Our Stories
My Journey to Mental Health
I first heard about Crystal Meth Anonymous in Berlin, at an event dealing with chemsex that I learned about by chance. The moment a fellow shared his story, I knew: CMA was where I belonged. This was the first time I truly felt not alone in my experience. And that sense of belonging was my first step toward a new life. I had always known I was different from the other boys. I would rather play with girls, since the boys were always off playing soccer, and soccer was never something I liked. I was also seriously afraid of balls, and especially that I might be hit by one. At school, I always got good grades and was constantly praised by my teacher, so it didn’t take long before I was being called “teacher’s pet” and a “fag.” It was only when I hit puberty that I began to understand what others had likely suspected for years: I was attracted to men. Being excluded by others pushed me to shut myself off more and more. In my mind, I saw myself as either better than everyone else or worse. I never felt like I really belonged to anything. In my late teens, what I wanted most was a boyfriend, a big love, to live “happily ever after.” But every time I met someone, I quickly got overwhelmed. The reality of a relationship never matched the fantasy I had built in my mind. I got bored, withdrew, and ended things. Even sex felt more awkward than satisfying. Since I didn’t know what I wanted, there was no way I could explain it to my partners. Looking back, I realize I often went along with certain kinds of sex just because the other person wanted to. My own desires were tangled up in shame. Coming out as a gay man in the 90s, I was raised with the unspoken message: If you’re gay, you’re gonna die of AIDS. Throughout my youth and early adulthood, I felt like a stranger—to the world, to my body, to my life. In my early twenties, I started using party drugs. First alcohol and ecstasy, then cocaine, ketamine, and GHB. Eventually, drug use became a part of my sex life—and for the first time, I was able to enjoy sex with less anxiety. But in 2009, I found the thing that really “worked”: shooting up with crystal meth. All my shame, all my thoughts, worries, and fears disappeared—blown away, quite literally. For hours, even days, I could lose myself in desire without a care in the world. It was in 2009 that I used the most. I was in a chaotic relationship with another heavy user who was HIV-positive. In hindsight, I was really in a three-way relationship—with him and the drug. Even after he told me he wasn’t taking medication, we still had unprotected sex. Crystal made it easy to ignore any concerns about health or consequences. In the fall of 2009, I was diagnosed with both HIV and hepatitis C. In a strange way, I felt relieved—but I also knew I had to stop using. I broke up with him and began HIV treatment, followed by hepatitis C therapy. Back then, interferon therapy was intense: For half a year, I had a fever every weekend and grew weaker and weaker. Even so, I used again—falling deeper into what we now call chemsex. For me, sex and drugs had become fused. With addiction therapy, I managed to cut back, but the craving never left. When I wasn't using, crystal was always in my thoughts. My life still revolved around loneliness, isolation, and despair. I couldn’t form any real relationships—not with friends, not with family, and certainly not with myself. In the summer of 2016, I went to my first CMA meeting. Immediately, I felt seen and understood. That was the moment I realized I wasn’t alone. In 2017, I moved to Berlin just because it had a CMA meeting. Recovery was the reason I moved to one of the world’s biggest party cities. Since CMA only had one meeting at the time, I also started going to AA. In one queer AA meeting, I found my first sponsor and began working the Twelve Steps. The last time I used drugs was in May 2017. By the end of June, I also realized that my use of testosterone was part of the same pattern. I had kept it a secret and ordered it illegally online to bulk up. I finally opened up about this in a meeting, and since then, my clean date has been July 1, 2017. Working the Twelve Steps changed my life. Step Two—“We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”—was a turning point. When I first read that line, I had no real idea what “sanity” meant. But the more I looked at my past, the more I realized: Sanity was everything I had never had. I never thought I could have a healthy relationship with myself or the world. That step opened my eyes. To me, this step is not just about faith in a Higher Power: it’s about the chance to heal my thoughts, fears, and shame. And by doing that, to heal how I live and connect in the world. These days, even on my worst days, I am better off than I ever was during my addiction—even if things don’t always go my way. That’s what used to push me toward drugs: the frustration, fear, and struggle of life. But today, I’ve learned to live on life’s terms. Right now, I’m dealing with money issues and looking for work. But I’m also in a relationship—my first healthy one, maybe ever. At 45, after everything I’ve lived through, I finally feel grown-up enough to be a good partner. I’m getting clearer about what I want and don’t want, and I can communicate it much more honestly—to my boyfriend and to other partners. Now I know that mental health is not something you either have or you don’t. It’s something you work toward, step by step. And the Twelve Steps help me do that. CMA Berlin is now a fast-growing community of addicts who support each other to stay clean and sober. But we also have fun together: summer barbecues, game nights, movie outings, shared meals. I’ve found a community of people who understand the low points I've come through—and who help me keep climbing, and enjoy the view from the top. (Gero, Berlin)
I Had Everything
