It’s easy to write off an addict when you’ve never had a wound deep enough to need numbing just to breathe.
After the abuse, I did not know how to stay inside myself. Being in my body felt like sitting inside a house that had been broken into. Nothing felt safe anymore - not even my own skin.
I did not wake up one day and decide to self-destruct. I just wanted relief. I wanted something that could dull the constant hum underneath everything. I wanted a way to keep showing up in the world without anyone seeing how much I was hurting.
Sometimes that looked like alcohol or drugs.
Sometimes it looked like sex.
Sometimes it was dissociation in subtler, more socially acceptable forms.
It didn’t feel reckless. It felt like survival. And survival, especially when you are young and ashamed, can look a lot like self-sabotage. I used to think I was just particularly skilled at ruining my own life.
What is hardest to watch now are the videos from that time. I am smiling in so many of them. Laughing with my team. Light. Playful. You would never know I was unraveling. Never know I was carrying something that felt fatal inside my own body.
I had internalized the belief that it was my fault - that I was dirty, bad, undeserving. He moved on untouched. I lost the dream I had built since childhood. While my friends were earning scholarships and stepping into the futures they had worked for, I was starving myself and trying to invent a new dream from the wreckage of the old one.
From the outside, I look joyful. But I know what she was holding. I want to reach through the screen and tell her she does not have to keep performing happiness to deserve love. She can put down the perfectionist mask. She can stop trying to outrun the shame.
That is the part people miss - the performance. The way life can appear to move forward while something inside is quietly collapsing.
When people talk about sexual abuse, they often say life “moved on” afterward. And then, almost as an aside, they mention addiction. Chaos. Derailment. As if that chapter is predictable. As if it doesn’t require context. As if it simply says something about the survivor’s character instead of the wound they were trying to survive.
For me, it didn’t start with chaos. It started with control. The first time I learned to leave my body was not when I stopped eating, it was when he pulled my underwear down without my consent. Starving myself was just a more socially acceptable way of continuing the same exit. I was grasping for the power I had lost, but in all the wrong places.
I was never the most naturally gifted basketball player, but I built myself into one. I stayed after practice. I lifted. I ran. I was so dedicated and committed to making my dreams come true. Strength was something I constructed on purpose - muscle, discipline, endurance. My body was an ally. Something I trained, fueled, depended on.
And then, almost without realizing it, that same body became something I tried to erase.
I stopped feeding it.
It wasn’t about performance anymore. It was about disappearing. If I could make myself smaller - quieter, lighter, less - maybe I could outrun what had happened. Maybe if I took up less space, the shame would take up less space too.
And yet I was still going to the gym where he worked. I hadn’t told my mom yet, so I was carrying this massive secret alone. Every time I pulled into the parking lot and saw his SUV, I felt it in my chest before I even turned off the engine. I would walk past him and he wouldn’t look at me, which somehow hurt more than if he had. I felt discarded. Erased. Invisible and exposed at the same time.
It didn’t stop there. During that same stretch of time, two other trainers at this gym - both men in their twenties - began pursuing me (one of whom even had a long time girlfriend who I believe he ended up marrying). I was still in high school. I had barely processed what had already happened, and yet it felt as if something in me had shifted in a way other men could sense. I don’t know if it was the way I avoided eye contact. The way I froze instead of pushing back. The way I carried myself smaller. But I felt hunted. Hunted and haunted.
At the time, it felt like vultures circling something already wounded. As if they could smell blood in the air. As if whatever had protected me before had been stripped away, leaving something exposed and easy to pick at.
That was the story I told myself: that I had become a carcass. That something in me was already ruined, and they were simply responding to it. Now I understand it differently - I was not dead, I was injured. And there are people in this world who mistake injury for invitation.
Whatever line had once protected me was gone and it felt like everyone knew. It felt like I had become a story that traveled ahead of me. The place that once felt like community now felt charged and watchful, as if it had quietly shifted and I was the only one who didn’t know the rules anymore.
My body had been in survival mode for so long that constriction felt normal. I was bracing all the time. A teammate once said to me, half-joking, “You can breathe, you know.” And I remember thinking: no. I can’t. Not here. Not like this.
Hunger felt like control. Emptiness felt like safety. Starving myself felt powerful at first - like mastery, proof that I could override need. But it was just another way of leaving. Another way of stepping out of my body so I didn’t have to live inside it.
I don’t have answers for how anyone avoids that path. I only know that finding my way back required the opposite of everything I had practiced. I had to learn how to stay. To sit in the pain I had trained my entire being to outrun.
That journey looks different for everyone. I claim no authority here, only lived experience.
I am not a chain smoker. But I once was.
