Christian E.
Photography by Savannah Mitchell
Dear Reader,
Christian’s letter describes his personal journey with substance abuse and we advise those who may be triggered by this topic to exercise caution when reading this letter. We have a number of resources listed on our Resources Page that may be helpful, and encourage your to reach out to members of your support network if needed.
Sincerely, the IfYoureReadingThis.org team
If you’re reading this, then you have experienced fear; it’s a natural part of being human, after all. A dangerous, unchained dog roaming the neighborhood; a bad seasonal yield from a crop field; a scary movie played late at night—all are valid fears, regardless of triviality, that can affect anyone at any given time.
As for myself, I have a fear of failure.
Whenever I speak up, my mind is blasted with a multiverse of everything right and wrong with whatever I'm going to say; thus, I end up stuttering through my points and feeling embarrassed every time I open up. It's been going on for years—since the beginning of my Junior year of High School—and at one point evolved into an outright debilitating fear of failure that manifested in the form of an addiction to prescription drugs and illicit substances.
The only thing I wanted was to be “better” than my peers, outperform the competition in both club and classroom settings, and the drugs gave me the energy to work hard for literal hours without having to take a single break. I was willing to sacrifice everything to be the “best version of myself,” even—ironically—my mental health. I was obsessed with “winning,” and I would do anything to avoid its unpleasant alternative.
On November 24th, 2019, the police took me to a psychiatric hospital after my roommates called 911, concerned that I would commit suicide after a severe overdose. I can still recall everything from that night with crystal clarity: the drug test that came up positive for a litany of drugs, some legal, others not so much; police officers explaining “the severity of your situation,” just in case I couldn’t put the 4-piece kid’s puzzle together for myself; nurses wearing cheap smiles to hide their judgment, their amusement at the sight of a college student going through the textbook stages of withdrawal in public.
But, above all else, there is one thing that I not only remember but still feel even today as I hesitantly clack the keys on my keyboard: fear.
Fear of being a drug addict. Fear of being unreliable. Fear of being alone. Fear of being judged. Fear of being consumed by my vices. Fear of never being good enough. Fear of becoming a spiteful man, willing to “do whatever it takes” to get what I want, even if it meant compromising my values; if it meant losing myself.
Fear of being broken under the weight of failure.
When I left the facility, my parents decided that I didn’t deserve to be in college—a decision that, although unpleasant, was undoubtedly valid. They booked a flight to come home and told me...how they felt about what I did, to put it mildly. Their disappointment became an ever-pervasive tumor on our relationship; sometimes benign, other times noxious, their quiet disgust at who I had become was permanently etched onto their love for me.
But it was that unspoken disgust that lit a fire in my heart to redeem myself, to work toward earning the right to return to Arizona State. It didn’t matter how many customers screamed at me while working as a McDonald’s Drive-thru cashier, how many confrontations I had to have with coworkers who were trying to blame me for their mistakes at GameStop, how many 12-hour graveyard shifts I spent making hundreds of Safeway sandwiches, alone with nothing but elevator music and the smell of stale bread and pastrami. I knew in my heart of hearts that I would come back to ASU, and nothing—nothing—was going to stop me.
And that is precisely what I did.
But here’s the moral of my story, something that I realized near the end of those 8 months I spent re-inventing myself: the true rebuttal to fear is willpower. While my fear of becoming a college dropout pushed me to embrace a reckless lifestyle and nearly ended my dreams of becoming a doctor, it was my relentless drive that fueled my return and set my life back on track. It was my burning desire to succeed that led me to success, not my abyssal fear of failure.
So, if you are in a situation similar to the one I was in last year, if you feel like a worthless loser, please remember this: you can bounce back, and you can win, even if you experience setbacks. Life is tough, and my story is just a minor case of adversity, but if you find a reason to succeed, a reason to push yourself past the pain and focus on a single goal like a bloodhound on prey, you can realize your dreams. Ignore everyone who says you can’t, because you can.
Christian E., Arizona State University ‘23
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