Love Lessons from a Junkie

I slowly cruise my pickup truck loaded with supplies, pulling into the desolate main drag of Spruce Pine at 9 p.m. on a frigid December night. Shops on the upper side of the road are brightly lit with Christmas decorations amidst a dire background of storm debris piles. The backside of the buildings open into a lower street facing the railroad tracks, and beneath that, the river swelled so high it swept everything out of the restaurants and stores, leaving gaping holes where doors and windows once protected the festivities inside.  

A small group of people are unloading contracting supplies from the only other vehicle on the barren street. I’m looking for Jason who says he lives in an apartment above the El Ranchero. I see him emerge from a dark staircase, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his hoodie, pulling his ball cap down tightly. He’s skinny and a little hunched over, walking with a bit of a Suboxone shuffle. 

I first talked to him this morning after a friend told me about him needing a place to stay. His FEMA vouchers ran out at midnight, leaving him back in the cold, moldy windowless apartment with a buddy heater and his belongings strewn across the floors. He was babbling incoherently, crying through his explanations of navigating the FEMA system. Someone was offering him a camper, but he had nowhere to put it. He had no money and had missed the FEMA inspection because he had gotten a ride to Burnsville trying to seek help. He said he didn’t even have money for a bar of soap. I found him a campground for $500 a month but what I didn’t know is that he gets housing assistance, which won’t pay for that. I have clients all day, so I give him a phone number for someone who can help, and promises that I’ll see him later.

I first met a woman in the Ingles parking lot to give her warm layers and sleeping bags for the volunteers who arrived without enough layers for sleeping in tents. I found my way to apartments downtown Burnsville to deliver dog food, propane tanks, sleeping bags and cleaning supplies for a couple staying in a camper that was running out of heating fuel. Then I met a woman in the bank parking lot to give her a chainsaw for her husband to help their community clear trees. 

Donation centers are closed for the night, so I go into Ingles to get Jason a toothbrush, soap, shampoo, fried chicken, salsa, ships and a box of cookies, using my DSNAP card. He called me earlier to tell me where he was and was so upset and trying to make sense of his strong emotions. “It’s been a couple awful days, and I’ve been crying my eyes out,” he tells me. “Thank you for helping me. I’m not used to anyone being nice.” 

He tells me that he hates to bother anyone and tries not to be around people because he knows they can’t stand being around him for too long, so he just tries to stay out of the way. He has no driver’s license so he relies on rides.

Now he walks toward me and looks so distraught I ask him if I can hug him. He bursts into tears, nodding yes and falls into my arms, clutching me tightly like a shaking broken child. We rock as I hold him and I already feel the angst of an unloved little boy, although he is 32. He is utterly grateful that I’m here, and he confesses that it has nothing to do with what’s in my pockets. We go to my truck where I pull out things I think he will need in case he gets the camper. A camp stove, small propane tanks, sleeping bags, water jugs and gloves. We carry these things up the narrow staircase where he shows me around his apartment littered with his belongings, the damp smell of mold from the carpets, fringed with cigarette smoke. He’s packing his things and someone will come by later to bring him back to the motel. “You don’t mind the cigarette, do you?” he asks apologetically even though it’s his place. 

I’m tired and have more things to drop, but he begins explaining how he has no self-love and his mama used to say things to him when he was little like, “You’re just like your dad!” He says, “I didn’t know what she meant, but I knew it wasn’t because she was being nice.” 

Even as an adult, he never felt comfortable around her and didn’t even want to use the bathroom if she was in the next room where he would listen for her snoring, and if it stopped, he would leave. She never did anything bad, but just weird things, he says, changing the subject. 

“She would put me outside on a night cold like this and lock the doors,” he said. “I was 5 and it was a school night. I didn’t know what to do. It was so cold.”

He goes on about how he’s got mental illness, been diagnosed with severe ADHD and other things. He shows me what the doctor gave him, and the paper says bipolar, depression, scoliosis, neck pain, tight chest, insomnia, nicotine dependent, cannabis abuse and opioid dependence. He’s trying to get disability but admits he doesn’t have a good advocate. 

He describes always having a hard time in school. He talks so fast that he can’t keep up with himself, jumps from thought to thought and forgets what he was saying, which clearly frustrates him. His sentences are interrupted with abrupt tears. He tells me that so many times he’s thought about ending it all and begins sobbing as he describes wanting to blow his brains out with his mama’s 9 mm. “I’m not afraid of death,” he says. He describes as a kid how he would wake up and just immediately feel sadness. “It would be the first thing that hit me as soon as I opened my eyes. Nothing even happened. I would just be so sad.” 

