ULTIMATE HIGH
One man’s journey to crack habit
EAST Londoner Marc Schroeder seemed to have it all – a loving family, a high earning career and girlfriends that came and went.
But then he nearly lost everything as he got deeper and deeper into a toxic world of drug addiction.
This is the story of how he found redemption.
His journey – contained in his about to be released debut book Sleeping with Dogs: A tale of Madness – starts in East London suburbia.
It goes around the world, taking him through the hell of drug addiction, and delivers him safely out the other end with his life going in an entirely different and healthy direction.
Many Saturday Dispatch readers may in fact, know Schroeder. But few are likely to know his whole story.
He attended Selborne Primary School and College, studied at Rhodes in Grahamstown and worked as a financial analyst at one of East London’s well-known financial institutions.
He always was and still is a gregarious guy, friendly and charismatic, charming and clever. He has many, many friends.
He lived his life with gusto and seemed to have it all – a job that paid very well, a house in Gonubie, a fancy car, the best, most expensive gadgets.
Or so one would think.
In Sleeping with Dogs he reveals there was a lot of other unhappy stuff going on below the surface.
He was a boy, and later a man, riddled with doubt.
It was however, doubt that he hid extremely well. I’ve known Schroeder since the early 2000s; we were both students at Rhodes University, and I would never have guessed.
But his insecurities made him the perfect candidate for drug addiction.
“I was already a cocaine addict before I first put that rolled note to my nose and inhaled the white lady until her tail disappeared from the plate in front of me,” he writes.
And it wasn’t a habit that was too difficult to cultivate, even in white picket fenced suburbia. Finding drugs was easy.
“It didn’t take long to determine how to source ecstacy in East London. In fact, it turned out to be easier than finding a car guard in Beach Road,” he writes with humour.
And so built a double-life – on one hand he was a respected financial adviser and on the other Schroeder was an unravelling party king.
“By day I was stiff collar and tie; by night, discombobulated.
“Luckily for me, people seemed to love it. I could be office serious and party clown, getting high fives from my bosses and colleagues for both roles.”
On one eventful and rather hilariously narrated occasion, he even rocked up to help host a bowls morning after a full night of frivolity blasted on coke at the Highlander.
But, he admits, there was this growing uncertainty about where life was taking him – although he pushed it aside.
“The question was still there, in big red letters: who am I?
“It wasn’t long before I found my weekend groove again, bending myself inside and out for 48 hours be- fore splashing my face with cold water and arriving for duty on Monday.”
That’s not to say he never tried to kick his drug habit. He tried to exorcise it with sport.
He got sober and began running, cycling and swimming with manic intensity in an effort to outrun his demons. He even finished the full Ironman in 2007 in Port Elizabeth.
But it wasn’t long before he slipped back into the old lifestyle.
“I recall a dread that sank deep inside me whenever I was sober, as if sitting in the dark with another being. Someone was there, but who? The person, of course, was me; I was a stranger to myself,” he said. “At some points I thought I had beaten the drugs, like when I completed the Ironman. But that wasn’t the end. I knew it wasn’t the end.”
Until finally the day came when Schroeder could no hide from himself no longer. His dogs were his only anchor in a life falling apart.
Amid what had become a personal journey through madness, Schroeder made his big leap in search of freedom. He quit his job, sold his home and car, and began a monumental open-ended adventure.
“I just had the feeling that I was wasting my life. At 36 when I left my job it shocked a lot of people because on paper it looked like everything was going so well,” he said in a recent interview.
But his daring decision to cut loose was, in fact, not the end. It was his new beginning.
“When I left my job, the relief I felt, this overwhelming sense that I had followed my heart and I sensed that I had found my way.”
In 2016 he found himself in the Kashmir Himalayas.
A month-long detox stint in an Indian Ayurvedic and yoga centre had cleared his mind, and he’d shed the 20 kgs that he’d picked up during his old unhealthy, unhappy weighed-down lifestyle.
And then Schroeder started writing
Sleeping with Dogs.
It took him a year to write and another year to edit. He is currently writing his second book.
In the meantime he has launched the Kashmir Trekking Company in
partnership with a local Kashmiri guide, Aslam Mota. They take travellers on trekking and fly fishing adventures into Kashmir, Nepal, and are possibly going to the low slopes of Everest this trekking season.
But how did he get to be writing these books?
“I really struggled with the reality that for a lot of people, success is measured by how much money you make or the things that you have. Maybe that’s not how everyone feels, but I just felt like I had other skills, and writing is one of those.
“I used to love writing stories at school. It dried up within me when I started living for money.”
And thus my tale concludes. Friends and family might not have understood Shroeder’s desperation in leaving it all behind, but, as Sleeping
with Dogs reveals, there was method to his seeming madness.
Sleeping with Dogs: A tale of madness by Marc Schroeder is being launched at the Beacon Bay Country Club at 7pm this Tuesday. Digital versions are also available on Amazon.com.