- Drugs
*NOTE: For my 90 day commitment, I decided that instead of going to a meeting and sharing my story I wanted to do something that would really hit home for me. I put in a request at the middle school I had gone to years ago to go and speak to the entire 7th & 8th grade and share my story about fighting addiction. I chose to talk to the 7th & 8th grade because that is the age I began drinking and using drugs. I thought if I could save just one kid from making the same choices I made, then it was a tremendous success! The outcome was better than I ever imagined. I can’t really put down in words what happened that day, but it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I am heading back to speak again in February to celebrate being clean for one year. This is the speech I shared with the kids. This is my story about taking back my freedom.
I would like to start off by introducing myself. My name is Danielle. I am a 24 year old recent college graduate of Westfield University. I D.J in my spare time and work full-time at an insurance company out in Western Massachusetts. I am also a recovering drug addict. As of February 12, 2013, I’ll have one year clean and sober under my belt. I have come here today to tell you a little bit about my past and about how I found what I consider to be the biggest miracle & blessing I’ve ever had in my life: my sobriety.
Nobody sets out to become dependent on substances or turn into a drug addict. Nobody I know wakes up one day and says, “Today is the day I am going to shoot dope.” Addicts often start with pot, which leads to pills, which quickly become too expensive. Next thing you know, you’re curled up in a ball in the corner of a trap house, dirty, sweating, and hungry as you twist an elastic band around your arm trying to find a good vein to hit and take your pain away. That is the reality of drug. That is what will happen, even though everybody things it will never happen to them. You know how I know that? It’s because I too said that it would never happen to me!
I grew up here in the same town all my life. I sat in the same chairs and at the same tables that you are all seated in today. I began using drugs & alcohol in 7th grade and by 9th grade, I was smoking pot daily and drinking regularly on the weekends. Before I knew it, the weekends turned into a few times a week, which very quickly became getting high multiple times each day. I didn’t consider smoking pot to be an addiction. It’s not like anybody overdoses from smoking pot, so what’s the worst that could happen besides eating the entire refrigerator? Well for starters, I wasn’t just smoking pot at my house. A majority of the time, I was smoking in my car and driving around with a car full of friends. I had this mentality of being invincible and that nothing bad was going to happen to me. Well it took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t invincible. I was just lucky, until the day I got caught anyways.
I was wearing a townie soccer uniform at just 5 years old. I absolutely loved it! Soccer meant the world to me. I actually played for this middle school & was the starting goalie in 7th grade. Like most sports I participated in, soccer slid down the drain in high school because getting high became more important to me. Peer pressure is real, and I can guarantee if you haven’t dealt with it yet, it is only a matter of time. You may laugh, but I am living proof that it doesn’t matter how smart, popular, punk or into sports you are. If you don’t have a solid plan to say no when offered drugs, you could easily fall into the dark world of addiction. To picture this “dark world,” draw your darkest image of hell and then try to picture it ten times worse than that. Then you’ll know you aren’t even close to the darkness to which I am referring.
By the time I was a sophomore up at the high school, I was using narcotic painkillers, which immediately drew me in. It was as if someone took me from 0 to 100mph in 6 seconds flat. It was as if all my pain was erased from my life, the weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders and the only thing that I could feel was complete euphoria. I couldn’t get enough of the high but now I look back at all the things I have missed out on because I was under the influence. Doing drugs took a toll on my grades, as well as my attendance. I begin skipping school regularly to go do drugs all day. I almost didn’t pass my junior year due to attendance alone. My most important year in high school was spent ditching school and getting high. The thing about addiction is that it doesn’t target any one type of person. It doesn’t seek you out of a crowd, you seek it. Addiction will befriend each and every one of us if we let it. It isn’t picky nor does it care what you look like, who you are, or what a promising future you could have. It is loyal, I will give it that. Addiction will never leave you. Addiction turned me into a manipulative, vindictive, impulsive, homeless junkie in a very short period of time, not to mention that I was one of the best con artists you’ve ever seen in your life. Waking up when you’re an opiate addict is like waking up every day with the flu, and you know that if you don’t get your fix soon, it’s only going to get worse. You have to fight to get away from this addiction, and every day will turn into a battle. I know. I live it.
It is a proven fact that long term heroin addicts have a 50% survival rate. Knowing that you risk cutting your chance at life in half by using heroin should be enough to shake anyone to the core, but not for long. It is important to remember that any drug addict who can stay clean for just one day is a miracle.
