One day, I just remember staring at a reflection that I didn't even recognise anymore. The gaunt and pale-faced girl, was a girl that I no longer knew. She had empty eyes and hollowed-out cheeks. Her hair was lank and long. This girl, she looked so hauntingly tired.

Tired of herself.

Tired of life.

Tired of everything.

I reached out to the mirror, touching the face who so sadly stared back at her, then I just cried.

I was tired.

Unbelievably tired.

And I was sad.

Unbelievably sad.

The reflection that I was staring at, was a me that I had slowly been destroying. The partying was no longer working. The drugs, they were no longer working. I was slowly killing myself. Then, I thought of my nan and my gramp. They had been watching me doing all of this to myself, and they couldn't do a damn thing about it.

That made me cry even more.

On that dull and quiet morning, it was like I had woken up for the first time in two years. All that I had been doing, was bombarding all of my newly awakened thoughts.

The shame I felt over so many things, they bombarded me, too.

I had this compulsion to apologise to my beloved grandparents, for all of my lies to them, and for all of the times that I had pretended to be okay around them. I also wanted to apologise to a school friend who had invited me to meet her fiancé who was a Freemason. I shouldn't have gone, when I knew I was being so thoughtless and so reckless at the time. But I did go, and when I found out that we were going to a posh, invite only Freemason dinner party, I was so angry with my friend. She didn't tell me that it was a Black Tie soirée. So imagine how I felt having to walk into a mansion that had security everywhere I looked, when dressed looking like someone from Woodstock back in the 60s?

It was awful.

Everyone had stared.

Everyone had looked down on me.

Everyone had judged me.

I eventually got defensive and argumentative.

I ended up shouting to everyone there that they were all 'up their Freemason posh arses', before stomping my way past all of the security and angrily waiting by the car. Myself and that friend didn't speak for many years after that night.

Then there was the lad who had taken some acid one day, and was having a really bad trip with it. He was trying to calm down at this guy Martin's flat, when myself and Martin thought we would tell this tripping-out lad, that we had accidentally killed someone the night before, then buried their body somewhere in The Forest of Dean. The poor lad was convinced we really had done it, and combined with the acid, had totally freaked out. It took us quite a few hours to assure him that we had just been messing with his head all along. The poor sod was absolutely traumatised, but at the time, myself and Martin thought it was funny.

Yeah, I had a lot to apologise for.

I had a lot to make amends for.

Staring into those cruel and lifeless eyes of mine, I knew then that I had to stop what I was doing. The drugs weren't helping my sick heart and my even sicker mind, they were simply now feeding them. The highs were getting lesser, the lows were getting more frequent. A more sicker and more careless numbness had replaced the innocent and harmless numbness that I'd always had before. This numbness had taken me over, and I knew that if I didn't try to pull away from its sick grip—I would forever be lost to it.

So on that day, I stopped taking drugs.

It wasn't easy, but my spirit had finally had enough.

It was while I was trying to be free of one thing, that another thing would soon replace it. All of my need to take drugs and to party, would soon be replaced with someone who would become the jailer of my heart.