Susan Stellin talked to her boyfriend, Graham MacIndoe, about his struggle with heroin:
When you talk about wanting to quit, was it just a moment and then it would go away? Because I think that’s what people don’t understand: Why doesn’t this person want to quit, or if they do want to quit, why can’t they?
I wanted to quit a lot. I really wished I could’ve quit. And there’s nothing in my heart that I feel so bad about — not being able to quit when I first met you. ’Cause I would’ve saved myself and my family a lot of stress and pain and anger and money and humiliation.
But in a lot of cases with addiction you’re never ready to quit until you really hit rock bottom. They say that all the time in meetings. And it isn’t necessarily the case all the time — I see people who have quit, they’ve managed to nip it in the bud. And I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know how some people manage to drag themselves away from the cusp of going into that really dark place and some people don’t. I quit a bunch of times, but I always slipped back into it because it’s not the quitting — it’s the long-term thing. You don’t know how to function, because you’ve been so dysfunctional for so long that you find yourself going back to your comfort zone, and your comfort zone is being around people who enabled you and people who are in the same boat as you. You go to somebody’s house where other people are using, and it’s like you’re with your family again. They tell you it’s going to be all right, then you take a hit, then you think, Fuck it, I feel good. Cause it’s really hard to get your shit together when you don’t feel good. And when the reality of where you’ve been and how much you’ve done and the lies you’ve told all dawns on you, it’s really hard to face. It’s a really big emotional crisis that is very hard to face up to. And that’s why people say they want to get clean but just can’t do it.
View more of MacIndoe’s work here, or visit his gallery here.
The Dish 