- Drugs
From the time I was born until I was 12 I lived in San Jose, CA, with my mother and my sister. Following that my mom and I moved to Los Banos, CA, which was a town that was about an hour and half away. I was a very active child. I played basketball, soccer, baseball and did karate. I was a very good kid with a lot going on. My family was relatively close, and we got together almost every holiday, but that changed when my grandmother passed away. After that my family fell apart.
From the time I was 7 up until I was 14, I was molested by my cousin at every one of these family gatherings, and I can remember one occasion where his sister walked in on him sexually abusing me and asked what him he was doing. I don’t remember his response, but I remember her telling him to be careful, as she closed the door and went back downstairs. I thought that meant that what he was doing to me was okay. Eventually the sexual abuse took its toll on me, and a few years after I moved to Los Banos things started going downhill.
My mother worked nights, which let me do whatever I deemed to be a good idea at the time. At 14 I started smoking cigarettes, because one of my friends told me to try it, and I was a sucker for peer pressure. Smoking quickly turned into a habit. Shortly after that I met another person, we’ll call her S, who I thought was my friend. She’ll decided to take me under her wing. S was two years older than me and trained me to be just like her. She liked girls, and I liked girls, so she taught me how to get all the girls I wanted. She also introduced me to marijuana. We would smoke at school, at my house, at her house, virtually anywhere we wanted. She was the kind of person that did what she wanted to do, and she taught me to be the same way.
Rolling a joint became a daily habit for me. It was my breakfast, lunch and dinner. When I wasn’t smoking, I was drinking, and I spent the majority of my days throughout high school high, drunk or both. I spent all of my time trying to see how many girls I could get and had no care in the world for anyone’s feelings, until I got mine hurt. S wound up doing the same thing to me that she had taught me to do to other people. She took my girlfriend from me. From that point on she spent her time turning everyone at our school against me. Following that incident I became angry, depressed and started inflicting pain on myself. I would hit things to see if I could break my bones and began to drink and smoke a lot more. I locked myself in the bathroom at one point and pierced my eyebrows, my nose, my ears and my lip with safety pins. I cut all of my hair off.
When I was 15, I talked my mom into allowing one of my friends to stay with us, because she had been my friend for a few years, and she had nowhere else to go. We’ll call her T. T got me out of class whenever I didn’t want to go and put my ego back to where it had previously been. Unfortunately a few weeks after T started staying with my mother and I, she decided that it would be a good idea to go through room and read my journal. Something in there was entertaining to her, so she decided to rip out the pages and hand them out around school. Whatever she had handed out made all of my friends mad at me. My mother realized that I was having issues and sent me back to San Jose to live with my sister.
Somewhere along the line I met a girl who offered me “ice.” She said it would be one of the best feelings I would ever have. This “ice” was crystal meth, which I knew nothing about. I smoked it one time using a light bulb and a straw, and that was the moment my whole life changed. I stole money from my sister every day, so I could buy a bag. I would smoke it at home and then go to school and do lines in the bathroom. It made me feel incredible. I spent every day of my last few years in high school doing meth and was even high during my graduation.
After I graduated, I moved back home with my mother. Shortly after I moved home, I started introducing people to the drug, because I didn’t want to smoke alone. I joined a gang and start doing their “delivery driving.” They paid me in food and meth, and they also gave me a place to stay. A few months after I moved home I was doing about an eight-ball of meth a day. On top of that I was smoking marijuana laced with ecstasy like it was normal and doing lines of cocaine for breakfast. Throughout the day I would drink a few bottles of Gin and Hennessy to top me off. I hardly ever slept, and, if I did, it was because I passed out. I was in and out of the hospital due to seizures and overdosing, but I had no reason to stop. I was working for one of the biggest drug dealers in my city. I was robbing people by holding guns to people’s heads and threatening lives. I was a force to be reckoned with, when I was high. My mom had moved to the next town and left me in Los Banos. I sold all of the furniture from the house she had left me in, so I could by food and drugs.
My mother, my godmother and my aunt attempted an intervention on me ,but it did me no good. I got into a fight with a girl who I found out later was a minor, because she hugged my ex-girlfriend. I put her in a coma. My mother, as furious with me as she was, bailed me out of jail and told me that was it. She had received a job transfer and told me we were moving to North Dakota. By then I had my ex-girlfriend, my current girlfriend, the majority of my friends and people I didn’t care for hooked on meth. I left home, and smoked my life away thinking that if I didn’t go home my mother wouldn’t make me leave.
When I was about 20, my godmother came to Los Banos to get me and take me to my mother. My mom had everything packed and was sitting in her car in the driveway waiting for me. When I got there, I got into the car and didn’t say a single word to my mother. We drove for a couple days from California to North Dakota, and by the time I got there I was over it. We lived out of a hotel for a month with my two dogs, and I spent that whole month trying to get my hands on some meth. My efforts were useless, and eventually I gave up. That was October 2006. My mother saved my life by forcing me to get sober, and I will forever be indebted to her for it. I am now 26 and in college. My life is amazing, and my time is now spent paying it forward. One day I will change someone’s life. That’s the least I can do.