Following our articles about sobriety earlier this year, 1 More Thing writer Marc Chisholm shares his own personal experiences with addiction and sobriety. We’re heading into one of the most challenging times of the year for people who are battling any type of substance use – especially in the music industry where drug culture is normalised and daily for many. Whether you’re recovering, t-total, use regularly or recreationally, a responsible, open and honest attitude towards drug culture is the only way we’ll make progress… In this scene and in life in general. We’d like to thank Marc for his honesty and insight and send love and strength to anyone who can relate to his journey.
When you’re at the peak of a drug and gambling addiction, you never really see the light at the end of that long, dark and twisted tunnel.
Another fifty pounds swallowed by the fruit machine, another line of gear goes up the nose, another handful of joints prepped for another attempt to get at least some sleep before you get up and do it all over again tomorrow.
Everything that’s happened in your life, the great bits, the shit bits and all of the numb bits in between, it’s all led you to this… really? You’ve had these conversations with yourself before haven’t you? Are you going to do something this time or is that head of yours getting buried deeper and deeper in the bag?
This is my story. It’s not designed for pity. It’s not designed for likes. It’s designed to empower, motivate and educate by sharing stories of dark times and steps I’ve taken to bring hope. As I know I’m not alone – especially within rave culture
It’s December 2 2023 and I’m six months clean today after battles with cocaine, cannabis and gambling, some of which have been ongoing for over a decade.
The first five months of sobriety were filled with feelings of freshness, accomplishment and pride. But as the title suggests, this is no walk in the park. This is a full on journey with feelings I’ve never felt before and the battle has only truly just begun.
Addiction has its ways of creeping back into your life and tapping you on the shoulder to remind you that it’s there. Coiled, ready to strike when you show that weakness you’ve shown so many times before. Anything to get you to think about it… A message from somebody asking if you know any dealer’s numbers, the smell of weed in the air as you walk your dog, somebody sending you their winning accumulator from Saturdays three o’clock kick offs.
So I’m grasping the fact that this journey I’m on will of course be a lifelong battle, a battle I’m determined to win despite all the knockbacks and relapses. This time just feels different to all the others and I’m taking all the correct steps to ensure it stays this way. You can change your ways if you stay on the right path, even if it seems impossible to start with, one step at a time. Those mountains will turn into smaller hills, into minor speedbumps, then turn back into mountains sometimes. This is life in a nutshell.
So let’s start rewinding…
June 2 2023
I’m sat upstairs in a pub I run surrounded by empty baggies, used tissues, the disarray of my thoughts clearly visible by the filth I’m barely living in. I’ve just done my last bit of gear, I’ve banged some money into my betting account and I’m by the door with a joint hanging out of my gob. I’m rocking back and forth, praying for a jackpot. I’m toking like a robot, hoping to feel tired soon but I know there’s no chance that’s happening any time soon. My chest is feeling tight, again, I’m clutching it for dear life. Am I finally dying?
That’s when it all came to me. It’s like my whole life just played over and over in my head. I’m not going down like this, I’ve pissed my whole life up the wall. It’s gone on for too long, it’s time to get yourself home and get your shit together. I packed a bag and I left the life I’d been living for as long as I could remember. I was finally coming home to the family I’d left and deserted all those years ago, I was ready to face everything I’d ran away from.
I didn’t realise at the time but this was a poignant turning point and where this journey began in earnest. But to understand how important this move would be, I need to acknowledge previous events which changed the way I looked at things forever.
April 10 2022
I’m sitting in the back of a police car about to head to nick for a night in the cells. What the fuck has my life come to?! I look to my right and see the smashed up windscreen of my car and the cyclist I’ve just hit lying in the middle of the road surrounded by paramedics.
His bike a good few hundred yards from where I hit him. Mangled. One blink of an eye, freak accident and a drug swab later, my life has been turned upside down. But that’s what you get when you’re an addict, I smoked, sniffed, drank and drove on the regular and it was bound to catch up with me one day. I just didn’t believe it could happen to me. When you’re staring at the ceiling of a police cell, the knots in your stomach feel like a noose around your neck, choking you into the realisation of the actions you’ve taken to get there.
