will we be together?” floated through the air toward my ears and into my head and found itself on repeat. An eerie peace settled over me, and I somehow fell asleep.

Even more miraculous than being able to fall asleep was that I was able to wake up. I did so groggily the next morning, and since the details of that day are clouded, I only vaguely remember the awkward silence while being driven back to my apartment.

My neighbor, Jared*, had taken his overdose as a wakeup call, one which caused him to almost entirely stop partying. His girlfriend was proud of him and cheered him on in word and deed by following suit. They had the right idea, the wise response to a drug induced near death experience. The same can’t be said for me.

No. I couldn’t choose the wise thing, because wisdom meant no longer being able to escape. And I needed to escape. There was too much to run from. Self hatred, the dark and abusive environment of the sex industry, shame, regret, broken relationships with family, imminent eviction due to not paying my bills.

And so I continued on. More parties, more drugs, more escaping. It was too late. My brain had already been rewired to choose the goal of pleasure and escapism above any other goal.

Only once I was finally forced into sobriety by incarceration a few years later would the insanity stop (at least mostly). Prison is where the proverbial smoke began to clear.

Two years into my sentence, in only a moment, the storm clouds parted and a ray of light brighter than the sun itself shone through. Jesus had come onto the scene. And as I reflected on my life and the miracle of making it out alive to tell the story, I realized something:

The night I overdosed, He was there, singing over me, “Do you know that I love you? When will we be together?”

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