Filling 'the void inside' with purpose

Aiden Clore started taking drugs at 11 to deal with his depression and panic attacks. At 21, he is studying psychology with the hope of helping other adolescents make better choices.

Aiden Clore is a 21-year-old senior at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He hopes his history of drug addiction and recovery will prove an asset in his chosen field of psychology.

WARNING: This story contains discussion of suicide. Please use good judgment and self-care in deciding whether to read it or find someone you can share and discuss it with. If you need help call the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-8255 or text Crisis Text line at 741741.

From a very early age, Aiden Clore was battling his own psyche. While he was still in elementary school, teachers who found his clownish, rambunctious and uncontrolled behaviors disruptive recommended that he be medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

His well-educated parents, aware of a family history of anxiety and suicide and knowing that children taking ADHD drugs were more susceptible to addiction, refused. Clore’s teachers found a solution in segregating him at the back of the classroom, with his own special desk and work tailored for students several grades ahead. It was enough to keep him entertained and, for some time, out of trouble.

Outside school, Clore increasingly immersed himself in the punk music he and his friends enjoyed, which had dark lyrics that often referenced depression and addiction. “They’re singing about how I feel,” he thought initially. But pretty quickly this identification turned into “a label I slapped on myself that became self fulfilling.” By the time he was 11 Clore was experiencing significant bouts of depression, one of which caused him to swallow an entire jar Vitamin C gummies, without consciously recognizing the potential harm.

Not long after that he was offered drugs for the first time – a cigarette laced with K2, a synthetic cannabinoid also known as “Spice.” A decade later, he still doesn’t understand why he tried it, or why it lead him to experiment further.

“It was probably one of the worst experiences in my life,” says the now 21-year-old psychology major at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “But for some reason after that, I wanted to do more, try other things. I don’t know if I was doing it to numb myself, because if anything it made me feel worse. It was just a way to escape reality.”

His drug use rapidly progressed, fueled in part by his well-meaning parents who, in administering at-home single-panel tests that could detect marijuana use, propelled Clore toward trying other drugs that couldn’t be detected. By the time he entered high school, his escalating use had precipitated mental health symptoms. He began experiencing bouts of “heavy dissociation and depersonalization” that led to a Baker Act (involuntary confinement for a mental health evaluation) at 16.  Precipitated by a suicide attempt that involved drinking nearly a full bottle of rubbing alcohol, it was the first of what would become five psychiatric hospitalizations.

“I would have panic attacks about death and the fact that I was going to die,” he recalls. “I’d start thinking about how fragile consciousness was and then, all of a sudden, nothing was real. It was like watching myself through a camera of my own eyes, disconnected from reality.”

A near overdose got him released from his original high school, a military academy, in his sophomore year. Before the end of the school year he’d attended three other schools – an alternative high school designed to get students back on track and progressing toward graduation; a larger public school, which he left in an ambulance after another drug overdose; and eventually, a virtual school online, from which he eventually obtained his degree.

His parents continued to try to intervene with help. Diagnosed with depression, anxiety and a panic disorder, Clore was prescribed a cocktail of what would eventually include seven drugs, to even out his moods and manage his dissociative symptoms. He also began attending an outpatient counseling program for talk therapy, something he found “helpful” and “reassuring” even if it didn’t curtail his drug use.

“I think I was a little too young to really internalize all of it or utilize all the information I had,” Clore says. “But it was exposure to that early on, which I think really helped me later. When I really needed treatment, I was already used to the environment and open to counselors and therapists, which I know a lot of people struggle with.”

Another hospitalization, just before his 18th birthday, brought a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and a visit with his parents to a residential treatment center in Tampa for what he thought was a “tour” of the facility. Instead, since he was still a minor, he was immediately admitted against his will and went through a detox period during which he “thankfully” largely slept. That was preferable, he remembers, to what came after.

“When I was awake it all hit me that I had been such a piece of trash, I had been very neglectful toward my family and my significant other and everyone and there was just this super immense sense of guilt,” Clore remembers. “So anytime I was awake, I was crying, including very inappropriate times.”

Rules of the facility were strict and rigid and the recovery model was based on a 12-step program Clore rejected out of hand because he had embraced atheism since middle school. His denial of a “higher power,” combined with his “nihilistic crisis about death,” made him touchy and volatile and resistant to treatment efforts.

He also had a mindset that “I’m too far gone, there’s no point in even trying to do this.” Not long after his admission, he was again Baker Acted for suicidal ideation and sent back to the psychiatric hospital, this time as an adult, before returning to the residential center again.

