Let me start with a picture.
I’m sitting in a room. There’s music playing – quiet, background stuff, softening the edges. I can hear conversations, voices overlapping. I can feel the chair beneath me, but I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who I’m with. For a moment, I’m just a disconnected point in the middle of the noise and the light.
And then, cut. The scene shifts.
To understand how I got to that room, I have to rewind. It wasn’t one big disaster that landed me there – it was a slow build. Small losses. Missed chances. Mistakes that piled up until I barely recognised myself.
I’d always been “Steve.” Dependable. Strong. The bloke people could count on. That’s what people saw. The problem is, when your story is “He’s fine,” there isn’t much space to say, “I’m not.”
When the cracks started, nobody noticed. I lost my job. I leaned on alcohol to cope. At first, it seemed harmless – just a drink to dull the edges of anxiety. But the stress kept coming. In a new role, the pressure grew: criticism, the threat of losing work, constant insecurity. I found myself planning ways to end it all. Not dramatic, just quiet, repeated calculations in the gaps of the day. Thoughts that slowly took over the space in my head.
Then came cocaine. I didn’t go looking for it, but I found it. Or maybe it found me. Alcohol had already taught me the language of numbing; cocaine was just a sharper version of the same thing. Soon it was a routine. A secret. A lie I carried home to my family. Even after my sons were born, I hid. I wore the mask of the dad who had everything together because the shame of admitting otherwise was unbearable.
Worse, I thought I’d found belonging in a group that was anything but safe. What looked like friendship was really control. The man I thought was my friend isolated me, chipped away at my confidence, humiliated me in public. It took years to realise that I’d been coerced, that my addiction had made me vulnerable to exploitation. By then, the damage at home was already showing. My relationship with my family was strained. Life changes – moving, new stresses – only shifted the substances around. Less cocaine, more drinking. One habit swapped for another.
But then – something changed.
I met a man who became a mentor. For the first time, I wasn’t “the dependable one” or “the problem.” I was just a man worth helping. He gave me a role where I could help others, and in that work, I found purpose. For the first time in years, I felt supported, listened to, useful. I began cutting back. Slowly, I stepped away from the drugs. Slowly, I reduced the drink. And I started to see a version of myself that wasn’t built on shame or chemicals.
That job was a turning point. But it also showed me something else: I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to understand why I had buried my feelings under substances, why shame had held me so tightly, and how to make sure I wasn’t carrying my own wounds into the work I did with others.
And that’s how I ended up in that room I described at the beginning. Numb. High. Lost. And yet, in the simple act of lifting my head and looking around, I realised: this isn’t what a content life looks like. That small moment of recognition was the first honest step towards change.
I won’t claim I’ve arrived. I haven’t. I still worry about slipping back. Addiction and shame don’t vanish overnight – they linger, shadows that need attention. But I can say this: honesty has been my way forward. Naming the lies I told, the coercion I experienced, the damage I caused – those truths are the start of a new story.
If you take anything from this, let it be this: being the “strong” one doesn’t make you invincible. Sometimes it hides the hand that’s shaking. Asking for help isn’t weakness. It might just be the bravest thing you ever do.
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