Dear Addiction

A Letter of Gratitude

Dear Addiction,

Today is 1,848 continuous days of ME without YOU.

In a peculiar way, I find myself grateful for the role you played in leading me back to myself.

You were both the poison and the path.

The thief that hollowed me out,

and the mirror that showed me what was left inside.

You arrived like a lover-

sweet-tongued, soft-handed-

promising escape,

and delivered a cage made of velvet shadows.

I didn’t know I was trading my voice for silence,

my fire for fog.

But somewhere in the middle of the numbness,

I began to feel.

It was agony,raw and wild,

like waking up buried alive.

But it was also birth.

And birth, I’ve learned, is always preceded by breaking.

You unraveled me.

Took everything I thought I was

and burned it to ash;

and in that ash, I found a question:

Who am I without you?

The answer was terrifying.

And then, liberating.

You were the chaos that revealed the architecture of my soul.

The storm that stripped me down to bone,

so I could learn what was truly mine,

what could not be taken.

You showed me the paradox of healing:

that we must bleed to stop the bleeding,

we must lose ourselves to come home.

You were death in slow motion.

But I died just enough

to learn how to live.

Now, 1,849 days into this strange rebirth,

I see you for what you were-

not a demon,

but a cracked doorway.

I crawled through you.

And on the other side,

I found Me.

Not the polished version,

but the feral one.

The one who weeps, and rages, and burns with longing,

and chooses life anyway.

I will not romanticize you.

You stole.

You scarred.

But from your ruin,

I harvested something holy.

So, Addiction, as strange as it sounds,

I thank you for leading me

back to myself.

I acknowledge the chaos

you brought into my life,

but I also recognize

the invaluable lessons

that emerged from the wreckage.

And now,

I carry the torch forward

into places still dark,

toward souls still drowning.

Because if I can rise, splintered, imperfect, and still on fire,

so can they.

Goodbye, old ghost.

You were never the end.

You were the threshold.

With gratitude,

Angela