- Alcohol
- Drugs
I was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. My parents got divorced when I was three years old. My father is an alcoholic and left my mother for another woman. Everything was in my mother’s name which forced us to have to move and file bankruptcy on my childhood house.
I always did very well in school. At about the age of 14 I began drinking and smoking with my friends. None of it seemed out of the ordinary because everyone else was doing it. As a sophomore in high school I met a boy who already had a five year Percocet habit. I was very naive then and didn’t think too much about it. I was always experimenting with different drugs and never thought that I would get addicted to any specific drug.
The first time I ever tried a Percocet I immediately fell in love. All my childhood fears and worries of abandonment had left me. I continued with Percocet but I also continued to do well in school. I was in AP classes senior year of high school and I received the Abigail Adams scholarship for scoring advanced on my math, English and MCAS. I graduated high school and got accepted to two colleges.
I made a decision to go to U Mass Dartmouth for marine biology. That summer, my Percocet addiction got really bad. I knew I had to do something before I moved away to college so I tried to detox myself. That seemed to work for about 2 weeks until I started up again.
I somehow managed to move into college and stay there for a semester. I was never going to classes because I was always sick and I was constantly going back to Worcester to get my fix. After finally waking up in my dorm room with no recollection of the night before, I had enough. I called my mother that morning and told her that I just want to kill myself. She picked me up at school right after that phone call and brought me to the hospital.
I went to detox the following day and stayed there for two and a half weeks. I managed to stay clean for about two months. That was not my last attempt at staying clean. My addiction progressed to harder drugs. The next three years I spent in multiple detoxes and even trying the geographical cure by moving to Florida.
When I returned from Florida I finally made the decision to go to detox and then a residential program. I stayed in that halfway house for six months and graduated. This time around I decided to get a real sponsor and get into working the steps. Going into a residential program was the only thing that I hadn’t tried before and it honestly saved my life this time.
I just celebrated one year clean and sober on 11/15/14 and I couldn’t be more grateful. I have a small job working at a hospital but that’s a huge step for me after not working for three years. I am currently getting out of default for my student loans and can return back to school this year. My life has changed immensely and I have only just begun. I wouldn’t want to change this for the world and I plan to continue doing what I am doing.
After the four years of pain that I’ve been through I am grateful for every single day that I wake up. I wish that I could just give sobriety to every single addict or alcoholic out there but I cannot. All I try to do on a daily basis is to be a power of example, which is easy because my happiness is real now.