People think getting clean and sober is the hardest part.
And don’t get me wrong —
Getting off substances was brutal.
Messy.
Lonely.
Painful.
But staying clean afterwards?
That’s its own kind of battle.
Because life doesn’t suddenly become soft
Just because you stopped drinking,
Stopped using,
Stopped trying to numb yourself.
Life still hits.
People still disappoint you.
Trauma still exists.
Stress still arrives uninvited.
Grief still knows your address.
And sometimes,
When something happens completely out of my control,
I feel it. ( Like when my brother died. He was my rock and I loved him dearly)
Not the romanticised version people talk about online.
Not temptation wrapped in movie scenes.
I mean the sudden pull toward escape.
That old voice whispering:
“Just make it stop for a while.”
The cravings don’t live in my everyday life anymore.
I don’t wake up wanting substances.
I don’t spend my days fighting urges.
But stress,
Pain,
Fear,
Emotional overload —
Those things can wake old survival instincts up fast.
That’s the part people don’t understand about addiction recovery.
Sometimes the body remembers before the mind does.
And in those moments,
I have to put my armour on.
I have to fight through my own head.
I have to remind myself:
Temporary relief is not freedom.
Because substances never solved my pain.
They only delayed it,
Buried it,
Muted it for a few hours while quietly destroying me underneath.
Recovery is not becoming someone who never struggles.
Recovery is learning how to struggle without destroying yourself.
That’s the real work.
Learning how to sit with discomfort.
Learning how to survive your own nervous system.
Learning how to feel things fully
Without running back to the thing that nearly killed you.
Some days that strength comes naturally.
Other days it feels like war.
But every time I choose not to go backwards,
I become stronger than the version of me that once believed escape was the only answer.
I did not get clean and sober the first try.
It took multiple attempts.
And even now,
After all this time,
I still have moments where life punches old wounds.
But now I know something I didn’t know back then:
Cravings pass.
Feelings pass.
Hard moments pass.
Destroying yourself won’t.
So I breathe.
I ground myself.
I put my armour on.
And I fight through it.
Because I fought too hard to lose myself again.
And honestly?
Staying clean and sober
Was one of the hardest things I have ever done.
But it was also one of the best.
Nearly all of my poetry is rooted in recovery in some way.
Not always directly about addiction,
Drink,
Drugs,
Or getting clean.
But recovery from something.
Recovery from trauma.
Recovery from grief.
Recovery from self-destruction.
Recovery from people,
Places,
Versions of myself
I had to outgrow to survive.
A lot of my writing comes from learning how to stay standing
Without reaching for the things
That once numbed me.
And I think that’s why so much of my work circles themes like transformation,
Survival,
Identity,
Shadow work,
Pain,
And rebuilding.
Because recovery is not just about substances.
Sometimes recovery is about learning
How to live with yourself honestly
For the first time.
For anyone struggling out there,
You are not alone.
And if my words touched you in some way,
Then I’m truly blessed.
Read my Fractured Mind Collection here
Thank you for reading.
Your DislexicPoet 🖤