[meg]

When someone you love is becoming addicted to drugs it’s hard to take everything in. For the purpose of this I’m going to make up fictional names but the characters are all true.

When I first met Chris I fell head over heels, he was mysterious and a bit of a bad boy but he completely stole my heart.

I knew that Chris had had a past battle with depression (something I now know he was still struggling with when I met him) and that he used drugs, such as marajuana and legal highs, occasionally.

Usually if someone told me that I’d run a mile as I myself have never been into any sort of drugs but have seen what it can do to people, for some reason this only made me want Chris more. I think I thought I could be such an amazing girlfriend he’d never think about drugs ever again, now I know just how naive I was.

Our relationship was great at first, I worked and he didn’t but that meant I could pay for dinner dates and days out and that didn’t bother me. I knew his depression and anxiety made it hard for him to work so I was happy to spend money for us to be together and go out.

It was about a month in that things started to change. Chris would go missing for days on end without contacting a soul and then turn up again like nothing had happened. His answer to everything was ‘don’t worry’ but of course that’s all you do!

Hanging out with his friends made me feel uncomfortable, scared and vulnerable. I think my parents probably brought me up wrapped in cotton wool but I didn’t know anything about people who did drugs so openly and so care free! Not a single one of them discouraged Chris, even when they all knew about his struggle with his mental health.

Then one night I was with Chris and a group of his boy friends when they decided they were all going to buy ketamine and ‘forget about all the shit’. I took myself out of that situation, I could deal with watching my boyfriend smoke a joint but to see him physically sniffing a drug made me feel sick. I went for a walk before returning around half an hour later, where I found Chris had wet himself and was having a fit, if that wasn’t bad enough his ‘friends’ were in fits of laughter around him and told me that if I rang an ambulance and told them what drugs he’s taken I’d be sorry.

I didn’t ring anyone, I sat by him as he lay in a puddle of his own urine and waited for the fits to stop, I then dragged him home through the back alleys of London all by myself and lied to his parents that he was ‘just a bit drunk’.

It all went down hill from there. He began stealing money from me, pushing and shoving me if I asked him not to go out and I began to become withdrawn. I told my friends that I was absolutely fine and that we were just ‘going through a bad patch’ but inside I just wanted to run away. He started to cut me off from everyone, no-one close to me could help because I didn’t want to admit how stupid I was being.

This went on for around 6 months. At the end I was nothing like the person I was before, I started skipping work, becoming distant from everyone I loved and cared about and spending more and more time devoted to Chris.

I then found out that he was cheating and had had another girlfriend for a number of weeks, that was the last straw and I ended our relationship. I can’t thank my lucky stars enough for him cheating on me, because if he hadn’t, I honestly don’t know if I’d have ever left him.

I’m now almost 19 and I see things so clearly now. I genuinely believe that unless someone wants to change, there is nothing you can do to help. And in my case, where I thought I was helping, by staying with him and providing money and someone he could escape to, I was actually making his addiction worse.

I have never spoken about this until around a month ago when I finally opened up to my mum about those months she thought I was heading for a break down. When she learnt the truth I could see her heart breaking and I know she partly blamed herself for never forcing me back then to open up to her.

I’m in an excellent place now and I just want anyone else who was in the same position as me to stop trying to change the person they love. I know it’s hard but I promise you, they’ll never change unless they want to, and don’t blame yourself, I know that no matter how hard you try to be the ‘perfect’ partner/family member, it will never make a difference. The first step to change has always got to be from them.

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