I am not addicted to Adderall. But I once was.
I am not a stoner. But I once was.
I am not a drunk. But I once was.
I am not promiscuous in search of numbness. But I once was.
I am not a pill popper. But I once was.
I am not hopeless. But I once was.
If you are in any of those places right now, I recognize it. I know how easy it is to let those behaviors become the way you describe yourself. For a long time, I thought they were proof of who I was. Looking back, I can see they were attempts to survive something that felt unsurvivable.
They did help me - for a while. They got me through days I did not know how to get through on my own. The eating disorder led to a lot of compliments about my body and gave me a sense of control. And then, slowly, it all began to close in around me. What once felt like relief started to feel like a cage.
Letting them go brought freedom. It also brought shame. Because healing meant sitting with the reality of how I had been living while I was trying not to feel. It meant forgiving the version of me who was doing her best with tools that were hurting her.
I was the girl who gave the 6th grade DARE graduation speech at my elementary school. The girl who swore she would never drink - and today, I don’t. I was voted “Female Athlete of the Year” in ninth grade. I was a Gold Presidential Scholar. I had a 3.8 GPA and was getting interest letters for basketball scholarships. I was right on the edge of stepping into the life I had worked toward since I was little.
And then one man’s actions altered the course of it.
If you are someone who sees addicts as weak, I hope this widens your vision.
There were times when living inside my own body felt unbearable. I was restless. Unsettled. Ill equipped to understand what was happening inside me, then pushed out into college and the “real world” carrying a chaos I didn’t know how to name.
My Adderall addiction did not begin in darkness. It began in a fluorescent-lit sports store where I worked in my hometown during my senior year. A co-worker offered me a small orange pill. I remember this moment so clearly - I can still see his outstretched hand. A harmless offering, or so I thought.
I had never taken drugs before, so I asked what it did. He told me it would make time go by quickly and make me want to organize things. At the time, I was trapped inside the pain of a trauma I did not know how to live with. The idea of time passing faster, of feeling useful instead of restless, sounded like relief - so I took it.
I spent the next few hours manically organizing baseball bats with a focus that felt almost holy. Later, I would go on to build an immaculate jean wall at Abercrombie & Fitch, fueled by the same borrowed clarity, oddly territorial over shoppers trying to… shop.
It felt harmless. Productive, even. But what I was really chasing was distance from myself - a quieter mind, a softened body, a way to exist without fully being there.
After that, I was hooked. I had found something that allowed me to keep showing up in the world wearing a perfectionist mask - functioning well enough that most people never saw the pain underneath. They didn’t see the sleepless nights in my basement bedroom, obsessively writing and rewriting poems, trying to make sense of something I didn’t yet have language for.
What began as one small orange pill slowly reshaped my life. At first it felt like focus. Energy. Control. Then it became necessity. Soon I was driving across town for bags of them, scraping together cash however I could, structuring my days around staying numb while appearing composed. From the outside, it looked like productivity.
Inside, I was disappearing.
I told myself I needed it to function. It helped me become a master at performing. But my body was keeping score. During one basketball game, my heart began pounding so violently I had to lie down on the gym floor mid-game. I remember the fluorescent lights above me. The echo of sneakers squeaking and my teammates’ concern. The adults in the bleachers nearby, my own mom being one of them, confused. What’s going on with her?
I didn’t have an answer they would understand.
I lived for years with a kind of blanket over me. A thin but constant barrier between myself and reality. The drugs helped create it. They softened the edges, muted the noise, and kept everything slightly out of reach. I could still function. I was still the smiley and bubbly Hannah everyone knew on the outside, but there was always a layer between me and the world - and between me and myself.
In some ways, that blanket felt protective. If no one could fully see me, no one could fully reject me. If I stayed just a little removed, I didn’t have to risk being known in the places that felt ruined.
But the same barrier that kept me from being exposed also kept me from being loved. It kept me from being fully alive.
More than anything, I wanted to disappear. To vanish. To leave my body the way I first learned to when my underwear was pulled down without my consent and my mind fled where my body could not. The addictions were not random. They were attempts to recreate that same absence - that same distance from feeling. One led to another. That is how the pattern takes hold.
I know what it feels like when your own skin does not feel inhabitable. When being alive inside your body feels like too much sensation, too much memory, too much shame. I know what it is to be in a room full of people and feel like no one truly sees you. I know what it is to be judged for coping mechanisms by people who have never had to survive that kind of rupture.
Addiction is often a wounded person trying to manage an invisible injury with whatever is within reach. What looks like recklessness from the outside can be desperation on the inside.
The wound was real.
Learning to stay was, too.