5 years clean

I encourage people to talk about it. I'm an anti-drug activist. I talk to addicts, I volunteer for clean-needle organizations. I do everything I can, and I just realized, I never really talk about my story. I never share what it was like to be on it, to depend on a substance. I never talk about the disgusting shit I would do to make sure I got my next dose. I don't tell the tale of how I got clean.
It's an ugly story, as are all stories about addiction.
I got into it because "everyone else was doing it". In reality, the guy I liked was doing it, so what better way to get close to him than to try whatever he was into? I got what I wanted. I got the guy, and I got wonderful years of feeling like the world was mine. I lost a lot of weight, which was pretty cool for a girl like me, who has always been way bigger than her peers. When I snorted, I was invincible. When I looked in the mirror, a hot chick was smiling back at me. The dark circles around my eyes disappeared as soon as I got my hands on the first few grams of the day. We were a family, we spent most of our time together. We helped each other out, but really, we were all self-obsessed and very very protective of our belongings. I had it easy, to be honest. My guy was the dealer, I never had to pay for anything. Well, not in money, anyway.
People died around me. They overdosed or their body got tired of the harrasment it was going through. I remember thinking this could never happen to me, I'm a smart user.
It was the 1st of February, 2009. We were hanging out by the bridge behind our apartment. By that time nosebleeds were a very frequent visitor in my life. Days, sometimes even weeks would just drop out of my head, I would have no idea of what I did a few hours ago. I thought I was happy and great. Our usual provider got caught, so we got our daily dose from a woman we had never even heard of. I clearly remember taking the first snort of the day, which would be the last in my life. It took about a minute for me to pass out. The next thing I remember is waking up on a hospital bed with my hands tied to the rails. I was so.fucking.scared.
What followed was hell on earth. It's not pretty when after days and nights of screaming from pain, sweating your heart out, pissing yourself, scratching the skin off your bones, shaking in misery, you finally give up, your muscles release themselves, and you just collapse and surrender. Rehab, missing your friends, a few months in Kuala Lumpur in a correction facility for privileged youngsters, regaining the weight, depression, losing all faith in yourself, loathing the world, your family, but mostly yourself. So many lessons to learn!
Today I am celebrating five years of not using. In those five years I bought cocaine twice, was offered pot and cocaine a number of times, thought about snorting millions of times, but I never did it. And for that, I thank myself every day. Every day I don't use is one more day I get to be proud of myself, and that's pretty cool.
So that's my story, there you go. No, I wouldn't change it even if I could, but I do want to make people understand that you shouldn't necessarily try everything. You should first know yourself to be able to decide whether you will just be trying it, or whether you will get hooked for life. Because once you become an addict, you are always an addict.