Before I got into recovery, my sponsor once pointed out to me, I basically had everything I had ever wanted—and I was miserable. My addictions had been building for at least 15 years, with increasingly painful consequences that I just ignored, denied, or argued away. I had a very secure professional job that gave me incredible freedom to manage my own time, a marriage in which we had always agreed to be open sexually with others, and a husband who approached our relationship and me with love, care, and trust. I was also convinced that being gay, and leaving behind the judgment and shame I had experienced growing up Mormon, meant being sexually liberated—doing whatever I wanted with whoever I wanted, and doing it almost exclusively on drugs. I was compensating with my addiction for intense amounts of stress in my job and unrealistic expectations I was placing on myself, not to mention pains from my past. My husband was developing codependent patterns to deal with my relentlessly progressing addictions. He was increasingly desperate and hopeless about our future, and my behavior was making it impossible for us to address these problems. It’s hard to say what hitting bottom looked like. The immediate trigger for me getting into recovery was a set of job evaluations that managed, after months of warnings, to finally break through the fog of my denial and make clear to me that my entire career was in real jeopardy. But looking back now, with the perspective of six years of recovery, the bottom looks much worse. In the space of two years, I had contracted HCV and HIV. I had spent fourteen months high on crystal meth and various cocktails of other drugs and alcohol, without interruption except to sleep every three or four days; I had been showing up to work high, giving public presentations that others described as “incomprehensible”; my husband and I had purchased a new bed, perhaps two years earlier, in a moment of attempted togetherness, thinking that might help our relationship, but I hadn’t managed to sleep a single night in it with him, because of the drugs; I had stopped eating anything but ice cream and gatorade; my entire life revolved around sex parties and sex websites and saunas and finding online venues to exchange sexual fantasies and do drugs. And if I looked around me, at the people I was mostly hanging out with, my future on this path was clear: unemployment, homelessness, and mental illness—at best. My main hurdles in recovery were, first, admitting the devastation I had caused and accepting that my addiction was the problem. I was suffering—that much was already clear to me. I had sought out treatment in therapy, where I mostly lied about my using by minimizing it. I was visiting a twelve step meeting without making any commitment to being sober, mainly because I had met one of the members on a sex date and there was some magic in that connection that gave me a glimpse of a way out. But something happened when I got those job evaluations. First, I went out and got high. When I woke up three days later, though, something in my heart simply said: this is done. That was an intention; the work followed. I agreed to go to treatment and got engaged in twelve step work when I got out and I have stayed sober ever since. Looking back at my first year, the biggest hurdles were mainly sexual. I didn’t experience many drug cravings—only on just a few occasions where my emotions were so intense that I wanted to escape the world entirely. I was, however, confronted with my sex and love addiction in full force. I spent at least a year (or was it two?) confronted with endless obsessions about the guy who had been the catalyst for me to first attend a twelve step meeting. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I couldn’t stop texting him. I couldn’t stop imagining the perfect future we would have together. I was enraged and confused and hurt and jealous that he told me we couldn’t sleep together anymore, that he loved me and, yes, he still thought I was damn sexy but we could only be fellows for now, and that what he wanted most for me was just to stay sober. I also had to accept that my old sexual identity—my way of being sexual, of being gay—was just something I had to let go of, because it was not serving me. To see that this was a choice I was making, not something being forced on me by others trying to judge or control me. Luckily, I was engaged in a program of recovery and had incredible resources in therapy. This helped me keep these obsessions from becoming something else—a reason to act out or disengage from my recovery. I was able to focus on working the steps and addressing the issues in my past that had fueled my addictions. And to build a new sexual me, step by step, by building relationships I could trust where I could try out new things and learn that, for me, healthy sexuality is about play and joy and pleasure and mostly connection. With my husband, we also built a new marriage, through some very difficult work. It’s stronger, deeper, more gentle and more connected. My recovery has always been our recovery, too. What does my life look like today? I did lose my career, or rather I decided to let it go after getting fired from my job, and I am very happy in a new one that fits my new life better. I actually live in two relationships now, and that works for all of us. I’m fast friends with that guy I spent two years obsessing about; he’s a lover, in fact. And I stay sober the same way I got sober—I work a program of recovery, including the twelve steps. I have a sponsor and I sponsor others. I attend meetings. I try to stay humble by focusing on others, especially when I’m spinning out in self-absorption. And to practice gratitude, by treating what I’ve been given with care and respect. My life isn’t perfect. We lost my brother, in fact, to addiction not two weeks ago. His death has reminded me—all of my sobriety has been about mourning, because that’s how I heal and make peace with the pain of the past. What I know now is that I can’t do this alone, and I don’t do it just for me. (Thomas, Berlin)