Dying to Survive

by Rachael Keogh

  Another friend, Declan, was there. I had met him in the meetings and I had taken a shine to him from day one. We had gotten clean around the same time and I knew in my gut that he was one of the good ones. But in spite of Jimmy and Katriona and Declan, it was all too much for me to handle. I still hadn’t used drugs yet, but I was holding on for dear life.

  _____

  In the end, my friends weren’t enough. It was only a matter of time before I went back using drugs. By now, filled with guilt and self-loathing, I had pushed everyone away from me—Jimmy, Declan, even Katriona, who had done everything in her power to help me. She was heartbroken when I started using drugs again, but eventually even she had to walk away. I had moved into a shabby little flat in the city centre and I began to work from there. I was still devastated over what had happened with Justin, but I tried to block it all out with as much drugs as possible. I acquired a taste for speedballs, heroin and cocaine mixed together. These two drugs contradict each other in their effects and they have the potential to kill you there and then. But I told myself that I didn’t care. I would have done anything but feel.

  It was at this time that I met Seán, whom I had known since my teenage years. He was a local boy and somebody I had time for. Now, we had the same drug dealer and we always seemed to be scoring at the same time, but unlike my previous boyfriends, Seán was a gentle soul, very easy to be around. He was a loner and so was I. We connected in our loneliness.

  I began to use drugs with him and after three months it dawned on me what was happening. I was rapidly building up a tolerance for the drugs and they were beginning to lose effect. They weren’t taking away the pain any more. I wondered why Seán put up with me when all I could do was cry. I couldn’t tell him why I was crying and he never pushed me to talk about it. He just let me curl up into a ball and sob my heart out for weeks on end. I was grateful for his support. He told me that it was alright for me to cry as he gently rubbed my shoulder and reminded me that I was going to be ok. I really wasn’t that sure. The world didn’t have much to offer me any more.

  Chapter 15

  TWO STEPS BACK

  It was 2005 and almost two years had passed since my relapse, following my bust-up with Justin. By now I was spiritually bankrupt and mentally warped, with the emotional capacity of the thirteen-year-old I had been when I had first started using drugs. I made a promise to myself that I would never again make the effort to stop using drugs. My relapses only added to my self-defeating thoughts and for the first time in my life I truly accepted that I would die a hopeless drug addict. This was a huge relief. The fight to get clean was over and I could selfishly get on with passively committing suicide.

  My family knew that it was only a matter of time before I died. They left me to it in the knowledge that they had done all they could do for me. All of them except for my mother. She was trying to make a life for herself and Philip in Lanzarote. We hardly ever spoke now, as we were both riddled with our own guilt about never having the courage to be honest with each other. While my mother was away, I moved into her apartment in the city centre with my two friends Seán and Neil, the only two people on the planet that I could trust. We took turns shop-lifting to feed our habits, but most days I was too ill to move. The drugs had stunted my growth and I had lost the power of my left arm from injecting into an artery; many of my veins in my arms had collapsed or had thrombosis. Neil and Seán could get a hit of heroin without much hassle, but sometimes I would spend up to thirteen hours desperately trying to get the heroin into me. At stages I sadistically found this ritual pleasurable. It made me feel alive and it gave me something to take my mind off my real pain.

  My obsession with hurting myself started off with a wound on my forearm. I began savagely to inject the heroin directly into the wound. As soon as I could see the blood entering the barrel, then surely I was getting some sort of a hit. Within a few months the wound extended from my elbow right down to my wrist. So I began to chip away at my other arm. Then I worked my way onto both of my hands. After a while, butchering myself became the norm and Neil and Seán learned to keep their mouths shut and to just keep an eye on me. My tolerance for drugs had decreased because I couldn’t get enough drugs into me and I spent more times sick than stoned. Most days when I managed to successfully get the heroin into me, I would overdose, leaving myself badly bruised from falls. This also became the norm and Seán quickly learned how to snap me out of it. Once I didn’t turn blue, I would be ok. I spent a lot of my time in and out of hospital due to the infections in my arms.

