I was seventeen years old, standing in the hallway of our second house in the Netherlands. High. My head was light, my body warm and numb, my thoughts scattered.
Weed was new to me then. A new habit. A new escape. The relaxation wrapped around me like a thick blanket — but underneath that blanket, tension hummed. My mother was upstairs. I just had to slip past unnoticed.
But standing in the kitchen — calm, unmoving — was my therapist.
Of course he wasn’t really there. This was a session, years later. But in the memory, he was there. Exactly as I knew him from the therapy room.
Come here, he said.
No.
He waited.
I want to go upstairs, I said.
I want you to stay here. I’m going to call your mother.
Panic. No, no, no. You can’t do this. She can’t see me like this. This is her worst nightmare.
The woman who left her country. Who gave up everything to build a new life here. How could she see that I had become this? How could she see her sacrifices wasted?
But he called her name.
She came down the stairs. Her footsteps hammered against my skull.
I’m sorry, Mama, I sobbed. I’m sorry.
My therapist spoke for me. Calmly. Firmly.
Your son has nowhere to go when he’s struggling. He has never learned how to express his emotions. Especially not the difficult ones. He was never given the space to be sad, to be angry, to be uncertain. He was never taught how to carry those feelings. And now, he carries them alone.
When a child isn’t taught how to express emotions, he will find ways to cope. Ways that are harmful. But the alternative is worse: he will drown in them.
Then he turned to me. Babak. What do you want to say?
It erupted from me. Years of swallowed words.
Who am I supposed to turn to, Mama? Not to Papa. Not to you. To no one.
I’m just a kid too. Everyone always said: take care of your mother. Take care of your sister. But who takes care of me?
I was taken away under the pretense of a vacation. No one ever asked me how I was doing. How I felt. If I was sad. If I was angry.
All I ever heard was: I hope you’re doing well, study hard, take care of your mother, take care of your sister. But Mama. I was eleven.
What could I do at eleven?
I wiped my eyes.
And now I’m ashamed. Of the solution I found.
I looked at her.
But it helps. When I’m high, that critical voice is quiet. That demanding voice. I can just exist in the moment.
And at the same time, I feel guilty. Because I know I’m disappointing you.
She looked at me. It was a different look than before. As if she truly saw me for the first time.
This is what addiction was, for me.
A solution. A bad one — but the only one I had access to at the time.
When you don’t know how to feel, you find a way to not feel. When you don’t know how to grieve, you find a way to numb. When you don’t know how to express, you find a way to suppress.
Weed gave me twenty years of quiet. Twenty years of not having to hear the demanding voice. Twenty years of being able to just exist in the moment.
And twenty years of not actually living.
I’m done with those years now. They taught me what I needed to learn. They showed me what was buried. They forced me, eventually, to find a different way.
The seventeen-year-old in the hallway didn’t need to be punished. He needed to be heard.
So that’s what I do now. For him. And for anyone reading this who recognizes themselves in that hallway.
You found a solution. A real one — even if it cost you.
Now we find a better one.
Together.