I spoke to Glenn’s addictions counselor tonight. After she told me to “keep the conversation light” she also asked me to write something called a “cost letter”. It’s a letter to Glenn about all of the things his addiction has cost me. I figured I would share this here. I haven’t sent it yet and would like any feedback about it. If anyone has had experience with letters like this please feel free to comment. I have no idea what I should or shouldn’t include.
Dear Glenn,
I’m supposed to be writing you a letter about how your drug abuse has affected me. I’m sitting here and I don’t even know where to start. For almost a decade it has been an ever present looming monster. Sometimes it’s sleepy and groggy but most of the time it is ravenous. Over the last eight years, you have become my life. There is no aspect of our relationship that hasn’t been negatively affected by drugs, which means that my life is up ended every time you start to use again.
Your drug use has made me someone I don’t want to be. I have always trusted you one hundred percent and I liked it that way. When you started using heroine I was willing to do anything to help you stop, including snooping through your personal things. It is a horrible feeling to be constantly trying to get a peek at your phone to see if you were contacting your dealer. I don’t like being that person. I want to trust you again. I want to go back to being the person I enjoy being.
Your drug use made me feel foolish and humiliated. When you were taking Methadone you convinced me that when you would nod off it was because of your Seroquel. I believed you. I didn’t know any better. I watched a show about heroine addicts with you and jokingly said “hey look, that’s how your meds make you look.” In retrospect it’s still embarrassing.
Over the past eight years I have spent so many sleepless nights wondering if tomorrow would be the day that I would get the call, the call saying that you were dead. Dead from suicide, overdose, a bar fight, etc. I can never sleep a whole night with out thinking about what you are doing. Are you drinking or doing drugs. Is tonight going to be one of the nights that I stay up all night talking to you on the phone so I can make sure you are ok? Or is it going to be one of those times where I don’t hear from you and can’t get a hold of you. Then I sit there and wonder if I should get in my car and drive two hours to make sure you are ok. Or maybe it will be one of those nights where you call me, filled with anger and hate and tell me “I’m worthless, just like all your friends” and call me a “whore”. I never know what the night time hours will bring. The uncertainty and worry is unbearable.
Because I love you so much, the intensity of the worrying is all consuming. I can’t focus on my life, school, family, or job. Every time I sit down to do school work all I can think about is you; what are you doing, are you ok, where are you?
Whether it is reasonable or not it makes me feel inadequate. It makes me feel like I wasn’t enough for you. You couldn’t be happy just being with me. You needed drugs to make you feel like your life was ok. No matter what I give I felt like it wasn’t enough because you always needed more. I felt like our relationship wasn’t reason enough for you to get and stay clean.
We lost birthdays and Christmas’s to your addictions. Times when people would ask me what you gave me for my birthday or Christmas and my response would have to be “oh, we decided not to give gifts this year” or “oh, he got me something really awesome. He said it’s on the way” only for it not show up, when really what it came down to is you didn’t have any money because you spent it all on drugs.
Your drug use has made me turn from a person who expects the best to someone completely lacking hope. For eight years it has been promises of new beginnings, only for nothing to change.
