- Drugs
Siobhan still remembers how, after her first time using pot, she looked at the people who gave it to her and said, “Where do I get some?” She had finally found something that made everything in her head go quiet and she knew she had to have more.
That internal noise had been following her for as long as she could remember. At age 14, she already realized that wherever she went, she was never going to be able to get away from it. It was a very depressing thought. “The conversations going on in my head were absolutely brutal,” Siobhan recalls. “Back when they were first voting in South Africa, I saw a story about a girl who was registering voters and a mob beat her to death. I remember being so jealous of her because it was over, and she died in a noble way.”
Throughout her childhood, Siobhan went back and forth between liking being invisible and hating it. She was self-conscious, and there were problems at home. Her dad was a good man but he struggled with rage and would beat her. As the oldest child, she had the least protection. Her mom would take the younger kids away to keep them from harm, leaving Siobhan to take the brunt of her father’s wrath.
On the surface, everything looked good. Siobhan did all the things she thought were expected of her. She was named valedictorian and was awarded scholarships. She earned a master’s degree and was very successful in business, marrying a federal law enforcement officer. Through it all, she managed to keep her addiction undercover. She turned down the opportunity to go to Annapolis because she knew they’d notice her drug use.
As her addiction got worse, so did her thinking. The circumstances in her life became more and more difficult. She was making poor decisions. She left a job teaching at a university to start stripping. From there, it was a short trip to escort services and turning tricks on the street. Her using followed the same trajectory, from smoking crack to shooting crack to shooting cocaine and heroin. She lived under trees and climbed in through people’s windows. When she finally hit bottom, she was living behind a Walgreen’s underneath the train tracks. “The most vulnerable thing you can be on the street as a female is tired,” she says. “You don’t know what you’ll wake up to.”
She was raped and still has a scar on her neck from that assault. She’s been stabbed, cut and burned all over. There were 18 arrests involved. Finally, a judge told Siobhan that if she appeared in front of him again, she was going to prison for three to five years. That was a turning point, but she still wasn’t really ready to get clean. “My goal was to find the shortest program around and get through the program so I could go back to being a functional user,” she admits.
Once in treatment, though, a funny thing happened. She found hope. “I realized I had done nothing to merit being alive. Something was helping me all along. Maybe it could help me have a life worth living,” Siobhan says. “So I began paying attention and began listening. I did everything I was told to do, such as acupuncture, service work and nutrition. I got a sponsor and I went to meetings.”
That was more than six years ago. Today, she directs a research institute and works with clients new to recovery. She also does interventions. “Today, my life is amazing and there is nothing I can’t do,” she says.