Letter To Myself: Constellations Beyond The Trees, The Drug Addict, The Lone Figure In A Matthew Wong Painting

2 July 2026, Thursday evening

Dear Abigail,

The drug addict is always searching for the meaning and the innocence they have lost, and are constantly brought back to the emotional pain and the suffering they have endured and caused other people.

They are searching for the boy they once were, the child they once were. They are searching for peace of mind, trying to establish identity, meaning and belonging, and most of all human connection and a shared humanity. The longing to belong never escapes any of us and all of us have felt the keen pull of loneliness in our lives at times. The drug addict is shaped by the adversity that he experiences, that he often masks, that he feels irrevocably, and even adversity and addiction can profoundly damage emotionally, mentally, physically, and can psychologically change the framework of the brain’s chemistry in subtly dynamic and energetic ways.

It can also leave scars, it leaves imprints on the conscious mind and the blueprint of the subconscious. They must begin to see it that way, they must be encouraged to see it that way, that there is hope in recovery. The drug addict’s decisions are driven and motivated by impulse and emotion, relief, urgency, ego, belonging and external validation. There has to be a re-alignment with values, norms, principles, a religious outlook, a faith-based perspective and it means adopting and nurturing a spiritual lifestyle. This can be the difficult part of their recovery if they come from a dysfunctional background. They will repeat old patterns and want the familiar back in their lives.

Moving towards the man that they want to become is an act of reclamation, maturity, and emotional confidence. It is the powerful manifestation of breakthrough, self-acceptance, self-love, triumph, clarity. It is an exhaustion with uncertainty, a feeling of powerlessness, an exhaustion of reckless, self-destructive and self-sabotaging behaviours. Every drug addict has a life story. We must never forget that. It is not a burden to love someone who is suffering and neither must the loved one see it as a burden to love a drug addicted son or daughter. Intensity is not finding meaning. Extreme chaos is not meaning or fulfillment or satisfaction.

To love an addict, to be supportive of an addict, is not unconscionable. What loving an addict means is this. It is to give them a roof over their head, shelter, food, medicine, clothes and shoes if that is what they need. This letter is a message of hope if you have a son who is suffering from, who is living with an addiction. It is useful to understand that although addiction destroys trust, harmonious relationships, family life, addiction is still a disease, like diabetes and heart disease. Addiction is not your son, and it is not your daughter. They are just addicted to the substance.

Over the years, over two decades, I have personally watched my brother’s addiction, how he became a high functioning addict, how he achieved glory, a good job in the banking world, and promotion. I witnessed how he rose in the world when he wasn’t using drugs or substances, before he started doing all of that, before I knew how desperately he tried to fit in because he didn’t feel that he belonged anywhere, or here, at home, with us. There are times when I still see the boy in him, the child I knew, the young man, the youth who grew up in front of my eyes, the man I shared a mother and a father with, a sister, and I was there when he fell, when his earth was scorched by failure, regret, poor decisionmaking, bad choices, and his disobedience.

I see the boy in him when I see him smile, or with his children, when I hear his laugh, when he appears to be “not high”, and when he appears to be in control of the situation. He still has the gift of the gab, and is able to communicate his feelings, his thoughts and ideas, his experiences fluently, excellently, and so exquisitely that it is painful watching him, studying his behaviour, and observing his lows and highs. His darkness is my own, yes, it is my own darkness seen, no unseen, no, never unseen, it is my own darkness visible like the title of William Styron’s masterpiece on his depression, and during the day, my parents and I and his children revolve around him, his orbit.

He is the sun in our solar system, and he always has been. My brother and I have depression in common, and the dark side that our intermittent cycles of rage belong to. I have also personally watched my brother lose control, knowing that there was nothing that I could do about it, knowing that I could not rescue him, knowing that I could not save him from himself, knowing that I could not save him from being hospitalized or from being certified. I always knew that he was the one who had to do the saving. I always knew that my brother had to save himself.

I have often seen my brother as a teacher. I don’t know why, I just do. I see him as a teacher when he corrects his children, when he offers his son, nearly a teenager, advice, input, and feedback on his life, his studies, the career he will have one day, the high school that he will go to one day. I see my brother as a teacher when I hear him talking to his son, and when he plays with his daughter. There are moments when I see his face, when I look at his face and study it, every emotion, every feeling, every darkening mood, I study his face when he is deep in thought, when he watches his daughter, a proud father, I watch him when he reaches out with his hand and steadies her or when he picks up his daughter and holds her warm body tightly to his, and when I see the shadow that falls across his face when he is deep in thought, the shadow that only exists when I hurt him, the wound like a deep gash that I can never take back, that I can never fix, that I can never remove or replace or repair, the wound that leaves a scar, and emotional damages, an impulsive transition, transaction, takes place inside of me.

