Speak Up

I never thought I would be an addict. I saw the pain that my father's drinking caused my family and was determined that I would never be like him. The truth is that I am exactly like him, but I refuse to live like that anymore. Drugs used to scare me, but I found out early on that drugs and money were the quickest way to make "friends". I would be their friend and they would use all of my drugs and money. This was my pattern for nine years. I never thought it was a problem though because whenever I needed to walk away from the drugs for a time I could. This was before I was introduced to meth.

A guy at work gave me some after we had been partying all night so that I could stay up and drive us all to the next place to party. It was love at first hit. I felt normal for the first time in my life. I felt good about myself, I had energy to work the two to three jobs I was usually juggling at a time, and I could actually focus. The focus part seemed like a miracle to me because my head was always so filled with noise and the meth made it all go away.

My use didn't take long to get out of control. It seemed slow in the moment but it only took just over half a year for my life to become nothing more than ash blowing in the wind. It started with a group of about four of us going to get a gram and that would last us for pretty much a whole day. A few weeks later that same amount would last us as a group about an hour at most. I started getting my own stash and picked up my own pipe and things went down hill really fast after that. I needed a quarter just to get out of bed in the morning. What had started as long weekend binges turned into eight days of no food, forcing water down, and hallucinating.

Meth had taken over my life and I didn't even know it. I was going to work cranked up or on a crash because I was out of money and it became a dangerous situation quickly. I was falling asleep behind the wheel of company cars and drifting across four lanes of traffic on a regular basis when I didn't have meth or I would be disappearing into the bathroom every few minutes to try and get more into my system. It is a true miracle from God that I didn't die or kill someone else while I was out there still. As fortune would have it I did end up getting into an accident a company car while I was attempting to use while driving. Needless to say I lost my one job, was on the verge of losing my other one, had been kicked out of my apartment, and wrecked my personal vehicle in a different accident because I had been seeing shadow people. All because of my use. All because I was in love with something that wanted me dead.

I tried getting help for a long time and I couldn't commit because I was still keeping secrets from everyone. Anyone who had really meant something to me in my life were worried but they didn't know what I was doing or where I was or why I had become this other person. I was homeless, living out of my car, and was too ashamed to tell anyone what was happening to me. I was the failure. This was because I was a weak willed individual who couldn't keep herself together like everyone else. These were the lies that kept sliding through my brain, that kept me from telling my family the truth.

Everything changed the day I woke up and God told me "don't look back". That same day I had a friend check in on me where I had been crashing and she offered me help to get clean. I believe now that God was telling me not to look backwards at that time because the help I needed was in front of me. I have managed to completely turn my life around since then. The life I need and want is in front of me and each day I am putting up the fight for it. I have to mentally examine the past and walk through it with trusted friends but I don't have to go back to living that way and never will. The ashes of my old life are starting to drift away little by little now and I am just thankful that I didn't burn up in the same fire.