I Am An Addict

By Brice van der Post

By InnerVoice

November 30^th, 2018

I'm 19 and I'm an Addict

My name is Brice, I'm 19 years old, and I'm an addict.

I have a story that I feel might be worth sharing in more detail. I don't really know where to begin, but I know where to go: to help you if you are in a similar situation to the one I once was. So here goes…

I remember the exact date that it all started: November 11th, 2011. That’s when I had my first drink. I remember feeling as if a significant weight was lifted from my shoulders. Nothing really mattered anymore, just me. Very soon this became a standard part of my weekly routine. Every Friday my friends and I would meet up at a bar called The Green Room, get drunk and go out clubbing. I grew up in Bali, Indonesia, and lived there for the first 15 years of my life. I have always considered myself quite lucky to call that place home, but at the time we were 12 years old, driving bigger motorcycles than our dads, going to clubs, smoking cigarettes, and drinking.

Bali had no rules. It was paradise for us.

This flippant behaviour continued into 2014; a solid three years. Over that time the drinking became more serious, and I continued to act out. My parents could barely handle me anymore, and it was about to get worse. Around 2014, I began experimenting with drugs. It’s important to note that drugs are highly illegal in Indonesia, and something as small as a gram could land you in prison for a long time. But I didn’t care. I was failing school, taking drugs, and going out. That’s about it.

I promised myself

After some difficult conversations with my parents, we came to the conclusion that I should move to The Netherlands and live with my godparents. The plan was for me to relocate for the start of the academic year, but a month before I left, my father was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, which made it even more tough on us all. But still, I had to go.

In Holland, I really tried to sort myself out. I promised myself I’d do it right this time. Within a month, I was depressed. I was coming from a country with endless summer, where you could surf before school and go to beach parties to meet beautiful girls. Now, I was in a cold, dark place where kids my age were inside playing PlayStation and smoking cannabis. It was tough, and I wanted to fit in, so I started smoking cannabis. A lot of it, too. Before, during, and after school. Naturally, my grades plummeted. As winter came, I became even more depressed and started cutting my legs, drinking liquor on my own, and chewing on benzos in my bedroom.

I was 15 years old.

Even though I’d promised myself it’d be different this time, my behaviour had become intolerable again. One night, I got home at 3am, completely out of my head. My godparents were waiting for me and they were furious. They booked me on the first flight back to Indonesia, which left in 2 hours. They dropped me off at the airport and shipped me back home. I wasn’t even given the opportunity to say goodbye to my friends.

My Father passed away

I spent 3 months back in Indonesia, but it wasn’t pleasant. On May 7th, 2015, my father passed away. It was the most emotionally painful day of my life. I couldn’t believe it. My father. He owned a furniture company in Indonesia, so all of a sudden my mother had to take over, sign all the paperwork, and get to work. Come summer, I was back in Europe, in the South of France, getting drunk and consuming more drugs. I couldn’t deal with my emotions, and there wasn’t a day that I didn’t use something to dull the pain.

As the school year begun again, I re-enrolled in school in The Netherlands. This time, I lived with friends of my parents. They were truly amazing, but it only took 3 or 4 months until they were utterly fed up and asked me to leave.

I wanted it to end

On my own, with no money, I decided to travel. I bought a plane ticket to Portugal and travelled along the coastline from Braga to Lagos. In the beginning, I worked in exchange for a place to sleep and some food, and I made extra cash by busking on the street. When I hit the south of Portugal, I started selling drugs. Lagos is a small village that attracts mostly young tourists from the UK. In tourist season, there’s a lot of people - the underground parties are insane, weird and scary because of the excessive drug use. Locals started inviting me to these super underground raves, which were frightening, especially when the sun rose and you could see peoples’ faces. The drugs were crazy; concoctions of ten different drugs at the same time. I was 16 years old.

Lagos got too much for me.