In retrospect, Clore is grateful for “the things that happened as a result of that center, the people that it put in my path.” Most of them were former addicts and many, like Clore, were secular and didn’t believe in “the conventional God that we think of.” Yet they hadn’t let it stand in the way of their pursuit of recovery.

“Working with them was very crucial for me,” he says. “My counselor had tattoos all over and I do as well and I think if he hadn’t had those tattoos, I wouldn’t have trusted him as much. I was like, ‘This guy’s cool, I almost know what he has to say.’ Ultimately I’m glad I went. I think it saved my life.”

About a month into his stay, he was prematurely released when his insurance coverage ran out. Rather than returning to his parents’ home in Sarasota, Florida, where the temptations and drug connections of his past remained, he stayed in the Tampa area with his father, then entered a halfway house in St. Petersburg.

Fortunately – and unusually – he had all but lost the desire to use drugs. But he continued to beat himself up over his bad choices of the past, despite hearing in treatment how his guilt could to turned into a motivator to get better and “not have to inflict that pain on those people anymore.”

“I was so dead inside, like a husk of a human being, that I felt I had nothing to gain and everything to lose by continuing to use drugs,” Cloe says. “Yet I still I felt this immense guilt for hurting my friends. When you talk about recovery from substances, you have to do it for yourself because if you’re doing it for other people it’s usually not a sustainable thing.  But I think in my case that guilt helped me get my foot in the door to give it a shot. I had to become willing to be willing.”

If the desire to use had left him, his depression and suicidal ideation had not. One day, which he recalls as “the lowest I would get in my recovery emotionally,” someone in the house offered him an over-the-counter synthetic opioid. Though he had no real desire to get high, he remembers thinking, “What’s the use of staying sober if I just want to die?” He got no rush from the substance, but it did earn him expulsion from the house for having relapsed and an “abstinence violation” from his 12-step program that reset his “clean” date to August 1, 2019.

“I know in hindsight that was a turning point,” he says, “where it clicked in my mind that this is not something I want to do, a kind of make or break type deal. I had a choice, I could either go and really get high or drunk or I could just move forward again. And I chose to move forward.”

He transferred to another halfway house – a smaller, more cohesive facility that gave him “a feeling of unity.” He’d reached an emotional bottom and as a result relinquished his resistance to suggestions that before had seemed unnecessary or pointless. He started going to meetings and working the steps, deciding that “even if I never felt content, I just wanted to not feel depressed anymore.”

Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, rocking the recovery movement and moving all 12-step meetings online. As a veteran of virtual school, it wasn’t the dramatic shift and challenge for Clore that it was for many others. In fact, in isolation the halfway house became a refuge of sorts, and he became particularly close with one of his housemates.

One night, he returned to the house after several days of visiting his family. His friend was the first person he saw and he greeted him warmly and told him it was good to see him. The next morning, Clore awoke to find police swarming throughout the house and his friend lying on the bathroom floor, dead from an overdose. The shock was visceral.

 “I’d had people die before, but usually there was some separation to it, and it just felt like words,” he says. “But this was a very surreal moment and it triggered that weird dissociation for me, because I’d just seen this guy, just said good night to him and now he’s not here. And it kind of freaked me out. That was a really big point. That’s when you realize  this is real.”

By this time, Clore had returned to school, taking college classes that were required prerequisites for more specialized study, but without a specific goal or direction in mind. He’d considered computer science (his father is a software programmer), but his friend’s death, and his conviction that addiction and mental health were inextricably tied together and needed to be treated coincidentally, turned him in the direction of psychology.

“His dying, and all these other people dying, made me feel I really wanted to be able to do whatever I could to help,” he says. “I hope my own experience means I’ll be more relatable to people who need help and I’m thinking of working with adolescents, because I hope they’d think I’m pretty cool and would be comfortable with me.”

This fall Clore will begin his senior year at USF; he’s already looking at graduate programs that would lead to a counseling degree and he’s also training with a nonprofit organization to become a volunteer crisis counselor for LGBTQ youth.

He remains “extremely close” to his parents and his three-years-older sister, and credits them with getting him the early interventions that have meant he is well into his recovery at an age when many others are still spiraling into serious addiction. He feels he is “definitely at the peak of my life so far.”

“I thought I was never going to be able to be content,” Clore says. “I’m now able to elucidate the difference between euphoria and contentment. There was a void inside me before and that has been filled and I actually have a purpose and know I’m not useless.

“When I first entered recovery at 18, people used to say to me, “You’re so lucky, I wish I had gotten clean this young.’ And it used to anger me because I thought they were minimizing what I’ve been through. But now I really understand that it’s such a fantastic opportunity that not many people get, so I hope to maximize it and pass on what I’ve learned and give back.”

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