He doesn’t have a lot of memories of his dad but describes riding into the woods on the 4-wheeler and smelling the gas, and when dad would leave him alone, he would sit there just sniffing that gas because it made him feel happy. He said he didn’t know he was huffing, and that for a while he thought being with his dad is what made him happy, but it was just the gas. 

We sink onto the edge of a futon as he tells me how he suffered domestic violence from his last relationship. He says he thinks she kept hitting him because he never would hit her back, even leaving him with a broken nose. “People laugh in my face when I tell them she beat me, but I wouldn’t hit her back!” he says with pleading eyes. I assure him that he is a good man not to have hit her back. 

“I don’t even know you, but I feel you, and you are kind,” I tell him. He cries and thanks me, saying people don’t say those things to him, and that he does understand when you know someone is good. “You are,” he says. “I feel your kindness.”  I gather him close again, hold his head like I would my son, and I tell him he is worthy of love. “You are beautiful Jason.” He cries and thanks me. He truly is. 

He tells me that the best thing to do when things get that bad is walk away - not hit. He tells me all he wants is love and that he doesn’t think he’ll ever have that but whenever he’s been in a relationship he’s given it everything. “I just make sure that I’m communicating in the best way possible so she feels respected and cared for and understands that I am giving her everything.” 

His vulnerability and tears are a plea for connection and friends have told him that he overthinks things, but I assure him it’s important to process as deeply as he can. 

I want to let him feel that we are connected rather than me just being there to bring him things, so I tell him that I just left a four-year relationship with a partner who cheated on me the entire time we were together while I was loving him with everything I had. How he swore these were “just friends” but sent them flirtatious messages, going to great lengths to hide their existence from me, sending naked pictures. I tell him how now he’s with the first woman who I caught him cheating with, just ten months into our relationship when I thought we were blissfully in a honeymoon stage. She spent four years being his dirty little secret and finally gets to have her face and life posted on his Facebook page, her relationship status publicly announced with the same name that was once on mine. Oddly I feel nothing when I see it there. Just two days after I left him, when I busted his communication with numerous women, her status changed to “in a relationship,” not daring to add his name. Ten months later she added his name - after a summer of him luring me back with confessions of deep love and desire to be my husband, only for me to find his predatory online behavior on thirstrap photos of filtered sexpots. I told him he was worthy of love too. I saw that his desperate need for attention was a childhood wound and held him with empathy, giving him trauma-based bodywork.  I convinced him into counseling briefly, but he wasn’t doing it for himself. I so badly wanted to believe that lie too.  

“Then they tell you you’re crazy when you KNOW they’re cheating,” Jason says from the same experience. This wounded soul who never received the deserving love of his mother told me, “I just think it’s better to tell someone you don’t want to be with them. I would never want to disrespect someone like that.” 

I tell Jason that he’s choosing his abusive mama when he finds himself with a woman who’s mean to him. That’s what you’re used to. You see that as love. That’s what your developing brain was taught and is still convincing you. It’s not, Jason. That’s not love. What YOU’RE giving is the love that you want back, but you’re giving it to a woman who doesn’t deserve it. Don’t give that to someone who hurts you. He tells me he never thought of it that way. It’s like a revelation that gives him pause. There is a quiet moment where I see for the first time that he stops to breathe. I point it out. You’re breathing. I ask him if he knows anything about breath work. I explain that it can really control his body when he’s spinning out. He says yes, and we breathe together. 

I tell him that he can choose his family, that the family he grew up with is not who he has to be like or choose ever again. I ask him what he enjoys in life and that it’s important to do things that give meaning and purpose, because you can’t rely on other people for your happiness. You have to be happy within. 

I get up to leave and ask him if we can take a picture together. He leans his head in with a soft smile and gentle eyes. We turn so the small lantern in the corner of the room lights our faces. I quickly text him the picture and tell him to look at it anytime he needs to remember what I’ve told him. I tell him to look at it so he can remember how I think he’s worthy of love. I tell him to look at it when he feels sad. I tell him to look at it when he thinks the world isn’t there for him or that he doesn’t fit in. 

He walks me to my truck and I promise to be back and help him get through this. We hug again and he watches me drive away past the railroad tracks and I think about how meeting and holding space with this desperate and anxious soul has been just as much for me as it is for him. 

I drive back out of that town leaving behind another big part of my own lack of self-worth in choosing people who abuse me and proud of myself for empowering my self-worth by spending the last year firmly saying “No” to being chosen by someone who feels wrong so that for once in my life I can be the one to choose. 

My friends are worried that I am working too hard and going to burn out, but I’m doing things that give me purpose. What they see me doing is spreading love around my community in the same way I put into my partnership - selfless, nurturing, unconditional love.

This is self-care.