I felt something was wrong and had to get away. I tried to detox by surfing in Sagres, but I lasted 3 days, maybe. I went back to Lagos to pick up my stuff, but going back to a place with so many people scared the hell out of me. I remember walking on a busy road, and I was under the illusion that every person I passed was familiar. I was whispering “I see people, I see people, I see people” to try to stay sane. I grabbed my stuff, said an abrupt goodbye to some of my friends, and bought a bus ticket to Seville, then a train ticket to Malaga. The train ride seemed to last forever. If you’ve ever been to Malaga, you’ll know that walking out of the train station isn’t the prettiest environment. It was crowded and confusing. With my 20kg backpack and surfboard on my shoulders, I was looking down to the ground floor of the station, and I just wanted to jump over the edge and fall head-first, but I didn't have the force. I really just wanted to end the chaos in my head, I wanted to end it all. I didn’t have a phone, only a beat-up MacBook Air, and I’d left my charger on the train. I had no money, so I went to MediaMarkt to steal a charger. I got caught, but managed to talk my way out of it, and ended up borrowing a charger from someone.

I called my mum to tell her I needed help.

I stayed with friends for a little while, but after a week or two, I was back at it. I met a drug dealer from Cueta, who opened his apartment to me and let me stay there for a month. I sold drugs for him, and we went raving a lot. It all became super awesome again. More drugs, new drugs. I was living the life again. I checked into a hotel one night in Malaga, and the next morning the police were waiting for me. “Brice van der Post, your family in Portugal, are looking for you,” they said. The only problem was I don’t have any family in Portugal. Apparently, there was an international search warrant with my name on it. A lady in Portugal was worried about me - she’d seen me walking the streets in Lagos, out of my mind - and had called the police. I spent 3 or 4 days in child protective services until my Guardian Angels saved my life. With the support of my mother, they signed on to be my legal guardians and opened their house to me.

Like a Zombie

On April 15th of that year, I went into my first rehabilitation clinic.

I was okay until a day where I had to leave rehab to do an exam at school and come back the same day. There were certain triggers at school that messed me up. I came back to rehab and went south. I started slashing my arms and legs with razor blades, punched walls until my fingers broke, and deliberately hit my head on anything I could find. I burnt my books, crushed and sniffed vitamin C pills, and tried to escape three times. One morning, I woke up to my bed sheets full of vomit and blood because I overdosed on sleep medicine, and cut myself multiple times.

This picture is of me in the emergency room at the rehab facility. My mum had come to visit me from Indonesia; she took this picture. The day after this picture was taken I was in an ambulance on the way to the psychiatric hospital. The bed was drilled to the floor, there were bars on the windows, a camera in the corner, no closets, a locked bathroom, and you ate with plastic cutlery and plates. I was on suicide watch for 4 weeks.

I was heavily sedated on anti-psychotics, like a zombie.

I found running

After a month, my mum and brother visited me, and we went to Amsterdam. Around this time we contacted Yes We Can Youth Clinics to handle my case. On August 23rd, shortly before my 18th birthday, I began my treatment there. I signed out on November 1st and went into a sober living concept for 10 months.

When I came into the sober house, I was insecure, lost and scared. I was also quite a prick, I’m sure my roommates will tell you. For the first three months of my stay, I realised I was basically repeating the behaviour from when I was high, when I was sober - sitting up until 4am on my laptop, gambling and watching porn, smoking cigarettes and eating junk food all day.

On February 23rd, I turned six months sober, quit cigarettes and signed up for a half marathon. People thought I was crazy, especially since the half marathon was on March 11th - two and a half weeks away. They were discouraging, telling me that it’s a stupid idea and that I would hurt myself, which was all true. I ran so much in the lead up that I arrived fatigued and already injured. But I couldn’t wait to run it. I made all the mistakes, including running in new shoes, but that feeling of crossing the finish line was something so truly amazing. I finished in 1:51:10, and missed my goal of 1:44:59, but I was hooked.

You Did it, man!

