I come from a very disfunctional family, one full of physical and sexual abuse.  I learned at a very young age how to disconnect from reality by disassociating.  Before I knew it I was doing this all the time, and it was like a high all on its own.  When I was ten my brother intruduced me to sniffing gas and other sulvents, when that wasn't enough I found pot, acid and speed.  I did that for a number of years and also was heavily into drinking by then and was fast becoming alcoholic.  By the time I was 14 I found out that I no longer wanted to drink but needed to.  Our parents had made their final split after many such splits and left my brother and I to fend for our selves.  I went to work at an old age home earning minimum wage, witch wasn't enough to keep me going in drugs so I hooked on the side.  I needed to pay the bills some how and I wasn't able to do it on the wage I was getting.  Anyway then cocain enters the picture because I figured it was more Glamorous than injecting speed all the time, but I soon found out you could inject that to.  I think up in till I was 19 I tryed every street drug known to man, and it was all about trying to bury the pain that I felt inside of me.  I was never good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, worthy enough, and etc,  and surely God could never ever loved a sinner like me.  I felt so removed from myself that I had absolutely no self worth and had very little regard for my fellow humans either.  Whenever I slept with a stranger I would zone out or I would try to get them way more wasted than me and rob them and tell myself that I needed to get my fix and survive.   I had been doing a lot of street fighting and fighting in bars and the scary thing about it was that I was very mean and very good at fighting.  So I took my anger out on a lot of innocent people and never felt in the least bit sorry about it.  I would fight out of fear as well.  When I felt that you where threatening my supply of dope or my way of getting that dope that at the time I so desperately needed I would drop you in your tracks.  Or if you threatened someone that I thought I cared about,  but who am I kidding I think in those days anything would of set me off.  When I was 19 I moved to BC from ONT thinking that I could maybe start over but that just started something new for me prescription drugs.  Another thing I should mention is that I was also addicted to men and could not function without them the only thing about that was that they were all abusive and that in turn made me more abusive to everybody around me. I found that I could munipulate men into keeping me in all the drugs and booze I wanted at a cost.  I began to loose what little self esteem I had.    When I moved to B.C. I did everything B.C.  like logging, fishing and working on the coast and in the bush.  The whole time i did drugs and was alcoholic.  I was also young and stupid and got in with the biker crowd and was druged with ruffies and gang raped at the age of 21.  This set off a serious bought with drinking and druging not to mention the ptsd and the depression.  After this I became a work alcoholic and more than ever befor into drugs and boose,  although I could keep it together where I worked.  This is the way it went for many years before it wore me down.  When my mother died and my relationship ended with Glen someone I had been with for 13ys.  I became so obsessed with doing drugs and drinking that it began to spill over into my work and people began to notice.  I didn't care because at the time all I could think about was the gang rape and the abuse.  This absolutely along with a lot of other scarry shit filled my brain and would not stop taunting me.  It was all I could think about and I lived in absoulute fear of what I would do to myself next.  This was the beginning of many many overdoses and self harm to the extent that I was always pushing the limits.  I wasn't happy unless I was doing the chicken from drugs, I would always have to do the extra amount that would cause me to overdose or have a siezure.  If I had any kind of little sore on my body I would pick at it until it became a major wound.  Or I would inflict major wounds on my body by cutting, burning or hitting myself, sometimes breaking my fingers. I did this because I had absolutely no selfworth and felt that noone could possibly care for me.  Every man I had ever picked in my life was abusive and it also seemed as if I myself was a target for every kind of prick out there.  I went on like this for 33 yrs of my life. 
Because of my lifestyle and the abuse I suffered I was left sterile and generally very screwed up inside requiring a lot of surgery which supplied me with tons of morphine, diludid, oxycontin, and just about any pain killer I could think of that as long as you could cook it down and inject it I could talk any Dr. out of it.  I began to get sloppy and ended up spending more on dope than I made in a month and ended up cracking up a bunch of cars and myself.  At this stage of my life at about 40 I ended up living in a crack shack that had wall to wall IV drug users on the first floor and crack and meth users on the second.  I lost almost 100lbs and got so addicted to pain killers and heroin that I was spending 500 a day on dope. 
Anyway that behavior went on for another 8yrs.  For the last 2yrs I have been struggling to stay clean.  I have not touched a drop of alcohol in over 2 years and I have been heroin free for over 2 years I would of been pain killer free to but I had emergency bowel surgery and had a slip on pain killers for about a month or two more like two.  But I'm back now and am trying very hard to leave the pot alone.  I know I have a ways to go but if I have come this far with the help of the NA program and AA and all the support of the people I meet along the way I think I can maybe make it.  If I had anything to tell someone younger than me who is looking at maybe taking that first drink or drug Is I pray u find another way to have what u think is going to be fun.  What you are about to do is find out if you are one of us, to find out if you can take it or leave it and God help you if you can't leave it. I couldn't leave it and it nearly killed me in so many disgusting ways.  God help you make the right choice.