  Another year passed and in 2006 my doctor gave me a serious warning that if I didn’t stop using drugs, they would have to amputate both of my arms. I was watching my arms rot away right before my eyes. The heroin seemed to be eating them alive.

  It was during this time that my whole universe shifted. I realised that the drugs had stopped working a long time earlier, possibly when I had come back from Italy. Somewhere along the line, whether it was the praying, or the NA meetings, or the rehab in the Rutland Centre, a seed had been planted and I had found my conscience. Now it was just impossible for me to use drugs in peace. I had tried everything in an attempt to block it all out: running from country to country trying to put oceans between myself and my addiction, getting involved with madmen to distract me from my own madness, hiding behind bullshit, lies and make-believe identities to give my ego a nice boost, using my illness as an excuse to cop out of life and to abandon any responsibility that might hinder my drug use, convincing myself that I didn’t care less whether I lived or died.

  I continued to butcher myself, but as I did so my mind fine-combed through my life. Piecing it all together like a jigsaw. I thought of my sponsor Katriona and the knowledge that she had tried to pass on to me. ‘Why can’t I stay clean?’ I had asked her one day shortly after my relapse in 2004.

  ‘Rachael, the solution to staying clean is so simple that you miss it every time.’ Here it was, I’d thought, Katriona was going to tell me something so profound that it would completely blow me away and change my life forever.

  ‘What is it?’ I’d asked her in anticipation.

  ‘You can’t stay clean, Rachael, because you keep on using drugs,’ she had said calmly.

  I had been baffled. ‘What, that’s it? End of story?’

  ‘Yeah, when it comes to the crunch, it’s as simple as that.’

  ‘But it couldn’t be, Katriona. It can’t be that easy. Sure if that was the case, I would have got clean years ago.’

  ‘Well, there comes a point in your life when you just have to let go of the past and stop using it as an excuse to continue to use drugs. And when you do that, it is that simple.’

  ‘And how do I let go of the past then?’ I’d asked her.

  ‘You ask God to help you to let go and you pray for the people who have hurt you.’

  I had felt extremely frustrated when Katriona told me this. ‘Me, pray for the people who have hurt me?! Why should I pray for them: they don’t deserve it.’

  ‘I understand what you’re saying, Rachael, but maybe you deserve it. Because as long as you hold onto that hurt, you’ll never have any freedom.’

  I didn’t know it at the time, but she had hit a huge nerve with me. For three years I tried to make sense of what Katriona had told me. I couldn’t get her voice out of my head. I thought about our conversations over and over again. I had to let go because I deserved it? She had asked me one day if my expectations of people, particularly of my mother, were reasonable. I thought that they were. She was my mother, after all, and she ought to act like one. Then Katriona had asked me what it was about my mother that threatened me so deeply.

  At that time the thought of even answering that question pushed me over the edge. But now I could no longer deny the truth. I had what recovering alcoholics call ‘a moment of clarity’. Holy shit, I thought, I was holding on to the past and using it as an excuse to keep using drugs. By replaying in my head the hurt that others had done to me,
I was actually hurting myself. And where were they all now? Getting on with their lives, that’s where! More than likely completely oblivious to the power that I was giving them. And why was I so threatened by my mother? I wondered. The answer to this question lay at the core of why I used drugs in the first place. If my own mother couldn’t love me, then who would and how on earth could I? Deep down I believed that I was just unlovable.

  For so many years I had been in awe of my mother. She was everything that I ever wanted to be. She was beautiful and glamorous and loved by anyone with whom she came in contact. She seemed to touch everyone’s lives except mine. What she did and what she said was gospel and I felt ugly and inadequate in comparison to her. I began to allow myself to think that maybe my expectations of her as a mother weren’t that reasonable after all. I thought about her life and realised the resemblance that it bore to mine. We were so similar when I thought about it. How could she possibly show me any love when she hadn’t received any herself? She had been ruled by three men in her life: my grandfather, my father and Philip’s father and each and every one of them had abused her in some form or another. My mother could never love me in the way that I wanted her to until, that was, she learned to love herself. And in return, I could never accept her love or anyone else’s until I learned to love myself. And there it was, I had found my solution. I needed to find a way to truly love myself.