Everything about that accident and the way I lived my life should’ve had me locked up, but it didn’t. Instead, I’ve been locked up in my own head, pounding on the walls, clutching on the bars so hard you see the whites of my knuckles, screaming on the inside to get out of this hell hole of a life I think I’m in. You’d think this would be the kick up the arse I needed to shock me into giving everything up, but that wasn’t the case… As you already know. I can’t undo what happened on that evening, I’ll forever feel remorseful for my actions.
Addicts will do literally anything to get their fix. Bad things. Disgusting things. Upon reflection, this was the real beginnings of the change in my thought pattern. The worst of it was yet to come but I think you need to get to that point, be at the gates of hell in your mind, your lifestyle and to eventually put your hand up, grab onto whatever you can and begin the gruelling climb out of there.
August 2020
I’ve just got out of a relationship that hit me really hard and I’ve completely lost my head. Covid and lockdown was a complete blur. I’ve been living under the same roof as a drug dealer for the last few years. At the time I thought it was amazing, but when you’re painting your bedroom with your missus and it turns into a weeklong bender, there’s definitely something wrong there right?
Stuff like this was a regular occurrence, I’d work days in exhibition sales and my dealer would work nights so we’d always cross paths in the morning. You know the drill, a few slugs for breakfast every day and off to chat some shit on the phones at work. This went on for a good year before it got too much for me.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner, there was only one thing ever on the menu – cocaine. It consumed my thoughts, played tricks on me, made me think it was the only saviour when I wanted to come out of my shell or make me feel alive again.
There were a few occasions where I tried to get clean but being around the stuff 24/7 was a real challenge. You walk through the door after work and there’s more lines than a notepad racked up on the side. It’s tough. One day I’d had enough of it all, the lack of work coming in due to covid and the fact I couldn’t get out of bed made me quit my job. I got out of my relationship, I got out of that house.
That wasn’t all plain sailing, I ended up hitting the pub on the daily, using loads, driving everywhere to pick up more gear no matter how much I’d used and consumed. As an addict, even when you think there’s that light at the end of the tunnel and you put yourself in better positions, the illness remains. Like a chameleon, you adapt to your surroundings and find other ways to get your fix, it’s always the same.
Those were a few of the standout moments on my journey, there are of course many more that led me onto the path I’m on right now. However, I mentioned that I ran away from my family earlier and thinking back, this next event was the one that shaped it all.
Those are just a handful of standout moments on my journey. Many other similar incidents led me onto the journey I’m on right now. But how did I end up on this path? Why did I develop such toxic relationships with substances and vices?
Thanks to a lot of sober reflection, I think I got to the bottom of it.
This next rewind needs some context…
My father served in the British Army and accomplished a lot in his career. He was always my hero. Everything I did in my younger days, I would look to see what his reaction was. Is he a fan of what I’m doing? Will he be happy with this? Is he proud of me?
For a long time his opinion on everything I did was all that mattered because I looked up to him and respected what he achieved so much.
He joined the army at sixteen and worked his way up from a private all the way up through the ranks and left as a major. This is no mean feat, but it came with some challenges for me and my mother.
In the military life, you make so many friends, but you lose just as many at the same time. The average time spent by a soldier at their post is approximately two years before they move to their next job. As a kid, I went to three different primary schools and two different high schools. Making new friends at each place was hard, but it was life.
Obviously, there were many wars happening during this time, in this life you get used to your parents being away on tour in places like Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. The more these tours occurred, the more things changed in my head. But they weren’t the only changes taking place.
I noticed a change in my father when I was a teenager, he’d just been made an officer and his whole demeanour changed. Everything was about status, he had to look good in front of his peers, brothers and sisters. I hated this. Being a teenager, you go through all sorts of feelings and the rebellious change in myself didn’t really go down well with him either.
