Where Was I When I Needed Me?

Escapism, addiction, and the long walk back to truth.

I never would have called myself an addict. Not then. Not in the years when my life looked “vibrant” on the outside. The festivals, the community, the spiritual workshops, the plant medicine ceremonies, the initiatory rites of passage, the late-night conversations that felt like enlightenment (but were probably mostly dehydration and adrenaline). 

Me, still awake after a long night at a festival. The exhaustion is palpable.

From the outside, I looked like someone who was expanding, but beneath the glow of it all, something quieter was happening. I was disappearing, piece by piece, choice by choice, year by year. 

I had been absent from my own life for a very long time. I genuinely didn’t know how to stay with myself. I was constantly seeking something outside of myself, not realising that the answers were encoded in my own body, waiting for me to shut up and listen. 

I reached for anything to avoid the truth that my body already knew, but my mind refused to touch. The truth that I had been hurt, I had been silenced, and I had forgotten how to be with myself. I was living inside a web of unspoken truths that I was too loyal/frightened/conditioned, to name.

So instead, I reached for things that were helping me to go further away from my feelings, rather than closer to them. 

I spent years trying to “fix myself” with food, as if kale and probiotics could outrun trauma. I took supplements, ate clean, talked about antioxidants… while still drinking alcohol. It’s a bit embarrassing to remember myself earnestly doing breathwork in the morning, and then taking shots that evening, as if my body wouldn’t notice the dissonance. 

My social milieu was saturated with psychedelics, ketamine, cigarettes, ecstatic dance, and endless “breakthrough conversations” that never actually changed a single thing. I told myself I was attending festivals for “community” and “art,” but the truth is, I wanted to be cool. I desperately wanted to belong to something that felt bigger than the loneliness inside me. 

There was so much energetic noise in these environments, that the soft whisper of my buried intuition didn’t stand a chance. I ignored these obvious warning signs, again and again. The exhaustion I felt after a party; the faint nausea I experienced before taking drugs; the conversations that felt… sticky. I felt a sense of dread when I realised the sun was rising, and I was still awake from the night before. 

I did things I felt ashamed of, and filed them away in a “DEAL WITH LATER” folder in my mind. Spoiler: Later arrives - it always does. 

When I moved towns, I suddenly became the only one smoking cigarettes. I had the rude awakening of realising that my smoking wasn’t part of a cool, collective choice - it was me avoiding my life. In my previous community, there was a collective agreement not to look too closely at these behaviours. This new town had different masks, but at least now, there was a general, surface-level interest in health and well-being. 

As the festival culture began to feel hollow, I moved into a different milieu: wilderness therapy, rites of passage, and plant-medicine circles. Suddenly, I was surrounded by spiritual seekers, go-getters, and now, the drug-use became all about “awakening”, “releasing” and “learning.” 

Leaving behind the summer festival culture for guiding canoe expeditions.

At 22, I met Matthew. A plant-medicine facilitator who I mistook for a sign from the universe (when really, I’d paid $2000 and driven an hour, which tells you everything you need to know about who arranged the “synchronicity”). I spent five days “journeying” with him, thinking that he was the key to my energetic mastery and eventual healing.

I was cracked open, yet I was too unsupported, unprepared, and unsafe to properly navigate the things I was being shown. Matthew was not a safe person, he was not a skilled person, and it took me a long time to recognise that truth doesn’t come from the psychedelics, but from learning how to actually feel. 

Beneath it all, I remember the hunger to awaken, and to see the world in a different way. Without the proper support and capacity, that hunger morphed into perfectionism and addiction. I internalised more trauma, entangled myself with unsafe people, and mistook intensity for transformation. I had never been taught how to discern, or been around people that truly knew how to let go.

These were not random choices, they were coping mechanisms, designed perfectly to keep me from the one thing I could not face: Myself.

Me in a new town, during a pivotal time for my own disillusionment.

Now, I understand that I was avoiding the grief of an entire childhood spent hiding inside myself. I was avoiding the shock of a sexual trauma I had blocked for survival, and the gravity of the loneliness of being surrounded by people who never truly saw me. 

Escapism wasn’t the problem. It was the strategy I was using to try to meet my own needs. I wanted to have an experience, and with drug-use, I saw visuals, I felt chills and dizziness, I felt high and thought I was having epiphanies. Now, I realise that I was just leaving my body, rather than feeling the things I actually needed to feel. It can be very confronting to feel your feelings, but it is safe to feel. 

After I learned that I needed to come into my body, what followed was not a spiritual awakening in the romantic sense. It was not a psychedelic revelation, or a mystical, cinematic moment. It was a reckoning. A slow, ruthless, and often deeply uncomfortable reclamation of the self I had abandoned. It was the kind of reclamation that strips you bare, but gives you back your life.

“Where was I when I needed me?”

I was anywhere but inside the one body that has always been my responsibility to nourish, honour, and invest in. The buried memories initially began to surface in sensations. I felt pain, fatigue, dissociation, and unrefined emotion. I desperately tried to pin the emotions I was feeling on things around me, but it was just energy that needed to come out. The good news is, you can use every experience as a learning opportunity. 

For a long time, I thought that people would not take me seriously as a healer if they knew about my history of stupidity and harm to myself. Yet those forays gave me something profound: an embodied understanding of how heavy energetic patterns can be. Shame can root itself deeply at a cellular level, and we need to overcome every day in order to be what we are - life and love. My experience is why I can guide people out of places they think they cannot return from, and I am grateful every day for the deep wisdom that I have garnered from these experiences.