  It all sounded brilliant in theory but it nearly killed me to get my head around this concept. In order for me to learn to love myself, I would have to let go of a lot of old hurts. Easier said than done. But death was a reality for me now. And I was no longer afraid. I knew that before I did anything, I needed to get clean first. I was ready to give recovery one last shot.

  _____

  Somebody once told me that the easy part of recovering from addiction is getting clean, and the hard part is staying clean. But I have never once come across a hardcore drug addict who says that it is easy to get clean. I had made many mistakes in the past, but the one thing I had learned was that I couldn’t do it on my own. ‘Get humble or be humiliated,’ I was told by countless recovering drug addicts. ‘You can’t save your face and your arse at the same time,’ one had said. At the time I had cringed and sniggered to myself at their corny clichés, but now that my life depended on it and I was actually eating humble pie, I was finally beginning to understand what they had meant. It wasn’t about the clichés. It was about the positive attitude behind them and a willingness to do whatever it took to get clean and to stay clean.

  I knew that I couldn’t set myself up for failure by going through cold-turkey, only to realise that, halfway through it, the pain was too much for me to handle. Then I would end up using drugs and completely lose heart. Staying on methadone wasn’t an option for me either. I just wasn’t a great believer in the stuff. Fair enough if people were happy to stay on it for the rest of their lives and they used it to give them some sort of normality, but in my experience complete abstinence from drugs was the only way forward. I knew I had to be careful. I had learned the hard way about the power and the sneakiness of my addiction, that part of me that was ever present, always one step ahead of me, just waiting for me to be weak so that it could fill me with delusional thoughts and negativity.

  _____

  My desire to stop using drugs was born once again. Now all I had to do was to find a way to do it. Timing was everything. If I didn’t stop using drugs, my arms would have to be amputated. I needed the support of a detox centre. Even though I had great admiration for many of my friends who had stopped using drugs with the support of Narcotics Anonymous, I knew in my heart that this wasn’t for me. I would have to be hospitalised in a safe environment. But everywhere I went, there were endless waiting lists. Anyone I spoke to simply passed the buck to somebody else. I was frustrated and full of despair and for the first time in years I got down on my knees and with all my heart I asked God to help me. I even asked Big Mick for a dig-out. I was ready to surrender to God and to anyone else who cared to help me.

  Then one day my mother rang me out of the blue. She told me that she and Philip had made the decision to come home. My grandmother had told them that it wouldn’t be long before I was dead. She was now in Dublin and she wanted to talk to me. Ah no, I thought. What did she want? What was she going to say to me? I hadn’t expected this to happen.

  Myself and Seán were in her apartment when she arrived with my aunt Jacqueline. She was still as beautiful as ever and she didn’t seem fazed by Seán or the mess in her apartment. In fact she was as cool as a cucumber, although I knew by her that this was an act. I was just waiting for the shit to hit the fan. But she couldn’t seem to muster up the courage to say what she needed to say.

  She and Jacqueline went out for a few drinks and Jacqueline returned to the flat alone. Even though I was used to my mother glossing over things, I was really gutted that she had said nothing, not even now. Jacqueline, on the other hand, was in a seriously bad mood and began to get on Seán’s case. ‘Why are you even in this flat?’ she said to him. She kept at him. On and on, calling him names and trying to humiliate him. I don’t know what came over me. I had never in all of my life, even at the worst of times, raised my hand to any family members. I was never a fighter and I made it my business to keep away from violence. But in that moment everything came to the surface and I couldn’t control myself. I gave Jacqueline a merciless whack with the back of my hand. I hit her nose and within seconds it was gushing blood.

  The reality of what I had done kicked in straight away. ‘Oh my God,’ Jacqueline screamed, ‘I can’t believe you did that. How could you do that to me?’

  I felt guilty and I immediately ran to where she stood. ‘Jacqueline, I’m so sorry I didn’t mean it.’ With her hand to her nose she stormed past me into the sitting-room and she rang my mother. Then I rang my mother, crying hysterically, trying to tell her what had happened and how sorry I was.

