This is Eric Pimentel and he is RESILIENT.
CONTENT WARNING: The I Am Resilient Project provides an open space for people to share their personal experiences. Some content in this post and on this website will include topics that you may find difficult.
Describe the situation where you had to be resilient:
I had to overcome the struggle of addiction.
Eric’s Story:
It all started out when I was a second-year university. I had just broken up with my girlfriend and I was in a really weird spot because I had just learned who I was with her. So, I didn’t really know who I was without her and I was trying to figure that out. Something that I started to do more of were drugs.
First, it was just casually but I started to really get it into them. I started to try a lot more things like cocaine and eventually I tried sipping “lean.” I don’t even really know how I tried it the first time but I want to say I was probably influenced by rap music.
For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, “lean” is when you take a codeine cough syrup and you mix it with various ingredients to make a cocktail of opioids. I tried this drink and I loved it. It made me not feel. It made me feel nothing and because I was in the spot where I didn’t know what I wanted to feel, feeling nothing just seemed like the absolute best thing.
So, I began “sipping” and as I did that I noticed that when I wasn’t “on the cup,” I had absolutely no idea who I was and it was terrifying. I knew that that little bottle was what kept me going throughout the day. I would wake up and need it. I went to bed and would crave it. I wouldn’t be able to function without it and because of that, it spiraled me into a state of depression.
There were quite a few days where I sat downstairs with a shotgun and the only thing that stopped me from actually being able to pull that trigger was that I couldn’t let my mom find me like that. That was probably going on for a couple of weeks.
One day I went skydiving with a couple of my friends and that morning we all loaded up the car we were literally on our way to the airport and something clicked. I talked to myself and said, “you know, I’m really okay if I don’t land.” Obviously, I landed and I started to go through the motions of doing very reckless things. I’d wake up with tattoos – some of them I do myself some of them just spur-of-the-moment. I didn’t care about myself and from there my addiction started to evolve from “lean” into pills and that’s what I knew something needed to change.
I promised myself that I would never pop pills and the day that I realized that I broke that promise to myself, I stopped doing all drugs. I had to.
I remember watching a Ted Talk one day about a coach for a university soccer team in the USA and he was talking about his struggles. Something that he did was carry around a little notepad with ten things he really liked about himself. I think one of the hardest things I ever had to do was try to figure out the ten things I liked about myself at that time. But, I was able to create my little list. I would carry it and read it 10, 20, 30 times a day just to get me through my day.
I was at work one day and someone said something to me that really resonated. I wrote it down and I don’t even know why. From then on when someone told me something that I really liked or gave me a nice compliment, I’d write it down. Now I have about 600 things that I’ve recorded over the past year with little blurbs about what those words mean to me. It was little things like that, that really got me through each day. I am able to read my notebook and know that I like myself and I think that’s what really helped me get off of the drugs.
How did you practice resilience when faced with this challenge?
Most people throw drugs away or dump them down the drain, but I didn’t. I kept the drugs in the house. It was my little way of knowing that I’m cutting myself off because of my strength rather than being forced to. I think this is what actually made it easier – because I made a choice to stop using drugs and I wasn’t forced into that decision.
Please share one piece of advice for people who are going through a similar challenge
You have the power to change and at the end of the day, your life’s made up of decisions. Whether it’s a simple decision or a hard decision, it’s something that you have to do if you want something more out of yourself.
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