The Ghost Stories I Can’t Ask Anyone About

Substances, survival strategies, and the ache of finally understanding what might have been happening all along.

Content note: This post includes references to addiction, substance use, grief, and the deaths of close family members. If those themes are tender for you, feel free to read when you have space and support.

Photo by Rocky Xiong for Unsplash+

There’s a part of my story I avoided for years because it felt messy and complicated. And honestly, because I didn’t understand it.

Substances were never my downfall. They were my workaround.

In high school and through my twenties, drugs and alcohol let me do things I had no business doing with a nervous system like mine. They let me socialize. They turned the volume down on the overwhelm. They made parties, crowds, and human proximity feel tolerable.

But I never tipped into addiction. I stepped away when I needed to. My brain let me. I used the escape hatch, and then I shut it. For a long time, I thought that meant I was different. Or stronger. Or whatever internalized nonsense I absorbed along the way.

Now I know better.

I read the stories of other late diagnosed autistic adults, ADHD folks, twice-exceptional folks, and I feel the floor shift under me. The way they describe using substances in their teens and early twenties sounds a lot like me. The way some describe sliding into addiction sounds a lot like my father and my brother.

And that’s where the ghost stories begin.

Both of them were presumed to be addicts. That’s how the family told it. Addiction as a moral failure, a weakness, a choice. But they’re dead now, and I can’t ask them what they were actually trying to survive. I can’t ask if they were masking. If they were overloaded. If they were self-medicating a world that never fit. If they were carrying trauma with nowhere to put it.

I can’t ask if neurodivergence was part of their story that simply had no name.

So now, I read strangers on the internet who aren’t really strangers. People who describe the same fractures and adaptations I grew up watching. People who unravel experiences I recognize from childhood but never understood.

And it hits me in three places at once.

Recognition.
Grief.
Clarity.

Recognition because the patterns line up too cleanly.
Grief because I can finally imagine what they might have been fighting.
Clarity because so much of what I was taught to see as character flaws now reads as untreated pain.

I don’t romanticize addiction. I don’t shame it either. I’m just finally able to see the possibility that my father and brother were navigating the same storms I was… without support, without language, without any scaffolding at all.

And that lands hard.

It makes me want to go back and say, “I think I get it now.”
It makes me want to hand them the map I didn’t get until mid-life.
It makes me wonder what parts of myself are theirs and what parts they never got the chance to understand.

Mostly, it makes me realize that survival strategies aren’t moral statements. They’re adaptations. Some work for a time. Some become cages. Some become escape routes you can’t find your way back from.

I got lucky. They didn’t.

And I’m still figuring out what to do with that truth.