Dallas Bragg describes the "one more time" thinking that led to her relapse with IV meth and HIV diagnosis. She shares how the belief that a perfect moment and perfect partner would justify drug use became a dangerous lie, and warns against the idealized scenarios addiction uses to pull you back in.
My first relapse on crystal meth was one of those, I'm just going to do it one more time, episodes where I had the perfect opportunity with the perfect guy. And, um, you know, crystal meth told me, Tina lied and said that I love this person. And, um, so I decided to use and, um— What happened? He convinced me to use it through IV, and it was my first time doing that. And again, I thought, I love this person. It's gonna be the one that I'm going to be with. We can just use together. And as soon as we did that, he turned into a schizophrenic mess who was Talking to all these voices and was convinced that I was part of the police. But also, we still ended up being intimate, which he announced to me after we were finished. Congratulations, you have AIDS. And that was the night that I contracted HIV. So that was my one more time relapse. I talk— I just— I'm thinking about this because I just wrote about it in my relapse course that I'm doing. It's a free online course that I'm making. As I'm typing this course out, I'm recalling all of my relapses. But that, of course, was my most pivotal one because after that happened, I went into a spiral because I was— I had a death wish at that point because what's the point, right? What's the use? I have HIV now. And so I went into The deepest use of my drug career, um, and really started to use through IV use, um, and, uh, it was downhill from there. So I guess the reason I wanted to do this video is that if you think that it's the perfect time and the perfect guy and it's just one more time, it's always a lie. It's always a way to get you to use. It's always a device to pull on your, your senses that you want to be in love or you want companionship, or it's that picture-perfect scenario that you've seen in those corn videos. I can't say the word. Um, it's finally your opportunity, you know, to have that experience that you saw on Twitter. It's not gonna happen. Um, it's just never gonna happen. So anyway, I hope this helps someone. And, um, yeah, let me know in the comments if it does. I'd like to hear from you.