What so many people don’t understand is that oxycontin, opana, percocet and a few other pills are synthetic man-made heroin. People don’t realize that they are popping, snorting, shooting or smoking dope. They think it’s okay because it’s a prescription, even if it’s not their own personal prescription. Well as I said before, the pills get to be quite expensive. A dollar per milligram adds up faster than you can afford. Eventually, you get sick enough and know the withdrawals are only going to get worse so you cave and buy a bag of heroin just this one time. It’s cheaper and you’ll get the same high. Here’s where it gets even more risky. You were playing with fire before and though you may have walked away without getting burned, from here on out it’s only downhill. I went from having a wonderful life to having my entire life revolve around drugs in the blink of an eye and I was comfortable that way. I kept a steady high in order to block the rest of the world out.
Let me tell you this: when I was in high school, I was always very popular. In fact, I even won “most fun to be around” as my senior superlative. I ran with a big crowd, but we were all big into the party scene. I had a group of five girlfriends, and we were inseparable. We did everything together, side by side always. It’s been six years since we all graduated high school and during these past six years all five of my best friends, myself included, have been in detox and rehab, some more than once. How cool is that at 24 years old? I can promise you, it’s not.
Being addicts, we are not proud of the choices we made and some of the horrible things we have done. If we hadn’t all gotten wrapped up in the drug scene so young, I guarantee our lives would all be much different right now. Here is a little quote I really like:
“I’m sorry to say so but,
Sadly it’s true
The bang-ups and hang-ups
Can happen to you”
None of us ever imagined our lives would take such a drastic turn into the depths of substance abuse. None of us ever thought we would pawn our mothers’ jewelry for drug money, raid our grandparents’ medication cabinets, steal from our jobs, or take from a charitable donation fund. But this is what addiction will do to you. It will take your morals and stomp all over them. It will destroy your families and tear your friendships apart. It will wear your body out and drain your bank account. It will push you to the brink of insanity and then kick you over the ledge to fall. I never would have thought smoking pot in 7th grade would open the gates to cocaine, opiates, benzos, ecstasy, PCP, crack cocaine and speedballs.
I am a survivor. I am fortunate enough that on the night of October 11th, 2011, my mother found me after an accidental overdose and rushed me to the hospital. I thank God every day that he didn’t take me away from my family and friends that night. Up until that night, my mother thought the worst thing I did was smoke cigarettes, so you can only imagine how she felt looking at her strung out daughter on a stretcher in the emergency room floating in and out of consciousness. That night was one of the longest nights of my life. I may not remember much but what I do remember haunts me to this day. I regained consciousness around 6 a.m. when a doctor awoke me to be taken down to the psyche ward. Due to the amount of drugs they found in my system, they thought I may have attempted suicide. I was released around 10 a.m. after seeing about five different doctors who all asked the same thing. They asked, “With a lethal dose of opiates in your system, what exactly were you trying to do?” I answered every one of them the same answer: “I was chasing my next high.” The final print of my release papers said “Diagnosis: Opiate Addiction, seek immediate treatment.”
My mom came and picked me up once I was released, and I never in my life want to see the sadness in her eyes that I saw that day again. I destroyed her with my addiction and broke her heart more than I ever thought possible and that was only the beginning.
I was admitted into a detox facility the morning after my overdose and then following those seven days in detox, I was sent to rehab. Addiction is just so powerful. I can’t even sum up in words what it is like to have a constant voice in the back of your head screaming at you to go get high. I lost the fight my first time around and October 28th signed myself out of rehab and went on the run for three months. Within 20 minutes of leaving rehab, my phone was shut off and my car taken. My family had previously informed me of those consequences had I made the decision to leave treatment. It resulted in losing all contact with my family. They wanted nothing to do with me until I was ready to get clean and finish the rehab program. That is addiction for you. There are days when you feel on top of the world and days when you don’t think you’re going to make it. It’s unfortunate that the day I didn’t think I was going to make it, I let that day turn into my reality.
I picked right back up where I left off, something they warned us about in rehab. They also told us you tend to get worse after you’ve had a little clean time under your belt. That makes sense. It’s hard work trying to cover up all the shame and defeat that’s trying to consume you. I had nearly tripled the amount of drugs I was using prior to rehab. Not only that, but I began smoking it. I was spending around $300 a day trying to feed my habit. Wondering how I got all that money? It’s simple: I was a thief. I never stole a single thing in my life up until the day I became a drug addict. Things escalated out of control faster than I could have ever imagined possible, and I was living the life of a full-blown drug addict all over again. My worst nightmare became my daily reality.
Every day revolved around how I was going to get drugs, getting drugs, getting high and then repeating the process over and over. I didn’t care about anything else but getting high. I didn’t have my family, lost almost all friends, and was sleeping on a couch half the size of my body above the package store I worked at since I had nowhere to go. I would go days without eating, not because I had no money or no food but because I would be so high all the time I would forget to eat. I have burned myself with cigarettes many times. Once I even lit a couch on fire due to “nodding out,” a term used to describe drug addicts who are so high they can’t even hold their eyes open.