Being the child of someone in the military can be daunting. Everything is strictly regimented in your home life because that’s how things are drilled in from basic training onwards. And drugs, of course, are a huge no. I remember somebody getting caught with a ten bag of weed at school and their dad got demoted! Your actions are reflected on your parents… Which caused friction between me and my father.
Right towards what was supposed to be the end of his military career, everything boiled over one day. He was just about to leave us in Germany to go on his resettlement course which would prepare him for civilian life when he got out of the army. I’d had enough of his toughness towards me and I snapped.
I was so passionate and frustrated it’s hard to remember everything that went on, but I know I screamed in his face at how much I wished he’d be over in Afghanistan and how I was sick of being treated like one of his soldiers.
There’s the context, now let’s rewind…
March 27 2012
I’ve just walked out of the 1 LSR Families Office on Princess Royal Barracks in Gütersloh, Germany after seeing Gavin the Welfare Officer. We had received a call from the Royal Infirmary in Hull. My father had a severe stroke the night before and they didn’t catch it early, he’d most likely had it overnight and nobody got to him until the next afternoon.
Me and mum flew straight out to go and see him. I’ll never forget seeing him in the hospital bed when we got there. His reaction when he saw us for the first time will forever be etched in my memory. The entire right side of his face drooped and sunken, the left side of his face normal, it still haunts me.
He started crying, I’d never seen this before, everything was so surreal and I just went numb. Over the course of the next few months I saw my hero’s situation deteriorate. I watched him struggle to eat and drink. I watched my mother crumbling, but persevering.
They said he would never walk again but one thing about my old man is that he has the heart of a lion. The months of rehab that followed were inspiring as he did learn to walk again. His speech improved slightly but he couldn’t say whole sentences, just a few words so communicating was hard and frustrating.
The recovery process after a stroke is complicated, most of the skills he would learn again would be within the first two months. Me and my mother left Germany and moved to the UK permanently and dad finally came back home, but he’s never been the same since the accident.
I’d faced battles within my head before but never anything like this, remember the argument we had earlier before he went on the course? These were the last words I spoke to him before he had the stroke. I wanted to escape from life, I couldn’t live with myself, I had nobody I felt I could turn to. So I turned to drugs, the only thing that masked my trauma.
I wanted to mask it so much, I left the family home very quickly and ran away from everything. Drugs offered me something, they felt right, they felt perfect and those battles in my head got clouded by them at the beginning. It got to a point where I would ignore my family for months on end, only contacting them for money to spunk on drugs, gambling or booze.
My life went into a whirlwind for eleven years, I completely lost myself. Leaving the army life and moving back to the UK is a challenge in itself. You move to an area where all the friendship groups have been with each other their entire lives. Trying to break into a circle as tightknit as that is really tough as an outsider and like many padbrats, I still get the itch to move around all the time as my life has been chaotic.
So chaotic that using became a release for me, it was always a good way to break the ice. Fellow users were always easier to talk to of course, especially when you have that common denominator.
When I unravel everything about my relationship with substances and try to understand my avoidance of sobriety, this is where all roads lead, but it’s still not quite where they begin.
So let’s rewind further…
July 2005
I’m fourteen years old and it’s the first day of a holiday I’ve gone on with my best friend and his family. Like all decent holiday caravan parks, there’s bars, there’s activities but most importantly, there’s an arcade.
It’s crazy to think I can pinpoint my time in an arcade to some of the origins of my addictions, but then at the same time it really does make sense now when I look back. The flashing lights, the sense of achievement you get from winning a game, the feeling of pure thrill being on the edge of your seat playing these games felt amazing to me.
I’d never felt like this before, the obsession with hitting a high score on some games and the absolute need to win the prizes consumed me to a point where on the first day of the holiday, I’d spent all of the money I’d taken with me in that arcade.
This is a moment that stays with me even in my adult years. In the years that followed this holiday, the arcade machines turned into fruit machines, the pinball game turned into a roulette table and the grabber machine turned into a betting slip.
