*Names have been changed to protect privacy.*

Freshman year at State, I made the jump from "having fun" to "having a problem" somewhere between September and November, and I never noticed the line.

I came to college planning to study engineering. I came to college to have the best four years of my life. I came to college and found a friend group that had a keg in the basement and a philosophy that "if it's Thursday, it's the weekend." All of that was normal. All of that was fun. All of that was what college was supposed to be.

By Halloween, I was drinking alone in my dorm room. By Thanksgiving, my parents could hear it in my voice when I called home — I was using words like "tired" and "overwhelmed" and I was also not getting sober any night that week. They asked if I was okay. I told them college was just hard.

The thing about addiction in young people is that it doesn't look like falling — it looks like a bad phase. Bad phases are normal in college. Bad grades: normal. Sleeping through classes: normal. Losing track of entire weekends: happens to everyone. Blackouts? Yeah, okay, but I had friends who blacked out too.

What I didn't have that they did was a pattern. What I didn't have was the ability to moderate. What I didn't have was the year after freshman year where I leveled out, came back to myself, remembered why I'd chosen engineering.

I didn't come back to myself. Instead, I became the guy who'd "always be pretty fucked up." I became someone my family stopped asking about. I became somebody I didn't recognize.

I withdrew from school in the spring of my junior year. I was nineteen years old and it felt like my life was over. In a way, it was — the life I'd imagined, the future that was supposed to happen. But that wasn't the end. It was a turn.

I found a recovery program aimed at young people. I found out I wasn't alone. I found out that addiction in people my age wasn't a moral failing or a bad-decision marathon — it was a medical thing, a brain thing, a thing that responds to treatment.

I'm twenty-four now. I've been in recovery for four years. I didn't finish my engineering degree, but I did finish a certification program and I work in tech now. The life I'm living isn't the one I imagined on the first day of college, but it's real and it's mine and I built it sober.

To anyone in college reading this: the "normal" college experience isn't the one where you wake up wondering why you woke up. There's a way out of that cycle. You don't have to wait until after graduation to find it.