- Drugs
- Faith
submitted by: Susanne Johnson
My name is Wells, and I am a recovered heroin addict from California. I started getting loaded when I was 14 years old and continued to do so for the next 6 years. The first time I got high, I never thought that it would lead me to six treatment centers, four overdoses, two totaled cars, getting kicked out of high school, a destroyed family, hundreds of lies and ruined relationships.
No matter what happened when I was getting loaded, if I was high, I was OK, and that’s all I knew and all I cared about. Drugs and alcohol were my solution to dealing with life until I found recovery. Drugs and alcohol gave me an identity that I reveled in. I was the life of the party. I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. It was the opposite to how I felt growing up: separated and lonely. Getting loaded completely alleviated that feeling, and for a while I became the person that I so desperately wanted to be.
My addiction only progressed as time went on. I moved from marijuana and alcohol to cocaine, to pills. I moved from pills to smoking heroin, to intravenously using heroin and then finally to methamphetamine and heroin together. It was easy for me to rationalize my using because all the while I was doing well in school. I got into the colleges and universities of my choice, I was successfully playing music, I had a lot of friends that loved me to death, I had girlfriends, and I had goals. All I could see was the good in my life, and I chose not to care that my parents were in tears on a regular basis because of what I was doing. I chose not to care that I was taking semesters off from college to go to inpatient programs because all I cared about was having fun and getting high. It was easy for me to neglect anything that got in the way of my using, so I chose to do that and did so without remorse. All I cared about was myself.
Towards the end of my using, I was back with my family. It was a miserable summer. I had been looking forward to going back to New York and getting away from all the wreckage that I had created. Before I could finish packing my bags, I had a series of overdoses, and my parents gave me the ultimatum: Either change my life and go to a long-term structured sober living home or hit the streets and figure it out on my own. Fortunately I had been given the gift of desperation.
Although I thought I had a lot going for me before I got sober, I realized I had to let go to save my life. I had to let go of my girlfriend, college and old friends so I could focus on the issue at hand, me. Getting sober was no easy task. I had to dismiss what I thought I knew about myself and ask for guidance from other alcoholics who had already done what I was trying to do. I realized that I could not stay sober on my own and needed to be willing to do whatever it took. “Whatever it took” meant changing everything. It meant suiting up and showing up for life in a way that I had never done before. It meant getting a sponsor to take me through the 12 steps. It meant being open minded to the concept of a power greater than myself and taking the suggestions of others and actually applying them in my life. It meant I had to be honest with myself and others in all of my affairs.