Addiction: My Story - Connor Manning

Hey guys, I hope that you're well.

Before I start off this post, I do want to warn you of trigger warnings about drugs that will follow in this post. If you think this will negatively affect you in any way, shape or form, please click away now.

For you guys who want to continue reading, this post is about a video by Connor Manning that resonated really well with me and continued on from a conversation me and a friend of mine had been having earlier today about drugs and the way that it can affect people. It's a lot different to my usual stuff but it's really something I'd like to share.

Connor's video, for me, really put that into perspective and also added to the opinion that I'd held earlier today during the conversation.

First of all, something I think is worth recognising first of all is that during drug addiction, using the drug becomes the thing that controls your life and that can drain your personality and the awesome person that you would have otherwise have had the potential to be. Using becomes both the best thing and the single most thing you hate with every fibre of your being, all at the same time. And that is probably one of the hardest things that a person has to face during their life. Drug addiction is a plague, well and truly and honestly needs to be understood a lot more amongst the rest of society because without understanding it, how can we hope to improve the situation or understand how it can be aroused?

One thing I learnt from this video that I definitely didn't know before was the fact that you can be predisposed from birth to become more prone towards addiction. I guess this can be attributed to whether your parents used drugs whilst you were developing or whether your parents used before your birth and how that affected their eggs/sperm. It can also be genetic disposition and therefore, it's not always the user's fault if they end up in that situation. However, this is by no means an excuse for their situation, merely a contributing factor, if you will. This is also something to consider as a factor because we all think we understand why users end up how they become, forgive me for not going into details, but honestly, every user is as unique as the person they are. That is something we need to understand as a society too.

I think the one thing I've learnt from both my friend and Connor's video is that these people are in desperate need for compassion and empathy during addiction as well as recovery and they don't deserve to be shunned away from society and frowned down upon because they're quite often normal people who don't want to be in that situation as much as you'd like to be in that situation or perhaps even more so. They deserve to be shown that they are still loved and that people still care and that people will do whatever they can to help them and drag them out. As Connor points out in his video, that's often as much as you can do but believe me, it makes the biggest difference knowing that you're not alone. Kindness is honestly one of the best things of the world and sharing it with everyone is something our society really needs to learn, in my humble opinion.

Addiction, once it's developed and become a fully blown thing, is a mental illness and shouldn't be treated as anything else. However, unfortunately, our society has a stigma towards illnesses of the brain that we don't completely understand, however, this definitely does not mean that we shouldn't talk about it and educate ourselves so we can help others. After all, isn't that the best thing that you can do?

Thank you so much for reading this guys and I hope that you can take something from this post. Whatever you thought or if you want to add something to the discussion or something I should've  mentioned (many things) leave a comment below and I hope to talk to you soon! Take Care :)