- Alcohol
- Drugs
My story is like many others. My life became unmanageable, and I was unable to stop getting high. I am going to start with a brief “what it was like” and tell you what happened that led me to where I am today. I grew up in North Jersey, and had a normal childhood. My parents divorced when I was 11 and that is the first time that I can remember feeling so much emotional pain that I needed something outside of myself to stop it. That’s when I began cutting to ease the pain. I had seen movies and shows that portrayed young girls cutting their wrists with razors and when I did it the first time I felt immediate relief. The physical pain distracted the emotional pain, but it didn’t get rid of it.
I am not one of those people that can remember their first drink, but I remember the end of 8th grade and beginning of high school that I knew what drinking was and what it felt like. High school was one big party. I got decent grades but my academic career wasn’t my main priority. I began throwing parties when my mom would go out, and that made me popular, which was basically the most important thing to me at that point. At the time I thought I drank the same amount that most, if not all, of my friends did. I drank to get wasted and hopefully hook up with some random guys and pass out. It wasn’t different than most of my friends, but how I drank was. I would drink straight from the bottle and just chug until I couldn’t drink anymore. I began smoking weed when I was 16, and it was the same with weed. I had to smoke as much as I could, as often as I could. By the time I was a senior I was drinking and smoking everyday by then, and didn’t care too much about my after high school plans. This was also the time when I realized I was in love with my straight best friend. Unrequited love is a very painful thing. It was then that I realized that I wasn’t sexually attracted to men also, so I figured out I was in love with my best friend, and I was gay.
After graduation my friends all went off to college, and I stayed home and took a few classes at community college. I started hanging out in Long Island with some friends from high school who had gotten kicked out for drug related incidents and they were doing harder drugs than I had ever did, and doing it in ways I never saw up close. I met a girl who was 16 at the time, and I was 19, and when we met she was shooting up in the back seat of my car and I was in “love”. Later that night I did coke for the first time and I wouldn’t stop for years. While I stayed with that group in Long Island I learned everything I needed to know to keep getting high. I learned how to hustle money, steal checks, commit check fraud, how to steal, what to steal, where to sell it, and other various ways and means to get my next fix.
Fast forward a year, I went to college in NYC for a semester but that didn’t last and so it was back to community college. I made friends with this girl in my English class and right away we were best friends. We actually wound up having all the same friends so we all would party almost every night of the week at her apartment. I was having tons of fun; school didn’t really matter so I wound up dropping out. While partying with my new friends I tried a variety of drugs, Oxycontin, Percocet and Xanax. I also got my first girlfriend and was still doing coke all the time.
My new friend had a sister that she was at odds with, but eventually they began talking again and when I met Mallory it was instant infatuation. The girlfriend and I broke up and Mallory and I began hanging out every day, and getting fucked up. The two of us were like two storms colliding. We would hook up here and there, but we never slept together until August 2007. My mom was going to Florida for 2 weeks and left me and my step brother the house. Without going into too much detail, Mal and I were taking Suboxone to get high, she was taking Xanax to come down from coke and still lots of coke. The day my mom left I decided to have a bunch of friends over to party.
Long story short, Mal and I went to sleep in my bed, her high on Methadone, Coke, Xanax, Weed, and Alcohol, and she never woke up. I went to wake her up and she was gray and it was the single worst feeling I have ever felt. The rest of the day was a blur of cops, phone calls, and my dad coming to take me to his house, and crying…lots of crying. My two best friends came to take care of me at my dad’s house and I just remember not being able to breathe. My parents decided to send me to rehab so the cops couldn’t question me on the events surrounding Mal’s death, including where all the drugs came from. My whole life changed that day. So I went to my first rehab and left after a few days. I wasn’t ready to hear what they were telling me and I was in too much pain to even listen.
