Addiction vs. Happiness

Dalton - Clay Center, Kansas
Entered on May 26, 2009
Age Group: Under 18
  • Bellarmine University — Education, unabridged

I believe in happiness. Although it’s an emotion I can experience at anytime, happiness means so much more to me.

In August of 2007, I began my never-ending battle with depression. It was the beginning of my sophomore year, and life at home was anything but amiable. I constatnly felt alone and dejected. Superfluous was the only was to describe my life. I had only one close friend, while everyone else felt like mere acquaintances. Any person who paid attention could tell I wasn’t the happy-go-lucky Dalton that I once was. People tried to interject themselves and make me smile, but I just got annoyed by them. I thought, “Why can’t they just leave me alone? It’s bad enough with the ‘rents breathing down my neck, but now my classmates?! Why can’t I just be unhappy for awhile?”

As I soon found out, my friend illness came with an even nastier friend. His name, Addiction. For me, addiction brought a blade and a bag of band-aids. This may sound wierd and psychologically unstable, but the cold blade piercing my skin felt utterly invigorating. Cutting helped me bring what I felt inside to a main focus point on the outside. I’m not a hundred percent sure,but it either distracted my emotions or gave me something to look at and a physical reason to feel the way I did.

Anyway, life got harder and harder. Cutting became worse too. I not only did it when I was depressed, but just because I wanted to. I guess that’s why they call it addiction?

Just as I thought there was no going back, things started to turn around. I began therapy and wrote a short story of my adventures with my two bad influencing “friends.”

In May of 2008, I cut for the last time. It was the worst I had ever cut, but it was the last. As I write this, it is May of 2009. That’s right! One year of sobriety!!

Depression stops by every once in a while to say hello, but never stays long. Addiction, on the other hand, well he packed his things and moved from my bedside drawer. As for me, whenever I’m down, happiness is always around the bend of my small Kansas town.