I dread to think of the actual amount of money I’ve wasted over the years with my addictions, there would certainly be enough there for a deposit on a house, a nice car or something along those lines. This is the brutal reality of my journey. A journey that’s had me on my knees, in the trenches and by the scruff of my neck. Times have been hard, but I’m harder.
Rewinds over. Let’s get back to the future…
I’m six months clean today. There’s been a lot of ups and downs, but for once in my life I’ve put myself first in this battle. And even when it’s become a challenge – as it has in the last month for me – it’s a battle I’m now determined to win.
But why have I shared such a personal and challenging series of life events? Because, whether you choose to opt-in or not, drug culture is hugely prevalent in dance music. Since 2018, drug use has increased dramatically across many regions in the UK, most notably in Yorkshire, East Midlands and London (Source: Delamere.com) I know for a fact that many reading this will be either thinking of getting clean, have just began the journey to sobriety or are further along than me.
Regardless of where you are on that axis, I want to tell you how proud of yourself you should be. The strength you have within you to just even admit you have a problem in the first place is the first big step in the right direction. It’s never too late to turn it around. Look at yourself in an open and honest way and don’t kid yourself. Think of the situation and the surroundings you are in, are you really doing everything in your power to get away from it all? There’s no shame at all in admitting defeat sometimes and reaching out.
My name is Marc, I’m an addict. I’m thirty-two years old and I’ve moved back home and live with my parents. I’ve rekindled the family relationship I was so afraid of facing when I ran away all those years ago. Nobody is getting younger, so don’t burn those bridges. They can always be repaired. There’s no shame whatsoever.
I checked myself into a service called We Are With You, a service that helps drug addicts, even the families of drug addicts.
I was drug tested on a weekly basis and had meetings with my support worker, Robyn, who was amazing in every possible way. I was discharged from the service and immediately put into another service called Double Impact, a relapse prevention service who were also brilliant.
Of all the observations I’ve made and thoughts I’ve had during these last six months, one thing seems especially poignant to point out… Don’t expect people to change just because you have. They won’t, and that’s not a bad thing. According to ONS, one in eleven adults in the UK used drugs last year. Whether it’s booze or pills or anything in between, drugs are part of life in almost every sector and generation. So you have to be comfortable with people using them around you if your rehabilitation is going to be successful.
Some may argue I’ve made things even harder for myself, having moved from a career in pubs, an industry where drugs and mental health problems are rife, into the music industry where the same issues occur. But my mind is in a completely different place, I literally get high from the music now.
I rave regularly, I’m around users regularly in this industry. Every time I’m one of the only sober skankers among a sea of gurning grins. But I’m still having it just as much, shoulder to shoulder, my elbows out and my knees up.
I’m not running away anymore, I’m actually running towards them and grabbing them by the horns. I can be around people who are still using and now almost don’t bat an eyelid. All the little wins eventually add up to a monumental victory and it feels fantastic to be in these positions. The mental shift I’ve experienced is one of the keys to getting myself to this stage.
From my experiences I know that putting yourself in the best position can is essential. Don’t think of anybody other than you. It might seem like you don’t feel you have the power to do this but believe me, you really do.
You’ll realise who is truly your friend, you’ll make new ones, you’ll have battles in your head no matter where you are on that sobriety road. But one thing is for certain, life is so much better without the substances.
Six months deep into a life that is no longer a dark and twisted tunnel. Some of the benefits I’ve already noticed are awesome. I’ve started putting on weight, there’s colour in my cheeks, the anxiety levels are lower and my memory has improved tenfold.
Here’s to another six months, and another, and another…
I want to give a special shoutout to anybody who is going through addiction, a massive big up to my padbrat posse, I know a lot are going through similar issues I’ve had. Huge love to my family and all the people in my life who have made this more possible and stuck by me, given me advice or supported me in any way.
My inboxes are always open to anybody who needs to talk or needs some advice and encouragement. Don’t suffer in silence, don’t give up. You can do this! If I can, you definitely can too.
If you’re ready to take the next steps, below are a few links to services I found extremely helpful to get me on the right track.
Double Impact relapse prevention
Steps To Change – Talking therapies