I moved to London when I was 21. It was 1998. I grew up in Albania. I came to London for a better life, a different life. I wanted to explore what gay life was all about – it was a part of me that I’d had to bury while I was growing up. I wanted to escape the restrictions of life in Albania, I wanted to escape the restrictions of my family. Drugs weren’t a part of my life during those early years in London. After about five years, I went back to Albania for a couple of months. When I returned to London, my friends here had discovered ecstasy.

I tried ecstasy for the first time in 2004. I was out with my friends in Brixton. Everyone was high. One of my friends gave me an ecstasy pill. I’d never experienced anything like it. As the pill hit, the song that was playing was ‘Put ‘Em High’ by Stonebridge. Whenever I hear that song, even today, I feel the memory of that first high – I feel the rush.

Drugs just became part of a night out – ecstasy and ketamine. They were party drugs. In 2006, I started taking GHB. It was a game-changer. GHB gave me an incredible sense of freedom – the freedom to be myself, with no inhibitions. I had boyfriends. My relationships were all centred around going out, partying, taking drugs – mostly G, and a lot of cocaine. In 2011, I was introduced to Mephedrone. The drug-use got more intense, it was darker. I couldn’t sleep. I wanted sex all of the time. That was the beginning of seven years of hell.

I was in a relationship. We were using a lot of drugs and it was fairly toxic. The relationship ended sometime in 2012, but I kept using drugs. Around that time, hook-up apps emerged. Everything started to change. I became obsessive. I wanted everything, all of the time. To party, we used to go out dancing. Now, it was all house parties. I was spending hours and hours on the hook-up apps. I would take drugs all weekend – then, instead of sleeping, I would go to work. Crystal meth became the main drug that I was using. By this point, I wasn’t able to have sex without drugs. I had a bit of a phobia about needles, but in 2015 I began injecting crystal meth. A guy that I was using with was a nurse. He showed me how to inject. Once I’d tried that, there was no turning back. I felt like I was in control, but I wasn’t.

Looking back, those years seem incredibly dark. You would end up at other people’s homes, surrounded by other users. You could see what people were going through. There were so many lonely souls, so many lost souls. We were all blaming others for our problems – hating everything, hating life, complaining about everything. Lots of gay men go through trauma in their lives – drugs can feel like a way to find freedom and lose your inhibitions. We see the drugs as a way to find intimacy, to find love, but it’s so damaging.

In 2017, I had something like a psychotic episode – I stabbed my arms with a needle and made myself bleed so much that I had to go to hospital. That kind of freaked me out – it resurfaced my phobia of needles. That episode helped me to stop injecting crystal meth but I was still using drugs.