I’d spend my days at work snorting lines off the safe in the back office, then walking out onto the floor to manage the staff. I was buying such a massive amount of drugs at work that I had the Massachusetts State Police Department investigating me for “trafficking narcotics.” I never sold drugs but I had such an outrageous habit that the police thought I was some king pin drug dealer. I spent every night curled up on a floor chasing my next high. I actually remember one night just lying on the couch after I did a large amount of drugs and thinking to myself, “This is what I am throwing my life away for? To sit on a couch, drifting in and out of consciousness alone? Why am I doing this?” I worked so hard in college, making the dean’s list four times, and finally getting that diploma to throw my life away. But I couldn’t stop. At this point, my health was at just as much of a risk if I kept using as it would be if I just stopped since my body could go into a seizure from withdrawals. I remember the doctors telling me when I was in detox that they had to put me on an extremely high dose of methadone to help me come down from the opiate addiction because without it I could die.
Who would have thought that a few nights of messing with hardcore drugs would land me in detox and rehab twice in the same year? Those few nights of doing hardcore drugs turned into many years of complete chaos within the blink of an eye. Who would have thought my family would need to have three interventions for me to agree to go get help? I sure didn’t sign up for that, or so I thought. I put my family through hell because I was hooked on opiates. I missed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and celebrated my birthday alone getting high as my family wept wondering where I was and if I was okay. Since my mom stuck to her guns and cut off all contact with me, she began writing in a journal every night as if she were writing letters to me. My mother and I talked every single day, no matter what. Even when I was in college, even when I was using drugs prior to my overdose, we never missed a phone call or an “I love you” up until then. It crushed my mom not being able to speak to me. To this day, I have not been able to read past the first two entries in the journal that she gave to me once I checked back into rehab. It breaks me down knowing the pain and torment I put her through because of my drug addiction.
I had finally had enough and hit my rock bottom exactly four months after my overdose and returned home to my mother February 11th, beginning outpatient rehab the following day. I began to realize one very import thing. I realized I had been living without hope. Either you will get real and live in the real world or you will die in a fantasy world of your own creation. I realized that if I get honest, then I will begin to solve real problems and once I step up and solve these real issues, I will be accepted for who I really am. I can’t even begin to tell you the pain and suffering I put my family through. But I can tell you how grateful they are to have me back home, sober and becoming a bigger success with each passing day. Families can share in victory over drug addiction or they can become victims of it.
It has been a long road to recovery. I have had my ups and downs and slips and falls but I don’t want to live my life any other way than sober at this point. I won’t ever be able to say I won this battle with drugs. It is a battle that I suit up for and fight every single day and will continue to do so for the rest of my life. I am fortunate enough to have landed a very good career that encourages and supports my sobriety and works around my rehab schedule, as well as my frequent suboxone clinic appointments. I wake up and thank God everyday for giving me the opportunity to start over and rebuild my future. Many of us addicts aren’t lucky enough to get that opportunity. Many addicts die before they ever get the chance to fight for sobriety.
I will tell you right now that doing drugs to fit in or gain acceptance in one particular crowd is the biggest mistake you could make. It will not make you look cool and it will lead you down a long and lonely road that some people never escape. When you are little, your parents, family, and teachers always tell you that if you work hard, you can be anything you want to be when you grow up. Well, my parents never imagined I would choose to be a junkie and neither did I. But this is why I am here today. I want to plead with you guys to learn from my experiences and to tell you the things I wish I knew at your age. More often than not, the media tends to glorify drugs and alcohol. They try to make addicts look cool or make you think that you’ll be funnier after a couple drinks, hits of weed, or lines of coke. Well, I’m here to tell you about the reality of drugs, the truth about what happens. Right now in the United States, there is 10 times the amount of drug overdoses than in the last three decades combined. We are facing a pill epidemic that is consuming our youths and taking their dreams away. But you don’t have to be a statistic. You can be the difference.
Drugs and alcohol are not something to take lightly. There is no experimenting or just trying it once. If you knock on the devil’s door long enough, somebody will answer you. You should focus on school, have fun in the process, keep it simple, and always hold your family close to your heart. Sometimes the toughest decisions you make in your life turn out to be the best decisions you could have ever made. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. You may not be lucky enough to survive it and a parent’s worst nightmare is to bury his or her child. Embrace your life and don’t take a single day for granted. Success is failure turned inside out. Thank you all for your time, and I hope that each and every one of you has a bright future that is drug and alcohol free. I can promise you it is the absolute best way to live because using drugs or alcohol isn’t living at all.