Writing not smoking

It’s 4:37 a.m., and the psychiatrist neighbour I’m suing for malpractice and verbal abuse has just arrived home blind drunk. She’s crying her eyes out on my doorstep.

The other night she did the same thing. I woke to the sound of a woman hysterically sobbing outside but couldn’t pinpoint where it came from. I chalked it up to pregnancy insomnia — my new late-night confidante — and went back to bed.

She has a drug problem, just like I do.

When I was still using and we were beginning to blur the lines between patient and friend, she’d offer me beers at 11 a.m. and, come evening, ask me to roll her joints to help her sleep. I watched her down six pints of espresso during my intake interview, and in the months since, I’ve seen her pop Ritalin, quetiapine, and a rotating cocktail of antipsychotics like candy.

She’s what many would call a total mess — but I believe I met her to learn something.

At 44, she’s built an impressive career for someone who’s been teetering since childhood. Like me, she was impulsive, boisterous, always chasing numbness through substances or sex. A single mother at 17. Then again at 27, the same age I am now, her wealthy father bankrolled her through private university, postgraduate studies, and eventually, her psychotherapy practice.

Brazil is a land of contradictions: abundant, alive, and full of potential — yet straining under corruption, inequality, and climate fatigue. The síndrome de vira-lata (the self-deprecating “mutt complex”) runs deep, a psychological hangover from three centuries of Portuguese colonisation and a nation built on slavery. Though abolition supposedly came in 1888, the echoes still ring through today’s meagre minimum wage and the language we use — like empregada, “the employed one,” a polite euphemism for domestic servitude.

Brazilian men are often allowed to be dirtbags, even celebrated for it. The jeitinho (the “special way of doing things”) is the country’s social lubricant, a dance of charm and shortcuts. Sincerity is almost gauche; transparency, a rookie move. To survive, Brazilian women must learn to play the same game.

All legal disputes and personal grievances aside, this woman is just another survivor of that system — a suit by day, a spiral by night.

On the street, she looks like she has everything: marble floors, an Italian-Brazilian surname, old-money inheritance. Yet she’s here, in my crumbling apartment block, probably drunk on 51 cachaça and prensado spliffs — the cheap, mould-pressed weed that circulates through Brazil’s underbelly.

I don’t write this to gossip. I write it because I feel for her. Because she’s broken in ways I recognise within myself if I ever turn back to substances. Because I know that if I opened that door, I might get pulled back into her tornado — legally, emotionally, even physically. So instead, I watched from the peephole and called the mental health team, sending a welfare request.

Sometimes compassion looks like distance.

I wish her healing. I wish myself the same. To think we bonded so seamlessly just months ago shows how thin the line is between recreation and rock bottom.

And maybe that’s the lesson.

As I step into single motherhood, I can already sense that my strength will be measured not by how much I take on, but by what I choose not to. I don’t need to rescue people to prove my worth anymore. I don’t need to lose myself in other people’s chaos to feel alive.

Sobriety has taught me that love isn’t measured in sacrifice, but in stability — the quiet, grounded kind.

My neighbour is 44 and still fighting the same demons I nearly let devour me at 27 and the years leading up to my pregnancy. I take that as a warning and a blessing.

I’m free to walk another path. And tonight, as the fan hums overhead and the dry air presses against my skin, I silently thank the universe for this reminder.

For the baby inside me.
For the chance to break the cycle.
For the courage to stay sober, just for today.