The Hurt I Tried to Outrun

~by Ryan

I used to think I had a cravings problem.

Nah. What I really had was an I-don’t-know-what-the-hell-to-do-with-all-this-pain problem.

Nobody taught me how to hold heavy feelings. Nobody showed me how to sit with hurt without disappearing inside it. I learned early that when life gets loud, you either numb it, fight it, or destroy yourself trying to outrun it. And I’ve done all three.

So when the weight started piling up?
I reached for whatever shut the world up the fastest.

The meth.
The fentanyl.
The black.
The shots.
The bottles.
Hell—anything I could put between me and the storm inside my chest.

People see that from the outside and call it reckless. They call it self-destructive. They call it stupid.

But inside?
It was strategy.

You ever hurt so bad you’d rather disappear than feel one more inch of it?
Yeah. That was me.
Every damn day.

My mind worked like this:
“If I can’t fix this right now, at least I don’t have to FEEL it right now.”

It wasn’t weakness.
It wasn’t ignorance.
It was straight-up survival mode.

Here’s the part I didn’t understand until recently:

I wasn’t just escaping.
I was buying time.

I was trying to stay alive long enough to maybe figure my shit out later.
But “later” never came.
Because later got buried under the next high…
the next binge…
the next blackout…
the next lie I told myself.

The substances weren’t the addiction.
Not really.
I was addicted to not having to meet my own hurt face-to-face.

It wasn’t the dope.
It wasn’t the needle.
It wasn’t the line or the pill or the bottle.
It was the RELIEF.

The silence.
The numbness.
The pause button on a life that always felt one second away from exploding.

And I know this now:
That doesn’t make me broken.
It makes me unpracticed.

Nobody ever taught me that you can sit with pain without letting it swallow you whole.
Nobody showed me that you can survive a feeling by feeling it.

So this is the shift I’m making — right here, from inside these walls:

Not
“I’ll muscle through every craving.”
Not
“I’ll fight every urge.”

No.
The new shift is:

“I’m willing to learn how to sit with my pain without handing it off to something that keeps me small.”

Because every craving I’ve ever had was never a command…
it was a message.

A message saying:
“Something in you hurts.
Something needs attention.
Something you buried is trying to make its way back home.”

You can’t heal what you won’t feel.
And avoiding the pain only chains you to it longer.

So yeah, I’m finally facing myself.
Finally listening.
Finally learning how to hold the weight without trying to disappear under it.

And I’m doing it because I want a life after this.
I want my freedom.
I want my wife.
I want the future I never thought I’d be allowed to have.

I’m done abandoning myself to the nearest fix.
It’s time to learn how to stay.