Looking for my next run, I stumbled upon this website: ironman.com. It was crazy to think about doing a full 140.6-mile triathlon, but I wanted to put my mind to something. I committed, “That’s it, I’m going to train, and one day I’ll finish an Ironman.” I biked 20km on a city bike, in my jeans, before my mum shipped me my dad’s old carbon road bike, which was in Indonesia. In my first swim, I wasn’t able to reach the other side without holding on to the lane ropes for a rest. But I slowly started to incorporate swim-bike-run into everything I was doing. This was 8 months ago.

I started small - sprint distance, then quarter distance, then half distance. On November 17, 2018, I did my first IRONMAN. Not only did I finish it, I finished it in 11:29.49 and placed third in my age group. As the youngest athlete in a field of 1,100 competitors, I finished 116th overall. IRONMAN Malaysia is one of the most challenging courses out there, but I chose it because it would allow me to train in Indonesia in the months prior. I still can’t believe it, in 8 months I went from not being able to cross a 50-metre swimming pool to finishing a 3.8km swim in an hour and five minutes.

At the finish line, 5-time world champion Craig Alexander announced my name, and I pointed up to the heavens and smiled to Papa. Crossing that finish line, I told myself ‘you did it, man.’

I never give myself any recognition, but at that moment it was probably the first time I’ve been truly proud of myself.

And that’s better than any drug I’ve ever tried.

I was never addicted to drugs, or alcohol, or sex, or anything else. I was addicted to a good feeling, a feeling of oblivion and escape. And that feeling was what brought me from A to B; it let me forget about everything. But that feeling was never the problem, it was the solution. A temporary solution; a quick fix. Take away all the stimuli of a good feeling, and you’ll be left with the problem— and that’s what I started to work on because if I don’t go to the core of my issue, I will only come back to where I once was.

I'm sober and happy

To be frank: I’ve had plenty of good fun with drugs in the past, but those were only a few hours of being under the influence of god-only-knows-what. I tend to forget the dark times where I didn’t really have any friends, or when I saw my mother crying because of me, or when I failed another year of school. That dark place where I once lived - I don’t ever want to go back there. In fact, I’m running as fast as I can in the exact opposite direction.

Recovery is hard. Really hard. And it only works if you’re honest. Getting sober was the most difficult decision I’ve ever made, but let me tell you - it was by far the best decision I’ve ever made. The thing that has helped me the most in staying sober is having a purpose. I have a reason to wake up in the morning, and I firmly believe that is what saved me. My experience has been that if you’re passionate about something and you follow through with a gritty mindset, amazing things will come your way.

I’m an addict, and if you know an addict or you are an addict yourself, you might be familiar with obsession. We can get abundantly obsessed with anything, whether it’s Candy Crush or triathlon. For me, it was triathlon. I really believe that being an addict is my superpower, it is why I was able to excel so quickly. There were people in my age group who trained for years to get in the proper shape but finished behind me. How did I do it? Grit. If I wasn’t swimming, biking, or running - I was reading about it, counting my calories, measuring my resting heart rate, sleeping my minimum hours, drinking enough water. The fact I was so obsessed with performance...it led to performance. Find your passion, follow it, and make it your purpose. A year from now you will wish you had started today.

For me, it doesn’t end here. In 2019, I plan on training religiously to reach my potential. I want to compete at a higher level and, hopefully, qualify for the IRONMAN World Championships in Kona. I have also made the decision to pick up my academics. Since I missed out on so much school, I can’t enrol in university the traditional way, I have to take an exam that requires study. This area of my life has always been something I’ve been insecure about - all of my friends going off to first- or second-year university while I didn’t even finish high school. However, over the months, and after reading about it, I’ve realised that I’ve got all the time in the world and even though I didn’t follow the traditional path to university, the life experience I’ve accumulated - through my travel, through my struggles, through my recovery - it’s priceless. And I have to be honest with you: I don’t particularly regret any of it.

There is a passage in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma where the yogi Krishnan tells him: “I’ve learned that everything happens for a reason, every event has a why and all adversity teaches us a lesson...Never regret your past. Accept it as the teacher that it is.”