TRAUMA DIDN’T CAUSE MY ADDICTION

Trauma mattered in my life

But saying it caused my addiction now feels far too simple

Plenty of people experience trauma and never become addicted

And people who become addicted can have completely different histories

So somewhere between what happened and what I eventually did, something else mattered

How I experienced myself

How I experienced the world

What became unbearable

What heroin changed for me

From inside that experience, using made sense

Calling trauma “the cause” can give us an answer too quickly

The question I’m much more interested in is

What made that behaviour necessary for me?

Trauma may be part of that answer

But it should never be allowed to end the inquiry