The Lonely Gardener

Date

2022-08

Authors

Kephart, Hannah

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Volume Title

Publisher

Texas State University, School of Social Work.

Abstract

As a child, witnessing addiction was always framed in the sense of extreme, that people knew they were overwhelmingly addicted to a substance, and it would ruin their lives the moment they started using. However, I was unaware of the silent slope that addiction could be and that I had already been on the slide down for quite a while when I was assigned to an abstinence project that would open my eyes. I chose to abstain from nicotine, a substance I had been using for nearly two years at the time, believing it would be easier to quit as it had never been a powerful influence in my mind. When the struggle of the first week hit me like a train, I started to look past my fallacy and see the reality of my dependency on nicotine. Through the help of my accountability partners and the knowledge I gained throughout the course, I made a genuine long-term commitment to quitting smoking when I first believed I would not be able to. This project gave me an incredible perspective and insight not only on my own struggles with addiction but those of the potential clients I may work with in the future in the social work field. Through this poem, I aim to cast a light for those in the social work field to gain perspective on addiction. I hope that others out there struggling with addiction know that in the end, we are not alone and that we have support out there even if we did not realize it before.

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Keywords

social work, addiction, support, accountability

Citation

Kephart, H. (2022). The lonely gardener. Louder Than Words, 2(1), pp. 63-65.

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