Learning to be sober and alone

Entertaining myself has always been a challenge. When I left my ex-husband, I moved into my first real home that belonged only to me. When I first got the keys, I walked to the middle of the empty room, sat down, and took it in: wide open windows, high ceilings, white walls, and an exciting emptiness that promised room for growth, for new memories, for a new depth. I sat on the floor and thought, I did it. I did the one thing I was most afraid of: I left him.

But before I had the strength to leave him, I had years of painful reflection ahead of me, and it felt like it would never end. Like I'd never be able to change. Like I'd never be able to leave him. And then the pandemic hit. And so the darkest of days began.

My days began to blend together as I attempted to create a tolerable life while trapped in the early-pandemic world of fear with a man I was desperately trying to leave. I'd wake up, make a cup of green tea, start my lofi beats, and change from my pjs to a T-shirt and joggers. I'd check emails from my suddenly at-home job and wonder how long this would last and how long I could last. And every day, not too long after I awoke, I would start my morning kratom ritual.

I'm often surprised when people haven't heard of kratom. It's a legal, common drug--more common nowadays--that can be purchased at nearly any gas station or convenience store, in pill or powder form. It's easily accessible, dangerously so. Packaged with trendy branding and marketed as a safe supplement. It's a drug I've been using and addicted to, on and off, for many years. Back in the day, around 2015, doctors would prescribe painkillers with an ease that shocks me now. As a person with chronic spine issues that began in childhood and worsened in my 20s, I was frequently prescribed hydrocodone, month after month, without physical exams, tests, or other treatments offered.

The irony was that I was in constant pain, but the hydrocodone did almost nothing for it. Yet I took the pills once a day, every day, after lunch to help get me through my then-retail job. I grew to look forward to the pill, and every day I stayed in that job where I was harassed on a daily basis, I grew to look forward to it more and more. Swallowing the pill became cathartic, my first ritual. The euphoria would hit me in 30 minutes or less, and it would last about two hours. I learned to love that feeling. That relief I got from my own depression, my own boredom, my own intrusive thoughts, my own brain. Things that bothered me didn't bother me as much. And when it was over, I'd look forward to it the next day.

But I always had a handle on my fondness for the drug. I never took more than one a day, and when I ran out, I intentionally would wait a month or two before requesting a refill. Sometimes much longer. I wanted to prove, both to myself and to the doctors, that I wasn't addicted. That it was a tool I sometimes used. And I never did become addicted to hydrocodone.

I learned how addiction really feels years later.

At my next job, a writing and editing desk job, I woke up one day and felt an unfamiliar numbness in my toe. By noon, that numbness had spread up my leg to my thigh. A month later, I was healing from spine surgery, taking high levels of oxycodone on a daily basis. No one warned me about addiction. No one told me how to safely taper my daily doses as the pain started to go down. So one day, I simply stopped taking them. Then the withdrawal began.

For about two days, I was anxious, almost paranoid, and sleep deprived. I was nauseous and feverish. And the worst part: the bugs. The feeling of bugs crawling under my skin, making me want to rip my flesh off and see what was moving underneath. And I knew it was withdrawal even though I hadn't experienced it before. Even though I had been taking the oxy at its prescribed dosage. Even though I, genuinely, wasn't abusing the medication and even though I genuinely needed it for the pain. Yet I remember feeling shame. I remember feeling bad, wrong, like I had misused the substance and was being punished for it.

Months later, the pain would still come in and out. The surgery positively changed my life, but I still had unaddressed pains that weren't so easily calmed by stretching or massages. This is where the kratom began.

Doctors finally had started clamping down on pain killer prescriptions, so my then-husband suggested kratom, the substance that helped his co-worker's back pain.

This became my new pain reliever, and eventually, my new form of coping.

The way kratom makes me feel is easy to describe: relaxed, euphoric, talkative, confident, energetic, and focused. These were the years leading up the pandemic--my kratom addiction going in and out as I started taking it every day. Then twice a day. Sometimes three times a day.

At my very worst in 2020, I was spending hundreds of dollars a month on the substance and taking so much that I was getting heart palpitations and throwing up multiple days a week due to the high volume I was ingesting. But if I didn't take these higher doses, I didn't feel the high anymore. I was faced with stopping the substance that had quietly become my own antidepressant--the thing I looked forward to, the substance that kept me going--or continuing to make myself sick every day trying to reach a happiness that was inaccessible to me otherwise. Even then, I didn't want to admit that I had an addiction.

At various points over the years, I'd quit kratom and be fine without it. I'd allow my body to reset so I could quietly come back a few months later, feeling the high yet again. It wasn't until a couple years ago when I finally had intended to quit it for good. More research was coming out on how dangerous this substance can be, and I had felt its dangers myself.