  About ten minutes later I saw Philip looking through the kitchen window from outside. It must have looked like a murder scene from where he stood—the kitchen was full of blood. Within minutes Philip had smashed the front door window in and he was charging at me like a lunatic. ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ he shouted, throwing punches into the air. My mother and Jacqueline held him back, but he looked as though he didn’t know whether to hold me or to hit me. Then he broke down crying and my mother began to get upset.

  She pulled me up off the floor and she tore my cardigan off, revealing my arms. ‘Look what you’re doing to yourself,’ she shrilled, holding me by the wrists. ‘Look at your fucking arms, Rachael. Look at them.’

  ‘I know what they look like, ma.’

  ‘You mustn’t! Do you even realise what you’re doing to yourself? Do you realise what you’re doing to us?’ she screamed. ‘Do you hate yourself that much that you would do this to yourself? Do you hate me that much that you would do this to yourself?’ She had held everything back for years. Now it was all coming out and she was sobbing. ‘I know that I haven’t been there for you, Rachael. Every day of my life, I have to live with that guilt. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. If I could turn back the clock, I would do everything differently. I wouldn’t send you to Cuba or even to Texas. I would be there for you and you’ll never know how sorry I am. I’ve tried to move on with my own life. But I’ll never be happy until I know that you’re happy. But I’m here now, Rachael. Look at me!’ she screamed, shaking my skinny frame. ‘I’m here now.’ She tightly wrapped her arms around me. ‘I’m here now.’

  That was the first moment that I realised just how my addiction was affecting my family. All of my life everything had been about me. My pain, my hurt, my loneliness, my innocence. Pointing the finger at pretty much anyone who came across my path and who didn’t behave in the way that I wanted them to. The whole world had it in for me and I had no comprehension of anyone else’s troubles except my own. But something had changed within me over the previous weeks. I knew now that I w
as the problem and that only I could change things. This was my final turning point.

  Chapter 16

  A NEW BEGINNING

  After my arrest for shop-lifting with Neil, my escape from Pearse Street and all the media frenzy that followed, I ended up right where I had started as an addict—in prison. But this time, for a different reason. This time, I was going to prison because I had committed a crime, sure, but also because I knew that prison would keep me away from drugs and give me the start I needed on the road to getting clean for good.

  After my arrest for shop-lifting in July 2006 I arrived in the Dóchas Women’s Centre at about 9:30 p.m. and I was quickly strip-searched, showered and sent to the medical unit where I received a set of old pyjamas, old sheets and a duvet cover, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a miniature box of Cornflakes and a carton of milk. After being informed that I would see the doctor the next day, I was sent to a transitional two-person cell that was already occupied by a young girl from Bosnia. She was a striking looking girl with long blonde hair, milky skin and big sad eyes that told a story of hardship. She smiled at me as I entered the cell, looking exactly how I felt, frightened and vulnerable.

  That night Maria told me all about her country and her family. I felt sorry for her, but I was also thankful to her because she distracted me from my withdrawals, which were getting worse by the minute. It was a long sleepless night of tossing and turning, battling with my own mind and trying my best not to torment myself by thinking about drugs. The next day myself and Maria were moved over to the real part of the prison. It was state of the art—six different houses with names like Maple, Hazel and Laurel. The houses were designed to segregate the prisoners from each other, depending on their situation and type of sentence. I was brought to Maple, which accommodated sixteen women, most of them drug addicts just like myself. They were in custody on various different charges, like me and were waiting to be dealt with by the courts. We had a communal kitchen, which appeared to be immaculate, and a sitting-room complete with a plasma TV. Our cells were not unlike bedrooms, with portable televisions and en-suite showers and toilets. Apart from not being allowed into other prisoners’ houses, we could come and go as we pleased within the grounds of Dóchas. It was a far cry from the old women’s prison, Mountjoy, which was cockroach-infested and overcrowded. The only thing that had not changed was the women who were imprisoned there. I knew most of them from Mountjoy and I was surprised that half of them were still alive.