I’m 32 years old. Growing up, I was constantly moving around and had to change schools 15 different times. My mom and stepdad had unstable jobs. There were times we didn’t have power or water, and sometimes we went without both. They struggled a lot.
I have two half brothers. The older one was taken from us by his father when I was five or six. Eventually, I moved in with my grandparents at 14. My grandpa died about a year later, after I watched cancer slowly kill him. I started stealing his pain pills and getting high.
I’d finally gained a stable home where I could finish school. Then my mom and stepdad got evicted again. With nowhere else to live, they moved into my grandma’s two-bedroom trailer with us, along with my lil brother.
I graduated high school and discovered heroin shortly after. A year or two later, my aunt died from leukemia at 38. The next year, my cousin Josh was murdered at 25. Those losses drove me deep into addiction and self-destructive behavior. Then I lost my uncle, who was around 60, followed by both of my grandparents on my dad’s side. By then, I was in a revolving door of jail and prison, stealing to pay for my addiction.
This past year, the grandmother I’d lived with since I was 14 died on the morning of Christmas Eve, after dementia had taken over.
I was on my way to prison yet again earlier this year when my probation officer offered me a chance to enter recovery court. I said yes, willing to do or say whatever they wanted to hear to keep my ass out of prison. That was July 1 of this year.
I went to detox for seven days, then completed a 30-day rehab, followed by a 60-day program called Achieve. I graduated on Monday, October 5. Now I’m at a sober living house.
I’m sooooo grateful for the opportunity to totally change the trajectory of my life. I was stuck in a hopeless, self-destructive existence that would have surely ended in more prison time and, sooner or later, an overdose.
Now I’m on the come up, and my life seems to get better every week. After 17 years of using opiates daily, I now have a lil over 100 days clean, and I’m loving my life.
If you’re reading this and have a drug problem, I swear, doing the work to get clean is worth more than any amount of money.
Thanks for reading my story. Shoutout to Amanda in Narcotics Anonymous for giving me a space to share it. Hopefully, this helps someone in recovery feel less alone and encourages others to share their own comebacks, even if they’re still in the middle of them.
