- Alcohol
- Friends & Family
Submitted by: Susanne Johnson
Whitney was twelve when she started using drugs and now has 13 years of recovery. She started right after her father passed away. She was on a cruise ship and everyone around her was using, and she had her first experience. Drinking was her primary drug of choice over the years, opiates followed closely. She tried many other things, but she kept falling back on the alcohol.
“By then, it was only me and my mom, and I’m pretty sure that she didn’t know about my use for quite a while. I was very good in hiding it. She was as a single parent not always there, and I was able to stay out of trouble for a good amount of time. We lived in a rough area and kids getting in trouble was the main focus. I flew under the radar for a long time until I was in my teenage years. Even then my mom knew something was wrong, she just didn’t know what it was,” says Whitney.
Whitney has two older brothers who are also in recovery. They were over ten years older than her and not much around anymore as she grew up, but faced the same disease. Her dad was in recovery when he passed away, and her mom attends all types of Al-Anon, CODA, and other meetings because she was always around family with the disease.
Whitney’s first wake up happened during her bachelorette party, a day before she was to be married. She promised herself not to use anything, even not to drink. To enforce this decision, she went out only with her two best friends. She stated,
Even so, it didn’t stop her from drinking and using more that night. “We developed the film and about a week later I looked at the pictures and there was no soul, there was nobody behind my eyes, there was just a human shape walking on the planet. I realized that I had completely lost myself and had to do something,” says Whitney.
Whitney knew she needed to change something. She just didn’t want to admit that she was an addict. In a family of addicts, she wanted to be the one that was different. She stopped using without having any program of recovery and fought it to stay clean for two years. She felt miserable.
Today she describes her life as beyond her wildest dreams and amazing. Her last drinking period occurred in California. When she got sober, she moved back to Florida to be closer to her family again. Her brother who was well in recovery, took her to a meeting, so she could watch him get his medallion. Going with him was the best decision. From that day on, she knew she was in the right place and needed recovery.
For a long time she kept saying “Yeah, but” and she had to push the differences aside to enjoy and unfold the true value of living in sobriety and recovery. The similarities outweigh all the differences at the end of the day. Today she works as the associate director of marketing at a treatment center in Florida for women, and is able to give back what was so freely given to her. She loves that she can educate people today about the disease of addiction as part of her job.
“Maybe I can touch one person, and maybe this person touches 50 people, that’s what it’s all about,” she says.