- Drugs
- Faith
My problems were deep rooted and started in grade school. I was a heavy-set little girl with a chili-bowl haircut. I finished the fourth grade with a complex and the first of many nicknames. Mine was “Shamu.” Kids can be cruel. Childhood progressed and so did my approval seeking. In high school I shed the baby fat and made a turnaround. Suddenly all the boys who were making fun of me before now wanted to date me, but the damage had been done. I felt a huge hole, emptiness, hurt. On the outside I was beautiful, but on the inside I was the ugliest person I knew! Cold. Empty. Numb. Dead.
I found temporary happiness in men, marriage, and money and material possessions. I got married at nineteen and had a baby at twenty thinking that would make me happy. I was divorced by twenty two and with baby number two on the way. I was involved in several relationships with abusive men. I was dying inside. That’s when drugs found me. My addiction to meth lasted ten years. I started out dealing. I managed to stay out of prison for the first few years, but I wasn’t as lucky with men. I married again and had another child. While pregnant with my son, I acquired a rare heart condition called peripartum cardiomyopathy. You would think that would have been enough incentive for me to quit the drugs, but addiction is cunning, baffling, powerful. A year later I aggravated my already weakened heart to the point of giving myself at least two heart attacks. I wasn’t expected to make it through the night. I did. I wasn’t expected to make it through the next day. I did. I wasn’t expected to ever leave the hospital. I did!
I wish I could say my drug use stopped there, but I can’t. I went back out there. The streets were calling. I got caught up. I went to prison for a two-year stretch where I found Jesus, got saved and prayed with all my heart and soul for deliverance from this disease. I wholeheartedly wanted to be free, but within three hours of stepping out of rehab, I had my dope on its way to me. God still had a lesson for me. I caught the flu, and with my weak heart, I went downhill fast. I had a stroke. One thirty-day hospital stay later, I picked drugs back up, but this time I did so with a needle. I stopped going home and started boosting to support myself and whatever “Tom, Dick or Harry” I’d taken a liking to at the moment. I was living motel to motel, breaking into cars and houses. I got arrested. It absolutely saved my life. In my cell one night, finally sober for the first time in months, the magnitude of what I had done hit me, and I broke. Years and years of pain came pouring out. I felt so unloved, so unworthy, so guilty, so condemned. A still, small voice kept whispering in my heart and in my head that no matter what my Father will always love me. It was then I felt so warm, so at peace, so calm, so loved. My heart was changed that night. Call it repentance or call it deliverance, either way the last thing I want to do now is sin against Jesus including defiling my body any more than I already have. Since I was a repeat offender, the courts made short work of sentencing me to seven months of prison time. I welcomed what was offered. I was released on April 23, 2014. I am happy to say I am in recovery and am absolutely in love with my God and savior, Jesus Christ!