'We are all the same, us addicts, and there are far more of us than people would like to admit'

I am a recovering addict.

People never seem to believe me when I say that. Not you, they think, with your degree from Trinity and your nice clothes and your lovely, middle-class parents and your primary school teacher sister. You can’t be an addict.

I believe that I don’t fit their idea of what a person struggling with addiction looks like because I don’t live on the streets, because a fragile veneer of respectability covers the cracks in my psyche.

As a society, we often try and ‘other’ addicts. We talk about ‘those’ people in a manner that is often simply a desperate attempt to create distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

It is a way of reassuring ourselves that the spectre of addiction could never visit upon us or our friends and family because we are intrinsically different to the frantic souls roaming the city streets, pupils pinpricked, their hands out-stretched with wanting.

It is easier for us to believe that we are somehow better.

But we’re not. We are all the same.

I understand the voracious hunger that hollows out your stomach, a hunger that you can spend a lifetime trying to satisfy.

I understand the need, the need, the need, oh the need that will break your bones and cut out your tongue.

I understand the gnawing restlessness that would have you walk a thousand miles and still crackle in your veins.

The only difference between me and ‘those people’ is that I had parents who refused to allow me to fall through the cracks and wallow in the underworld. I received appropriate treatment. I had access to therapists and psychiatrists and doctors. I had money.

But money is no real protection in the end. We are all the same, us addicts, and there are far more of us than people would like to admit. We are addicted to food, to sex, to shopping, to gambling, to drink, to drugs, to television, to our iPhones, to work, to busyness.

We are addicted to anything that distracts us from life. We see negative emotions looming before us — disappointment, boredom, sadness, frustration, jealousy, despair — and we rush to find something, anything that will keep us from truly experiencing them. In a world of instant gratification and where appearances are everything, our ability to withstand discomfort looks like it is rapidly decreasing.

That was my personal modus operandi for years. When I lost a family member at the age of 14 and the pain felt too savage to withstand, I discovered that food was an effective, if highly dysfunctional, way of managing that pain. Over time I began to use my eating disorder as a way of numbing out completely.

I was endlessly pleasant, calm, and inoffensive. I never got angry or upset. I never cried. I lived life in a state of nothingness, painting myself in beige. I never felt sad but I never felt happy either. I never felt very much at all.

I have been in recovery for five years now. While not a seamless, linear progression, my recovery has been accompanied with a series of triumphs, both professionally and personally. I have faced few obstacles. Nothing has ever tested my newfound dedication to ‘feeling my feelings’, as my long-suffering therapist would say.

Until recently. Until grief came and made its home in me.

It was my own fault. I pretended to be clean, to be sterile. I pretended to have no needs of my own to avoid seeming needy. And then it all became too much. I was thinking too much and not writing enough.

So I stood still.

This is what I need, I said, this is what I want.

And I let go of the acrobat’s swing, reaching into the thin air. Reaching into emptiness. I fall, whispering I made a mistake, I’m sorry, I take it back. Don’t go.

I am felled by the pain. I lie prone on a hotel bed, listening to my heart cracking inside my chest. Sobs claw their way out of my throat, talons sharp, until I can taste blood in my mouth.

Logically I am aware that the sadness is disproportionate to the actual event, that it seems exaggerated, almost comical. In a strange way it is as if, somehow, every hurt of the last 17 years has been nestled in my body, hiding, waiting until I was ready.

They emerge all at once, pooling in my lungs. I cannot breathe with it.

And there is Addiction, waiting for me, sharpening his teeth with a rusty blade. Making Faustian promises of relief from the onslaught, if only I will hold his hand. It is tempting, god it is tempting, but I turn my back on him. It is the first in almost two decades that I have done so.

I sit with the pain. I nurse it to me. I allow it to fill my belly. I call upon my army of warrior women and they surround me gladly, willing to listen. We stand shoulder to shoulder and I cry in front of them, allowing them to see me as messy and incomplete rather than ‘perfect’.

I allow myself to be vulnerable. And, paradoxically, I discover what strength lay in that.

I couldn’t have imagined in the aching and the yearning of heartbreak, everything would come into focus; that the edges of the world would seem to solidify before my eyes. And that I would remember what it felt like to be truly alive.

Thirty-one is a little old to learn these lessons. It’s probably too old to cry with the abandon of a child over losing what I thought was the missing jigsaw piece to my happiness.

I cannot help it. The grief is hot and fierce but I embrace it until I catch light, until I sizzle in its flames. I am on fire with it.

But I feel alive, oh so alive.

I burn. And I burn. And I burn.

* Louise O’ Neill is from Clonakilty. Her latest novel, Asking For It, was named the overall book of the year at the Irish Book Awards.