What to do with the wound, the scar, the hurt, but turn inward and internalise it, and in memory it resonates, it becomes the music of Chopin, Schubert, and like Chopin, like an autumn leaf falling, like a sunset that marks the end of the day, and like a good film, it stays with me still to this day, to this moment, still, still, still. I sometimes replay the shadow falling across his face in my mind, even though I know hurtful words, deeds, thoughts and actions can never be taken back. My brother is good at forgetting. It is a lesson he has taught me well. My brother is also good at forgiving. It is also a lesson he has taught me well. He has forgotten and forgiven the people who led him down this dark road of drug addiction. He blames himself.

They have taken other paths and he has tried to contact them, but they never return his calls, and they never answer his messages. I have never asked my brother how this has affected him, I have never asked him how this has affected his life, and I have never asked him if their silence hurts him. I have seen my brother help people, I have seen my brother drink alone, by himself in the study nursing a drink, I have seen him pour one for my father, perhaps he doesn’t want to drink alone, he has even asked me if I would like a drink, perhaps not to drink alone, perhaps not to be alone with his thoughts, perhaps not to be alone with his suffering, his isolation, his loneliness, his alienation, and his immense sadness.

I know immense sadness well. I escape it by writing poetry. I escape the alienation, loneliness, my suffering, my thoughts and the isolation through writing. I have named writing “a therapeutic instrument”, a tool with which I heal myself, and come back to myself. It is how I feel alive. It is how I recover. I journal about the emptiness I feel, all my failures.  I have seen him smoke a joint at the backdoor and then watched him light up a cigarette after that. I have never asked him if he feels more alone than lonely (there are days when I feel decidedly more lonelier), we have never discussed alienation and loneliness or spoken about anger, his anger management issues, we have never discussed his feeling of rejection from society, from family circles, maternal and paternal.

It is not a subject up for discussion. I have never asked him if he feels isolated from his peer group, whatever that means.  There are more important things, like the welfare of his children. We are only now starting to talk about his addiction and his relationship with our father, his feelings about our father and the mental tension that he displayed in the home when we were growing up is something that impacted us both in profound ways. We are only starting to speak about that now as he writes about it. The daily pages that he hands me are all about secrets and confessions.

He gives me the day’s pages. The pages that he has written today on Thursday, the 2nd of July 2026, I read them but I don’t know what I am looking for. Perhaps I am seeking a reminder of who he used to be, the person he was perhaps in high school or the individual who was developing his personality in university, or perhaps I want to reconnect with the childhood boy I watched become popular with a ton of friends, bad friends who led him down the wrong path, the pack that he so badly wanted to belong to. I want to ask him if the longing to belong, has it ever left him? I know it has not left me.

But I will leave that for another day,  I think to myself tonight. One thing I want to leave you with, he has always remained loyal to me, to my father who was often mentally unwell, he has always remained loyal to my mother who carried my father, and herself and her three children when my loving father was hospitalized for a manic depressive high or depressive episode or hypomania. My mother was the one who truly carried us all, she was the one who loved him in spite of chronic illness.

My mother loved my father in spite of the heartbreak of mental illness, and in spite of everything she supported him and stayed by his side through thick and thin. She never left him, although one night she packed a suitcase and I could hear them talk late into the night. I saw them, the light was still burning in their room, when I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night. My father got up to check on me but I just pretended in the dark of my bedroom that nothing was wrong, that I hadn’t seen anything, and I told my father that I had just gone to the bathroom. I fell asleep not long after and in the morning, the suitcase was gone.

I stepped inside my parents’ bedroom, and I found my mother sleeping beside my father, as if nothing untoward had occurred in our household in the middle of the night, but the perhaps the damage had been done the previous night, my father and mother, two shadows, plotting, planning, making preparations and after that nothing was ever the same again, I certainly wasn’t.

I found my childhood sea in paintings and poetry, in likeminded creatives, and everywhere I began to look, was a message of hope.