Counterfeit Love

On craving poison and trying to fill a God-shaped hole.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

“My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” - Jeremiah 2:13.

In the weeks and months after my near-death experience from drugs, it was as if I had developed a conscience. The desire to get high was borne more out of a compulsion to stave off withdrawal than to experience the pleasure I’d once had. I loathed my skeletal reflection that stared back at me in the car’s side mirrors. My coughs made my ribs ache and sent ripples across my shirts that were so huge they hung over my bony frame like trash bags. Drugs were no longer a gateway to bliss—they were a survival mechanism, saving me from the weight of the crashes even as they consumed my body. In hindsight, I suspect my newfound inner conflict was less of a noble desire to get clean than my body telling me something needed to change if I wanted to live.

“Why can’t we stop?” I once asked my best friend at that time. Though I meant it, I knew I had asked the wrong person; I’ll call him Nick. To this day, I’m convinced Nick was bipolar, though he was never diagnosed. Nick was a human pendulum, living on little to no sleep for weeks, getting high, having high-risk sex, drinking and driving, and partying until something crashed and burned or a relationship was irreparably destroyed. After his mania subsided and he no longer felt like Superman, he’d descend to pits that were dark beyond imagination, curled in a fetal position in his bed for weeks. Nick’s parents were the type of Christians who were distrustful of mental healthcare, particularly psychiatry and psychotropic drugs. His struggles were the product of a “lack of faith”, rather than cries for help. Because of this, he turned to what he felt helped him the most.

“Why would I stop?” he replied. “This is the world for me. This is love. This is when I hear God.”

After months of wrestling and then getting help, I severed communications with Nick, though it broke my heart. I often think about the sincerity in his eyes when he told me, in a cloud of smoke, what getting high was like. I remember a friend of ours from high school who’d had an intense, bad acid trip who had been admitted to a psych hospital for the better part of a semester because he’d completely dissociated, believing that he was outside of his body, almost in a catatonic trance. This was the goal—nirvana, or whatever he’d experienced; transcendence, deliverance into oblivion.

Nick was right, getting high was love, at least at first. In the beginning, intoxication was pure happiness, like the warmest, most seductive embrace I’d ever experienced. It was standing in the midst of a divine and black oblivion, welcoming complete mind-death with a smile and arms wide open. In the beginning, it was my attempt to find something that made me happy, and it delivered.

The only problem was that, like most things we use to try to make ourselves happy, the bliss I experienced was counterfeit. The joy I once felt didn’t last. I had placed my hope in something that made my brain light up, but the tradeoff was how it consumed my body and soul. What started out as an attempt to be happy had devolved into a chaotic cycle of despair, cravings, release, panic, then despair again.

“Every sin is an attempt to be happy apart from God.” — Father Mike Schmitz.

Before I started working at my current hospital, I worked for some time in an adult psychiatric facility, then a drug and alcohol rehab facility. Without exception, every patient in the rehab facility had stories that started in similar places. Whether their addiction started in childhood, during a toxic marriage, after an episode or cycle of abuse, or while they suffered a traumatic loss, the ones who could make sense of their own stories always said something like, “I just wanted x.”

“I just wanted something that made me feel safe. I just wanted something that made me happy. I just wanted something that made me numb.”

Almost every time, addiction was an escape, a refuge from something unjust, painful, and devastating, and the cycle would only begin to break when the addiction was seen for what it was: a poor medicine for a real need. And the need was never the problem. Everyone needs to feel love; not just love in the romantic sense, but in the deep, belonging sense of love. Everyone needs comfort, to have a corner of the world where they can feel safe. Everyone needs respite from cruel or unfair circumstances. We’re made for rest, belonging, peace, and love. We’re just poor judges of where it comes from.

“Jesus answered, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’” — John 4:13-14.

While these poor medicines are most obvious with drug or alcohol addiction, we reach for others every day, sometimes without even considering them. What is pornography but a facsimile of the intimacy and affection that we crave from a real person? When we relentlessly chase money and wealth, sacrificing all else for its sake, what is that but a pursuit to feel secure? We disengage from the world around us by holding our phones to our face in pursuit of numbness and distraction, administering the tranquilizer through our eyes.

I recently did an exercise where I wrote down some of my deepest thoughts that scare me the most in a notebook; thoughts and feelings that I’d rather not admit thinking or feeling. Afterwards, I crumpled the page and threw it away, but the reality of the thoughts sticks with me.

One of the first confessions I wrote said something like, “Part of me still craves the feeling of getting high and losing my mind again.”

While I try to keep that part of me as small as possible, I refuse to pretend that the desire isn’t there, because that’s when it will creep up from behind and kill me. Knowing that it’s there, I’m acutely aware of the power it has to distort anything I do. Relaxing with a drink can become a nightmare. A longing for solitude can become isolation, cutting myself off from everything and everyone. A desire for intimacy or detachment can turn into me retreating to a dark room on my phone.

At the same time, my past and my addictions have shown me something more hopeful than just reminding me of my human needs: I am capable of intense devotion and love—I just need to pick the real medicine rather than the poison. I like to think that, if there are a million toxic ways to fulfill my needs, there are a million-and-one wholesome ways. They’re almost always outwardly focused, not inwardly. They embrace and love what’s around me, and aren’t occupied with what “serves” me. Relaxation can be a good book or reconnecting with my family. Isolation can be time spent in prayer and meditation. Intimacy and detachment from the world can be spent with my wife. And each of these medicines leave me stronger, more alive, and more fulfilled. Each carries real transcendence, a real state of heaven on earth, not the counterfeit poisons that kill over time.

I haven’t spoken to Nick in over thirteen years, and to this day, I don’t know where he is, how he is, or what he’s up to. To protect my sobriety, it’s probably best that I don’t seek reconnection, but I pray for him often. I pray with desperation firstly that he’s still alive. I pray that he got help and that he found people better suited to guide him through his very real problems and needs. And while I don’t plan on it, if I ever see him again, I would tell him that I understand now why it was so hard for us to stop getting high. I would tell him that it wasn’t God he was hearing back then, but that he deserves to be listened to and talked to. I would tell him that it wasn’t love he was feeling, but that he deserves to be loved.

This Thursday, be sure to check out my next Masters of the Craft piece. I publish these every other Thursday. If you missed the last one, you can check it out here: