What It Feels Like to Be a High-Functioning Addict

There is a version of my life where I remember my twenties.

I try to imagine it sometimes, the way you'd imagine alternate timelines when you’re stuck in traffic or staring at your reflection a little too long. Like in Sliding Doors, where Gwyneth Paltrow's destiny hinges on that missed train. Or the branching timelines of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where entire realities split off from a single decision. In that version, I am better adjusted. I go to parties and speak easily. I don’t rehearse conversations in my head before I say them. I don’t feel my body lock up in rooms where everyone else seems to understand the rules. 

In that version, I coped properly. I might have been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder 1 and Generalized Anxiety Disorder in a timely manner. I was able to get treatment for syphilis before it affected my behaviour.

But that version of me also had access to things I didn’t. Language, for one. I did not know, for most of my adult life, that what I was moving through had a name. Social anxiety gets thrown around casually when you say it now, like something you can schedule around, like something that comes with a treatment plan. Back then, it was just a series of small, accumulating failures. Mukha kang tanga, but you dust yourself off and try again. Sanayan lang, except you don’t get used to it. And really, you shouldn’t.

I did not think of myself as someone who needed help. I thought of myself as someone who needed to try harder.

So Molly (in "The Chemical Romance of Manila’s Professional Class") gets it right that when substance use enters the picture, it does not arrive as danger. But they miss the point that it arrives as relief. Call it clout, but maybe it's belonging. It looks like hedonism from outside the skin of a person who can’t comfortably see themselves naked or feel another person’s touch. 

Something shifts.

It is not euphoria, not exactly. It is closer to the absence of something. The noise quiets. The constant monitoring drops away. You speak without checking yourself first. You feel, for a few hours, like you have finally caught up to the version of yourself that everyone else seems to be.

It reminded me, much later, of a line from Robbie Williams’ Feel: “I don’t wanna die, but I ain’t keen on living either.” That middle space. Not quite despair, not quite contentment. Just… suspended. Functional enough to keep going, but not enough to feel like you’re fully inside your own life.

It is a small miracle, the first time it happens.

And like most small miracles, it is difficult not to want it again. “Chasing the Feeling” as my psychometrician references TomorrowXTogether when describing my self-destructive behaviour.

I was a recreational drug user for thirteen years. That sentence sounds more deliberate than it felt while I was living it. There was no point at which I decided this would be part of my life. It just became one.

There were stretches when it was occasional. There were also periods when it was not. I overdid it. When I woke up with that familiar, hollowed-out feeling—my body tired, my mind racing ahead of me. Cleaning up my own vomit after I had fallen asleep on it? Not glamorous, but I made it to work after.

I was a high-functioning addict, but a lot of that function needed prep time in the bathroom. Tapos pagtatawanan na lang namin because it was so absurd, you can only look at that version of yourself with head-shaking retrospect. Never again, sana, but unlikely.

Like in Fallen Angels, where Wong Kar-wai gives us that image of Takeshi Kaneshiro and canned pineapples about to expire—buying them in bulk, clinging to a date that already passed, as if repetition could hold something in place. That’s what it started to feel like eventually. Not excess, but maintenance. Holding on to a version of relief that was already thinning out.

I am not interested in pretending those parts did not happen.

But I say this: there were moments in my life when I do not think I would have made it through without that relief.

That is not something people like to hear.

It complicates things.

Because it is easy, now, to say I could have coped better.

I could have gone to therapy earlier. I could have exercised more. These are all things I have since learned. But they require a version of me that already had options.

That was not always the case.

And so when I hear people speak about substance use—whether with moral certainty or with concern—I sometimes feel a distance open up.

What happens when the thing you are being asked to give up is also, in some imperfect way, the thing that allowed you to stay?

I have been in those rooms people write about. I have seen the way people look out for each other. I have also seen the repetition.

It is easy to stand outside of that and ask why it persists.

It is harder to sit with the possibility that it persists because it works, at least for a while.

Not because it is good. Not because it is safe. But because it does something.

It fills a gap. In our public health system. In our exploitative labor laws. In our conservative society. In our media manufactured beauty standards.

And if that is the case, then removing it is not a simple matter of will.

You can tell someone to stop. You can explain the risks. But if nothing else in their life changes—if the conditions that made that escape necessary remain intact—then what you are asking them to give up is not just a substance.

You are asking them to give up on surviving.

I think about how often we talk about “turning it off.” The anxiety, the overthinking, the constant awareness of yourself in a room. There’s a kind of appeal in that phrase alone—like in “Turning My Safety Off” (Sino Sikat), that impulse to disengage the mechanism that keeps you alert, guarded, contained.

But nothing actually turns off cleanly.

It just gets redirected.

What has changed for me, over time, is not simply that I use less. It is that other forms of support have slowly become available. Language. Understanding. The ability to recognize what is happening in my own body.

Those things did not arrive all at once.

They arrived because, at some point, there was something else to reach for.

Until that happens, I am not sure what it means to tell someone they should have chosen differently.

If there is anything I have learned from these past twenty years, it is this: people do not reach for escape without a reason.

Sometimes that reason is shallow. Sometimes it is not.

Often, it is an accumulation of both.

I can imagine a life where I never needed any of it.

I just know that it was not the life I had.

I didn’t arrive at these ideas alone. Some of them came much later, after the fact—after I had already lived through the things I’m only now beginning to understand.

Public health frameworks like those developed by the World Health Organization, Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime helped put language to something I had only experienced intuitively: that drug use is never just about the drug, but about the life surrounding it.

There is also the work of Norman E. Zinberg, who wrote about “drug, set, and setting”—a framework that, once you encounter it, feels almost obvious. Of course, the substance matters. But so does your state of mind. So does where you are, who you’re with, and what you’re carrying before you even take anything.

Closer to home, studies supported by groups like the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS on chemsex in the Philippines made something else clear: that many people navigating these spaces are doing so with very little access to care, information, or support—and are often left to figure things out together, imperfectly.

And then there are harm reduction organizations like Harm Reduction International, whose work insists on something both simple and radical: that people deserve to stay alive, even if they are not ready—or able—to stop.

I list these not as authorities to defer to, but as frameworks that helped me understand my own history with a little more clarity, and a little less shame.

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance use, help is available. Reach out to the Substance Abuse Helpline at 1550 to speak with someone who can guide you toward support, treatment options, and recovery.

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