- Drugs
- Friends & Family
How did you start your journey to recovery?
I started my journey into recovery essentially with my parents. My parents knew I had a problem before I had any idea. So that sort of started my whole rehab thing. I was 21. I had my 21st birthday in rehab. And I’m 34 now, so it’s been a long road. I was in and out of treatment centers, I went to any kind you could imagine, and I just kept relapsing, and relapsing and relapsing. It went on for like 10 years and then finally I hit a bottom, and I didn’t really have any other choice but to get clean, or I was going to die.
What was your addiction?
Heroin. It didn’t start out that way, but a funny thing happens when you try and get into recovery. You can also go the wrong way and learn even better ways to use drugs, so it’s really important who you surround yourself with. I didn’t even go to treatment the last time. I just went to detox, and I never looked back. And it’s been six years.
What’s your sobriety date?
It’s March 18, 2008. I’m married, and my husband is coming up on nine years. It was recommended by pretty much every person that we knew that we should not be together or stay together. We didn’t listen. Eventually people said, “Okay, well, let’s work with this.” We probably wouldn’t have made it if he didn’t decide that he was going to get clean. I kept using, and then I actually was able to see someone that I knew very, very well change, and stay clean, and that was the only time I realized that I could also. And then I did.
We have a little girl, her name is Zoe, she’s four, she just turned four in August, and we have great jobs. It’s all of the cheesy things that people say, you know? “Beyond your wildest dreams.” I didn’t even dream about this because I never believed. I would watch people getting medallions, and I believed what they were saying, that that was true for them, but I never believed that it was going to happen for me. I just didn’t. But I did the right thing.
Is there one moment that you can say, “This was the turning point for me”?
Yes. I went to California to see a friend, and I relapsed. And I came back and I was living with my now-husband at the time, who was clean. So he picked me up, and I went to a hotel, and I was using heroin and cocaine for three days straight, until all of my limbs were swollen from needles. And I ended up hallucinating and running around the hotel hysterically, crying, saying I knew my mother was there. I called my mom at 4:30 in the morning and said, “I know you’re here.” I had a breakdown. And it was the most awful experience of my life. I just didn’t care. I thought I was going to die. I just kept shooting up. I would wake up and I would shoot up, and I was hallucinating, and it was really bad. It’s all about what your personal bottom is, and for me, the emotional, the spiritual, there was…the only thing below that was death. So, I just kind of put one foot in front of the other and it just happened.
What would you say, since your recovery, is an event or something that you’re most proud of?
I finally graduated college. It’s kind of a milestone for everyone I guess, but for me, because I went to Emory and that’s really when I started using, and it’s a good school and I had a great future, I always regretted leaving. Always. It was one of my biggest regrets, and throughout the years I would go to college, I would drop out, I would go, I would drop out. It was kind of like what I said about getting clean. I thought, “I’m never going to graduate. If I graduate, that’s going to be so amazing.” The same way I thought, “If I ever get a year that’s going to be so incredible.” So that was a big thing for me. My diploma is hanging in my daughter’s bathroom, so we see it every time during bath time. I got my MSW and I have my Master’s in Social Work. I started as the program director for Guardian, so this is my path.
If there’s a piece of advice that you could give to someone who is struggling—either they know they have a problem and they don’t know how to seek help, or they’re struggling in their sobriety—what words of encouragement could you share?
I know it’s cheesy, but don’t give up until the miracle happens. Because it could happen at any moment, and it doesn’t have anything to do with you controlling it, it just…things can start to happen. And that’s what they mean by “one day at a time.” Don’t stop before the miracle happens. Just give it a chance, give it a shot. I tell people, give it a good year. Maybe their year is horrible. Give it another year. It took me six years to get to a point where I was like, “You know what? I can do life.” It took a long time. But now, looking back, thank God that I didn’t give up. Because I could have very easily. I did. I was just lucky that I didn’t follow through, but I could have. If you told me six years ago—like I sound really cheesy because I’m like the typical NA meeting story—but if you told me six years ago that I would be married to the man that I love, with the most amazing, incredible daughter, very close to my sisters and my parents, not only a Bachelor’s but a Master’s, and I’m a program director, I fell in love with yoga…I wasn’t even able to dream that seven years ago. Things just keep getting better.