The Darkness

Where I came from

There is a photo of me sitting on a bench outside a hospital. Bald from chemo. Hospital gown on. Smoking a cigarette under a No Smoking sign. My mom caught me as she walked up to visit.

You might think that is the bad part.

It isn't. The cancer came later. Years after the shift, after I had already started putting a life together.

The real darkness came before.

Rob Scott on a hospital bench during chemotherapy, bald, in a hospital gown, a cigarette in his hand — Hospital bench, 1999. By then the war inside had been over for years, which is why the man in the photograph does not look like a man in trouble.

Before the cancer

I was an addict. Substances were how I managed the internal chaos. The only way I knew to get temporary relief from the war inside. They worked until they didn't.

Before the addiction, there was abuse. Sexual abuse. Physical abuse. Emotional abuse. Mental abuse. The kind of childhood that installs a suffering machine so deep you don't know it's there. You think it's just what being alive feels like.

I was neglected. Both parents eventually cut me off. I don't blame them. I've been to jail. I've been to halfway houses. I've been to rehabs. Wherever I went I carried an identity that rebuilt the same hell out of whatever was there.

Rob as a small child, kneeling alone on a stone floor, turning the pages of a picture book — Before any of it had a name.

The statistics

If you study people who grow up in my level of disorder, the research is clear: most end up either institutionalized or dead.

I've watched that research play out in real time. I have more friends who died from suicide than I care to count. More who died from overdoses. More who never found the exit from the loop they were trapped in.

I found the exit.

Not because I'm stronger. Not because I tried harder. Because something happened that I didn't expect and didn't know was even possible. Something that ended the war instead of helping me fight it better.

It happened when I was nineteen, and it did not tidy up my life on the way out. The homelessness, the cancer, the end of the addiction: all of that was still ahead of me. What ended was the suffering underneath all of it.