I stayed sober for the most part for the next few months. I was called “a killer”, and people told me “I murdered my best friend”, and some of my close friends steered clear of me for a while. Once the smoke cleared I began hanging out with my group of friends again. One of my closest friends was a boy named Eric. We became close again because he needed pills and my step dad took Percocet, so I would sell them to him and take a few myself. This began the real turning point in my addiction. Soon enough I was stealing jewelry from my mom, stealing her checks and it came to the point she had to kick me out of the house. I began staying here and there and Eric and I began to do Oxys, Opanas, or any kind of pills we could get our hands on. One night we were down the shore and ran out of pills and couldn’t get more. We ran into some friends I went to high school with and they were doing Heroin and since neither of us wanted to be sick we did it. It would take me getting arrested for stealing some guys’ phone from the mall a few months later to stop me. I was arrested the next day for possession and the next day my dad flew with me down to Florida to go to my third rehab, my first full 28 day program!
I was ready to hear what the treatment center had to say this time. I got into what the steps were, got out, went to a halfway house, and started going to meetings. My new roommate in halfway would soon become my first serious relationship. My father bought me a car and I attempted to go back to school. I was working, but I wasn’t doing things on my own. My father still helped me and supported me financially the whole time I was clean.
At about 9 months clean, I began feeling really sick all the time. I had blood work done and was diagnosed with Lyme disease. It got worse from there. I was in terrible chronic pain. My relationship with my then girlfriend began to crumble when I began taking pain killers as prescribed. Basically, she broke up with me and I lost it and began using again. I went back to New Jersey and eventually I began shooting dope and things just got worse. Eric got out of jail and we began using together and for the next two years it was back and forth from rehab to rehab, New Jersey to Florida. In that time, in October 2011 while I was back in Florida, Eric was killed in a drug deal gone wrong. My world collapsed again and I spent the next year homeless and squatting from place to place, spending one Christmas alone because I wasn’t allowed home, rehab to rehab again. In the spring of 2012 after my 16th rehab I finally decided to read the guidebook to a 12-step program. It was then I opened my mind to what the 12 Steps could do for me. I went to a treatment center that put me on Suboxone, and this was my own personal choice. My severe chronic pain is one of my biggest triggers and it was the only thing that worked and that I could take as prescribed. So I got out of treatment, got a sponsor, and began working my steps. That sponsor dropped me because I wouldn’t get off Suboxone, and because I was in a relationship with an ex-girlfriend. They both actually dumped me on the same day. I found another sponsor and he took me through the rest of my steps and my life began to get better.
I wound up living with my grandmother who was 88 and at the onset of dementia, so she needed my help. I believe living with her was one of the driving forces of my sobriety. After I finished my steps I met a girl on an internet dating site. It happened that we were both in recovery and, thanks to learning what I do and don’t deserve from my ex, I opened myself up to a new relationship. It is now a year and a half since we met. I have 10 months sober off a relapse from getting off Suboxone on my own, in which I got high twice in one day in the last two years. I have a sponsor I love, who gets me and my medical conditions and helps me in any way she can. I have held a job consistently for the last year and just started a new job which I love already. I found a career I am passionate about. I continue to do service: I chair meetings, I do H & I, I give as many people rides to meetings as possible. I give back.
I live with my fiancé, and we have a happy life. We have a puppy who I adore and the best thing is I am fully self-supporting these days. The fact that I am proud of myself and can pay my own bills is something recovery has given me. My 12-step program has given me a life that I could never have dreamed of, and I remain grateful for that every day. I have God in my life and my two guardian angels watching over me. I am always mindful that I am one drink/drug away from relapse, and that healthy fear keeps me coming back every day. Thanks for letting me share my story. If I can give anyone hope, it should be that recovery is possible. There is a way out of that desperation and darkness. The pain does heal, and the steps gave me a way to heal. Sobriety is a beautiful thing; I can see the world for what it is and deal with life on life’s terms.
*Some names have been changed to honor the privacy of my friends and their families.