Addiction, Recovery & the Brain: “The Spark in the Dark”

Nangoma Simatele
Oct 6, 2025
4 min read

Rehab smelt like cigarettes and coffee.

That’s not a metaphor, it really did. Bitter instant coffee, burnt cigarettes, disinfectant, and despair. The scent profile of rock bottom. I remember clutching a biro and a cheap spiral notebook like they were sacred relics. I wrote furious things in that diary: curses, rants, and confessions. I was sure no one would ever see them. Spoiler: they did.

When staff read my journal, I felt violated, exposed, and humiliated. I was twenty-something, angry, clever, and convinced I was the misunderstood protagonist in a sad indie film. What I didn’t realise back then was that this anger, this chaotic scribbling, was my brain’s way of saying, 'Help me reorganise.'

The Day the Gospel Broke Through

Months later, in a halfway house garden, I sat on a weathered bench. The wood was rough, the air cold, and my hands were shaking. My father’s gospel playlist leaked faintly from my laptop speaker; it’s the only music I had.

I cried a lot.

That day I made a quiet, trembling promise to myself: I will find something better than this, even if I must build it from scratch.

I didn’t know it then, but that moment, the exact second I chose hope over shame, was my first neural rewrite. My brain, battered by years of chaos, was tentatively firing new pathways. Science calls that neuroplasticity. I call it mercy.

Neuroplasticity in Plain English (With a Side of Coffee)

If you’re new to this word, here’s the short version: Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change itself. It’s what allows you to learn, heal, and adapt; even after trauma, addiction, or years of bad habits. Think of your brain like a messy, overgrown garden. Every thought, action, and emotion is a footpath through the grass. The more you walk a path, the more defined it becomes. Recovery is just… deciding to stop walking the old path and stomping out a new one; sometimes while wearing emotional flip-flops.

Addiction burns trenches into that garden. It rewards the same loop, stimulus, craving, reward, guilt, repeat. Until the weeds become highways. But neuroplasticity says: those paths aren’t permanent. You can plant again. You can grow again. You can rebuild the terrain of your own mind.

That’s science, but it’s also poetry.

When My Brain Changed Before I Did

I didn’t notice my transformation right away. I thought “healing” would feel like a cinematic montage: morning jogs, kale smoothies, sunrise revelations. Nope. It looked more like me panicking quietly when my parents started trusting me again, with money, with house keys, with decisions. Like what was wrong with them?

“Have they seen something I haven’t?” I wondered. Surely, I wasn’t trustworthy yet. But maybe I was. Maybe my brain had already started repairing circuits of trust and impulse control before my self-esteem caught up.

Neuroscience explains this: new habits and supportive relationships literally strengthen prefrontal connections. The ones responsible for planning, empathy, and restraint. Recovery rewires the brain from the inside out. You don’t feel it immediately; you realise it when someone else sees the change first.

Relapse, Humour, and Other Unwelcome Teachers

Of course, I relapsed. I actually shouldn’t say of course. But that is beside the point. I call those months my “research phase".Every slip-up became a case study in “How Fast Can One Human Regress?” But even relapse teaches the brain. Each cycle of falling and rising reinforces self-awareness. A process psychologists call metacognition.

The brain naturally doesn’t shame you for failure; it takes notes. Somewhere, I (we) learnt shame was part of us. It says, “Ah, that trigger still lives in aisle four of our emotional supermarket.” Neuroplasticity thrives on feedback, not perfection.

So, if you’ve relapsed, congratulations: your brain is still learning. You’re just mid-upgrade. (Please, this is not the end.)

The Spark

That day on the bench, the cold wind, the gospel, the decision, was the seed of everything I later built. I didn’t have a business plan or a neuroscience degree yet (both came later). I only had a body learning to breathe again and a mind hesitant to rewrite itself.

Years later, when I started trying to build this community, I based it around that moment: the intersection of science and soul. Because healing isn’t just therapy or tea or worksheets. It’s biology meeting belief. neurones meeting narrative.

That spark in the dark? It was my first act of neuroaesthetics à turning lived pain into creative re-patterning.

Science Corner: The Brain’s “Comeback Circuit”

Want to know what was actually happening in my head during those months?Here’s a snapshot:

The prefrontal cortex (your decision-maker) was slowly reclaiming territory from the impulsive amygdala (your emotional alarm).
Dopamine pathways that once lit up for alcohol or self-destruction started responding to small wins à drawing, music, and connection.
The hippocampus, responsible for memory, was forming new links between “safety” and "self", replacing old associations of chaos with calm.

That’s the biology of becoming.

Journal Prompt

Think of one moment, big or small, where you surprised yourself by choosing hope instead of habit. Write it down. That moment is your spark in the dark.