Since the song “Patient Zero” came out, I’ve been thinking a lot about the six months I went down the road of drug use. Looking back, I can’t say that chapter was good, and I can’t even say it was entirely bad.
It started on Tinder—already not a great sign. I swiped right (or left, I can’t even remember, it was so long ago) and matched with a guy named Freddie. What a horrible name. And yes, that was his actual legal name. I saw his birth certificate. His mother really looked at him and named him that.
We went on a “date,” if you can even call it that. I went over to his house, where he lived with his grandmother, carrying a bottle of vodka. I don’t even really drink. Honestly, I don’t know what I was doing. I was still married at the time—a horrible marriage—and while I didn’t know what I was looking for or what I needed, I knew one thing for sure: I wasn’t happy.
At first, none of that sounds like “Patient Zero.” But then came the charm.
He charmed me with everything he said. When the song came out, I was completely flabbergasted by how dead-on the lyrics were. He said “I love you” first. He came into my life like a firework. He was the center of everything, the kind of guy who could charm anyone in the room.
And because of him and all that charm, I dropped everything. Then, I lost everything.
I lost my house, my kids, my mom, my husband, my job, my dog, and my friends. Every single thing that was dear to me, gone. I almost lost my life.
Here is the crazy part: if I could go back, I probably wouldn’t change a thing.
That six-month freefall made me stronger. It made me better. I’m still a work in progress—there is so much leftover trauma that I spend a lot of my time stuck in fight-or-flight mode, and I still miss plenty of red flags.
So why is this song hitting so hard right now? It’s been seven years since I last saw him—seven years since he bashed my head in.
Well, when you make your social media profile public, the algorithm starts serving up “People You May Know.” Out of nowhere, his face popped up on my feed. It completely threw me for a loop. When you click on the profile and see that he is in a relationship with someone new, your mind immediately starts spinning. Does he treat her the same way he treated me? Is he sober? Is he beating her, too? Does he yell at her? Does he steal from her?
In “Patient Zero,” one of the biggest themes is the cycle repeating itself. Looking at his profile, I’m left wondering: is it happening all over again?
It is so hard to recover and move forward from something like that. I’ve worked tirelessly to get to where I am today, and I’m happily remarried, yet there are still a lot of broken pieces. Take the things he stole from me. It wasn’t even all sentimental—though some of it was. He actually stole the marriage certificate from my first marriage. It’s not like I need it now, being remarried, but the violation lingers. He took so much from me that I now struggle with hoarding things, purely out of a deep-seated fear that what I have is going to be stolen again.
Sometimes I don’t even know how to feel, and it’s hard to find the right words. How does someone who was addicted to meth for over 20 years just suddenly get sober and move on? Maybe after two decades, he finally figured it out. Still, I have my doubts. His parents had plenty of money and paid to send him to rehab multiple times. He always had people in his corner, whereas I could barely rally one.
Honestly, I think that’s the exact reason I got sober—and stayed sober—so quickly. In the end, you can’t get sober for someone else. You have to do it for yourself. He was always doing it for the wrong reasons.
More than anything, I think he just hides his darkness remarkably well. Just like the song says: the devil on his shoulder under his halo. That was him to a tee. The “perfect” blond, blue-eyed man—hiding the wreckage underneath. And in the end? I was the one that got away.
(The picture is me with staples in my head, in a domestic violence shelter. )
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