What can we learn from Whitney Houston?

Whitney Houston’s memorial service is a prime example of how people learn to talk well of those who struggled with his or her addiction, feeling sympathy for what they don’t understand, after they are dead. Yet what makes an addict? We should really start examining this question.

Whitney Houston’s cause of death has not been announced, yet everyone who followed her career knows, that addiction had taken away part of her voice, her looks, affected the way she felt about herself to a breaking point and that addiction took away her light. Drugs shattered Whitney’s spirit, accompanied by violence she experienced from her ex-husband Bobbie Brown, who battered her, degraded her and spat on her, knowing she was one of the greatest vocalists of all time.

Drugs will break and pull down even the greatest, most successful, most genius person into the hell of self-doubt, low self-esteem, lack of boundaries and all that once seemed innocent and so very precious. We are no longer the person we once were; yet we try so desperately to hold on to who that person is, while regretting our mistakes and knowing there may never be a way back for us.

We know we lose control of what has become of us and when we start making promises about all the things we’re going to do to improve; inside we know, with every promise made, we fall deeper and deeper into doubting ourselves, because we have lost our way. We lose hope and try to hide it, we lose confidence from others and we know it.

While in our addiction, there is, once in a while, a small glimmer of willingness to stop abusing drugs, but those who judge us and convince us, that in fact we are hopeless, crush it. This is part of the revolving door of the wickedness some of us never come out of. Holding on to the will and the belief of recovery is only possible if we are surrounded by those who understand that this willingness is not strong in our first two to three years of recovery. Keeping the wrong kind of company easily crushes this willingness, and if we risk being around those people and we relapse, we often do not survive.

People get tired of being judged and even more, throughout history; people have spoken out, protested, even died to end the tyranny of discrimination and oppression. On the horizon, maybe, just maybe one day, there may be a flicker of hope that people will end the oppression of those hopelessly addicted to drugs. I hope for humanity to one day arrive at this realization, because getting sober is a matter of life or death.