- Drugs
My name is Matt, and I was born on September 7, 1951. I was the oldest of five children. If my father had a bad day, I had a very bad night, and he had a bad day every day. By the age of seven I started throwing up for days at a time. I was unable to keep anything down. My mother took me to the family doctor and his solution was morphine. By the time I was eight I was strung out and spending months in the hospital every year. They sent me to hospitals and kept giving me drugs for pain, drugs for anxiety and just more and more drugs. When I was 21, they decided it was all in my head and started sending me to mental health wards, and I got sicker and sicker.
Although I had a very high IQ, I did poorly in school. I preferred hanging out with the “bad” boys and was always getting into trouble. I got married at 18, at 21 and again at 28. I was always hoping someone else would fix whatever was wrong with me and love me no matter what. When I was 21, I discovered street drugs and hippies and fell in love with the lifestyle of free love and drugs. The world moved on, and the drug scene got ugly. Nixon started the war on drugs.
I fell into working hard, dangerous jobs, the ones that they didn’t drug test you for. I moved around the country looking for somewhere I fit in. I worked the Oklahoma oil fields for 16 years and loved the danger and the hard-drugging lifestyle until the work went bust. I returned to PA with my third wife and two youngest children. The marriage was falling apart, and I was going to the hospital more and more often and using more drugs.
After a very bad fight, I ended up back in the mental ward. While I was there, a man came in to see me. He never spoke about my drug use. Instead, he told me about his use and how he found help through a support group. As he was leaving, he said that he was going to a meeting and that, as I was being released, I might want to go too.
I showed up, although I had never been so afraid in my life. Just as I was about to turn and run, a beautiful girl walked out the door, said hello and gave me a big warm hug. I asked if there was some kind of a meeting here, and she said, “Yes. Come on in and get a coffee.” I stayed and heard other people sharing the story of my life. They had to have been looking in my window, because their stories were my story. Soon I was going to two or three meetings a day. I relapsed many times by trying to create my own program, but I never stopped going, and they never stopped loving me back to health. After five years I relapsed hard, ended up in rehab and spent six months in a halfway house. One year later I got my first one-year tag.
Life is pretty good today. I have four grandkids that have never seen grandpa high. I have good friends, and I don’t need drugs to make it through the day. I have helped a lot of good people find a chair in the rooms and shared my story with many people. I’m not a hero like the ones in the movies. I’m just someone who lived a hard life and isn’t afraid to help others find a way out of the dark and up into the light. Namaste.