I Was Born Addicted

A Vessel’s Truth

I need you to understand something that most people spend their entire lives never having to think about. I was conceived on a drug-fuelled night by two people so far gone they couldn’t even hold a coherent thought, let alone plan for a child. There was no celebration. No joy. No moment where anyone paused to consider the weight of creating a human life.

My mother, the woman whose body became my first home, was already ravaged by addiction. Dysfunctional. Completely out of alignment with everything that makes a person capable of nurturing life. My father was the same. Drugs. Crime. Chaos. Two broken vessels somehow creating another vessel and from the very beginning, I was poisoned.

For nine months, whilst I was supposed to be cradled in safety growing strong, feeling the anticipation of being wanted and loved something else was happening. Drugs were flooding into my mother’s veins which meant they were flooding into mine. The seed that had sprouted was being damaged before it could even fully form. My neural pathways were being rewritten by substances I never chose. My body was learning dependency before it learned to breathe.

The First Moments Were Agony

When I finally emerged into this world, I arrived already addicted. Do you understand what that means? The very first moments of my life, those sacred irreplaceable moments that are supposed to establish safety and bonding, were consumed by withdrawal. Whilst other babies were experiencing the gentle wonder of first breath, the warm security of skin against skin, the primal recognition of their mother’s heartbeat, I was screaming in agony.

My tiny body, only minutes old, was already shaking. Every nerve ending was on fire. I wasn’t crying for comfort or food. I was crying for the drugs that had been my constant companion in the womb, now suddenly gone. The medical staff knew exactly what they were seeing. Another baby paying the price for choices made by someone else. Another life starting in suffering for sins committed before I even had a name.

I never knew what those first moments were supposed to feel like. I never experienced being held without the tremor of withdrawal. I never felt what it’s like to be soothed as nature intended, without chemicals still coursing through my veins. The fundamentals of human bonding, the neurological foundations of trust and safety that form in those early days, were corrupted from the very start.

Growing Up Surrounded by Destruction

The chaos didn’t end after birth. It was just beginning. I grew up surrounded by liars, cheats, thieves, manipulators, and drug users. Everything that destroys a human soul was present in my daily life, teaching me that this was normal, that pain was love, that chaos was just how the world worked.

My mother and father, the bearers of life who were supposed to protect me, instead taught me every dysfunction they knew. I absorbed it all. I watched. I learned. And I grew up in pure misalignment, never truly understanding what it actually felt like to be loved, to be wanted, to be cared for, to be needed, to feel valid as a human being simply for existing.

There were other children born to the same parents. My siblings. We should have been united, but instead we were divided, each one of us swallowed by the same generational poison, each inheriting the same broken foundation with no instruction manual for how to build something different.

The World Sees What’s Broken

It wasn’t just home that was hell. The outside world added its own cruelty. Other children have a radar for vulnerability. They can spot a broken kid from a mile away. They saw my dirty clothes. They sensed my darkened spirit, the way my aura was already fractured. They circled like predators because wounded prey is easy prey.

I was bullied relentlessly. Excluded. Marked as different in all the ways that make childhood unbearable. Knock back after knock back. Time after time after time. I lived my life trapped in this environment for years, knowing only this distorted version of reality, unable to escape until I was strong enough to walk away.

But here’s what people don’t understand. Even when you escape physically, how do you function in the normal world when nothing about your formation was normal? When every fundamental understanding of human connection, safety, and love is corrupted at the source? I didn’t know the basic functions that other people take for granted. I had to learn from scratch what it means to be human.

The People Who Tried But Didn’t Finish

I need to acknowledge this because it matters. People tried to help. Genuinely kind souls who saw the destruction and wanted to offer something better. They gave me a place to stay. A roof over my head. Temporary reprieve from the chaos. And I will always be grateful for those moments, for any hand that was extended towards me when I was drowning.

But here’s the devastating truth that nobody wants to say out loud. They never solved the root problem. They provided shelter, but they never repaired the vessel itself. They gave me temporary safety, but they never addressed the fundamental damage that had been done from conception onwards.

Someone damaged this profoundly, poisoned before birth and raised in dysfunction, needs professional medical intervention. They need trauma-informed therapy that lasts years, not weeks. They need someone trained to carefully, methodically help rebuild what was destroyed before the foundation was even set. But that level of help requires commitment. It requires people to stay when it gets hard, to not walk away when the damage reveals itself in ugly ways.

Instead, what happens is people offer help with strings attached. They expect gratitude. They expect you to heal on their timeline. And when you can’t, when the damage is too deep and the healing too slow, they walk away. They tell themselves they tried, but what did they actually do? They put a wet blanket on a house fire and then left when it didn’t immediately extinguish the flames.

I became an expert at hiding how broken I truly was inside. I learned to just get by, to appear more whole than I felt, to not show the full extent of the emotional obliteration I was carrying. Because if I showed it, people left. If I revealed how damaged I really was, it became “too much” and they disappeared.

When the Bearers Left This World

Eventually, my parents died. The bearers of life who created me and destroyed me returned to the ether, presumably to face what they’d done, to account for the lives they damaged. But where did that leave me? Holding the biggest fight of my life, carrying all this damage with no instruction manual for how to repair it.

People come in at times when they think they can help. I’m always grateful for these moments of connection, for any kindness shown. But when those people walk away, often for reasons that seem insignificant to them, the abandonment cuts deeper than they could possibly understand. Because when you’ve had every reason to end someone’s world but chose not to, when you’ve shown restraint and humanity despite your own suffering, being left again feels like the final verdict on your worth.

What Society Owes Vessels Like Me

Without the support of genuinely good people who commit for the long haul, vessels born the way I was born have no hope. We’re set up to fail from conception. We’re damaged before we take our first breath. We’re raised in chaos and then expected to somehow emerge whole, to function normally, to not become statistics.

And when we inevitably struggle, when we end up in the systems built to contain rather than heal us, society acts shocked. They shake their heads at our addiction, our anger, our inability to form healthy relationships. They wonder why we end up in prison or dead too young. But they were there at the beginning. They saw what was happening. And they chose to look away, to offer temporary fixes instead of real intervention, to walk away when it got hard.

We owe children born into these circumstances so much more than they’re getting. We owe them acknowledgement that their formation was an injustice. We owe them the long-term, professional resources to repair what should never have been broken. We owe them the space to tell their stories without judgement, without being made to feel grateful for scraps when they deserved the whole meal.

My story represents thousands of others who never got the chance to speak. We deserved better from the very first moment. We still deserve better now. And until society commits to real, lasting change instead of temporary bandaids, the cycle will continue.

Another child will be born addicted tomorrow. Another vessel will be formed in chaos. Another life will be set up to fail from the very beginning. How many more before we actually do something about it?

This is not a plea for sympathy. This is a demand for accountability. For systemic change. For society to stop pretending it doesn’t know exactly where broken adults come from.