I do not believe in redemption. It might be a strange statement coming from a recovering drug addict, but it’s true. Redemption has always had too strong of a religious connotation for my taste, and I am not the religious type of guy. I prefer re-discovery – rediscovering yourself, finding a new meaning in life, and new ways to give back to the people who have saved my life.
This blog is a part of my re-discovery process. “You have always been good with words, so why don’t you put them to good use?” I’ve learned the hard way that when my wife says something like this, I’d better listen. I don’t expect it to be inspiring, viral or successful. But it will be honest. And to do that, I guess I’ll have to start from the very beginning.
My name is Dylan Bowler, and I am a recovering drug addict. I was born 32 years ago in Holloway, London, in what you would call a perfectly normal family. However, I exhibited signs of obsessive-compulsive behaviour at a very early age. It started with playing cards, and then I ran through my video game stage. At age sixteen, I began playing online poker. Looking back, I wish I had been terrible at it. The problem was I was good. I’ve always had a thing for numbers, and poker (Texas No-limit Holdem) is all about probabilities and game theory. It took me six months to master the rules of the game and another six to win my first thousand pounds playing freerolls. By my senior year in high school, I was making more money than my parents combined, and they had decent jobs!
It was a recipe for disaster. Giving an 18-year-old almost unlimited access to money is never a good idea, but catastrophe is just around the corner when he is prone to addiction. I didn’t know it back then, but by this time, I was spinning out of control. Despite my sliding grades, I somehow managed to graduate high school. My parents had found out about poker but always had an ambiguous attitude towards money. They didn’t understand how good I was and how deep I had sunk into the world of self-delusion.
The greatest irony was that I never got addicted to poker. To me, it was a source of money, nothing more. I never had the urge to go for ever-higher stakes, to seek the adrenaline rush. In retrospect, it proved my ultimate undoing. If I had a gambling addiction, sooner or later, I would have gone bankrupt and might have managed to avoid complete disaster. But the steady flow of money gave me access to much more dangerous addictions. What started as a few glasses of expensive Scotch quickly upgraded to designer drugs. And so the vicious circle began – I needed more money for pills, so I was playing higher-stake games; but the pills made me less sharp and efficient, so I wasn’t winning enough.
Finally, my parents intervened. I had moved out shortly after my nineteenth birthday, confident that I was now the big man, earning thousands of pounds, perfectly capable of living on my own. However, in one of my last sparks of sanity, I had insisted on opening a joint deposit account for my parents that I couldn’t access – I could deposit funds, but I couldn’t withdraw. Putting a thousand pounds per month aside, I had generated over twenty thousand in the account.
Mum and Dad pleaded, insisted, and finally threatened to cut all contact with me unless I sought help. I am an optimist by nature, but by this time, even I had to admit that things had gone terribly wrong. With the money in their account, my parents paid for a stay at a private clinic for recovering drug addicts – and quite possibly saved my life.
If hell on earth exists, it must resemble an addiction recovery clinic. To me, the physical pain was not that terrible, though it was substantial. It is the sense of shame and failure that crushes you and pushes so many former addicts to the brink of suicide. I can speak openly about it today, but I know more than a few people who lost the battle with their demons.
What tipped the scales in my favour was my mentor, Steve. Mentors are usually former addicts who have been to hell and back and have managed to build back their lives. Steve was a former car mechanic and speed junkie who, like me, had made every wrong choice you can think of in his twenties. But he clawed his way back, and when I met him, he was running a successful high-class car cleaning business.
During our first meeting, he listened to my story attentively. Then, he leaned back in his rolling chair and gave me a little impromptu speech I would never forget. “I’ve been a mentor in this program for almost ten years, and I believe it is the most important thing I’ve done in my life. I think there are two types of addicts – the ones on a self-destruction path and the others who think they are immortal and drugs are just a distraction. You are obviously in the second group. The only way you can overcome your problem is to humble yourself. You are neither the king of the world nor the biggest failure.”
“There are always open positions in my car-cleaning company. It is not glamorous, and you will make a fraction of what you made as a poker player. But you will earn every penny with hard work, and the effort will become your reward. I can see it in your eyes – you think it sounds cheesy. Maybe it does. But that’s all I can offer you – an opportunity to earn an honest living and an open ear at the end of the working day. The choice is yours.”
Three days later, I started working in Steve’s company. I was hopelessly inadequate for the first six weeks – I don’t know how the other guys found the patience to put up with me. Every day, I came home (I had moved back to my parents’ house in Holloway for the time being) exhausted, had a quick dinner and went straight to bed.
And then something unexpected happened – I began to get the hang of it. I started enjoying the hustle, the banter with my colleagues, and my daily conversations with Steve. I was a part of a family now, a new family. And I was about to meet the most important person in my new life.