And in November of 2023, after a year of being sober curious and tired of seeking the highs of kratom and alcohol, I decided 2024 would be my sober year. Sure, I'd still smoke weed, but I'd give up alcohol and kratom, the two things I knew were most destructive in my life. So I did.

And I had intended to keep that Cali sobriety going into 2025. Until my entire life turned upside down.

I was laid off from my job of seven years in early 2024. Not too long after, my main friend group, including my two best friends of eight years, quietly stopped being friends with me until they disappeared altogether, leaving me alone as my life continued to tumble downhill. By 2025, I had been chronically ill for over two years without many answers or treatments, and I was fighting daily fatigue, nausea, migraines, severe malaise, fainting, sensory sensitivity, and low-grade fevers. Over the course of a couple months, I lost 20 pounds and was worrying those around me, my ribs, spine, and chest sticking out sharply against my skin. I was being told blood cancer was a possibility while also being told in the same week that my 13-year-old corgi and best friend--who had recently started having seizures--likely had a brain tumor. Then, mid summer of 2025, I had to exit the one community I had left, and while I didn't lose all of those friends, I lost the comfort of a space I'd grow to love.

Then in May of 2025, my partner of five years and I had a fight, and he hung up on me, ghosted me for eight days, and then broke up with me. It activated my anxious attachment style to the highest degree. Nothing was going right. Everything was breaking around me. A day or two after the breakup, we started having sex again, hanging out again, being "normal" again, but without answers, without clarity, without labels. I began a damaging cycle with him: I'd pretend he didn't tell me the romantic part of our relationship wasn't working and instead hear him saying he still loved me while we had sex. I'd cling to him for survival. I'd cling to him for comfort. Then after about two or three days, I'd remember what he had said. That he'd broken up with me. That this wasn't real. And I'd break down: wailing and sobbing harder than I'd ever had before: suicidal ideations present and the feeling that I was frozen and couldn't move, think, or talk. Even despite having left a marriage, this was possibly the most pain I'd ever been in, and I wasn't sure I could survive it.

The worst part was knowing that my biggest comfort was also my biggest source of pain.

I struggle with being alone in my thoughts. Especially when I'm depressed. When I'm anxious. When my OCD is un-ignorable. When my self-harm tendencies come back. And with my anxious attachment style being activated so severely that I became borderline suicidal. So I started drinking again this year. I started using kratom again. The cycle started. Again.

I have always felt shame around the idea of addiction. Around the idea that I have relied on something so much that I need it. And while I don't feel that with alcohol, I have, at times, felt it with kratom. I do, in many ways, feel it with weed. The solitude of my own thoughts in my brain can be so overwhelming at times that I desperately just want to shut it off at times.

It wasn't until a few months ago when the suicidal ideations got so bad that I knew my methods of coping weren't cutting it anymore. My psychiatrist has been softly encouraging me to try antidepressants for a couple years now, and I've always resisted. I finally recognized that I needed to relent and give antidepressants a try, but one of my first questions was, "Can I keep taking kratom with it?"

She said no, which made me anxious. I replied, "But kratom is the only thing keeping me afloat right now."

It took my psychiatrist, who I am so thankful for, finally saying, "Jourden, I know you've gotten used to depending on your own methods of coping for your depression for a long time now. But I'm asking you to please give this a try. Truly try it and trust the process. I think you'll be surprised at what may happen."

And so I did. I trusted the process. I did all of the things you're supposed to do when you're depressed and when going through a breakup, a loss, and multiple big life changes. I started going to therapy twice a week. I started the antidepressants and stuck with them. I journaled and used this blog to write about my experience. I took off work when I could and needed to. I expressed when and how I needed support from those around me. I leaned on my mom. I started doing ketamine treatments with my psychiatrist. I read the books: "Attached" by Amir Levine, "The Let Them Theory" by Mel Robbins, and "The No Contact Rule" by Natalie Lue. I joined support groups on Facebook and saved inspiring posts and quotes. I asked friends for their favorite empowering playlists. I spoke affirmations. I healed. I prepared.

And through all of this, I feel like I'm finally finding myself for the first time.

The real me. The one who has been waiting for me to be ready along. Ready to leave a relationship that isn't serving me. Ready to leave a concrete room that I thought I'd be confined to forever. Ready to chose healing over suffering. I chose the word "build" as my word of the year for 2025, and at first, it felt like everything was breaking around me. Like I'd never build.

Then I remembered that sometimes we have to demolish in order to make space for the new. To make space to build. To make space to heal.

And now, I'm doing the hard demolishing. I'm doing the hard healing.

And I'm ready to build.