This was not supposed to be my story.
My mother should never have found me unconscious in a dope-house, thin, pale, weak, and broken with bruised and bloodied track marks covering my entire body. She was never supposed to have witnessed me slip into a comatose stroke-like-state, to be put in diapers, unable to move, talk, and hooked up to machines. She should never have had to hold my hand while I convulsed with seizures, terror in my eyes.
No mother should have to watch her only child nearly die from a heroin overdose.
If you had told me at 19, that in just shy of one year I would be shooting heroin, I would have laughed at you. I would have told you that I was not a partier and had never tried drugs, nor intended to. I would have told you that I had just finished working on an Academy Award winning film called “No Country For Old Men,” directed by the Coen Brothers, my big break as a makeup artist. I would have pointed out my involvement in other exciting film projects, among them Josh Brolin’s directorial debut “X”, and many other projects ranging from short-films, music videos, to documentaries.
I would have beamed with pride and joy sharing my extensive passion for traveling, which took me to many different countries. I had even founded an international non-profit that worked with a primary school in a village called Bagamoyo, in Tanzania. I would have pulled out the brochure that detailed the school’s library, the 1,000’s books, the water pump, the sanitation and bathroom programs, and the soccer and art initiatives.
If you weren’t convinced by learning of my achievements that I would never do drugs, I would have told you that I had watched people I love—especially one in particular—travel down that destructive path.
An unknown author once wrote that love is giving someone the ability to destroy you…and trusting them not to. I wish I had known how important the last part of this saying really is. I was naïve, young, and in love, a dangerous combination especially when the person you love is fighting and losing a battle called drug addiction.
He was my first love. Despite my ambition and the direction in which my life was headed, I couldn’t change the way I felt about him. In my mind we were like Romeo and Juliet. Little did I know that in this story I would be the only one dying.
We were first separated when he went to prison due to his drug addiction while I began to work in film. Unfortunately, when I returned from Africa he was about to get out of prison. I decided to rekindle our relationship with the hope of helping him find his life again. He soon became my priority and as I slipped deeply into our relationship every dream, project, and ambition began to fade away.
And then he introduced me to world of hard drugs…
It started with drinking too much, which quickly led to taking prescription pills. I justified my behavior by convincing myself that I deserved to be young and party. I told myself that I was too uptight, too driven. I needed to let loose.
I began to realize that when I took pills, parts of my past that had always haunted me began to quiet. The images of the boy who had shot himself in the face in front of me just a few years earlier began to dissipate. The emotional scars of the vehement bullying and torture in school became a distant memory. And the reality of just how unhealthy my relationship was slipped away. I was becoming numb, and I liked it.
Then came a night when my entire life stopped: a moment frozen in time. He shot me up with heroin. It was the injection that dictated my future, a rush so bleak yet euphoric. I felt the heroin coursing through my veins, heading straight for my heart. I was hooked. From that moment I became a ghost of the self that I once was.
What is it like being a heroin addict?
Addiction feels like a possession of both the spirit but more importantly the brain. I could not stop to save my life. There is nothing rational or understandable about being a heroin addict. My brain was high-jacked, my only escape: a suicide attempt a year and a half after my first injection.
During my addiction, I lost everything on every level. I had no respect for myself, no pride, no morals, no rationality, no spirit, no smile, no laugh. I had not one dream, idea, or goal. I had even lost the idea of love that had been the driving force into my addiction. My life became devoted to the compulsion and obsession to spend every minute in the pursuit to find a vein to inject more heroin into.
Along the way I witnessed crime, disease, overdoses, and death. I was beaten, left for dead. I contracted hepatitis C, superior mesenomic artery syndrome, a contracted gallbladder, and I lost everything I had ever owned. Yet none of these things stopped me from getting high. All it did was drive me further into the insanity that had become my life.
Then came a day where the insanity was too much for me to endure. I looked into the mirror and saw the empty vessel I had become. On that day I decided that there was no coming back from the depths of hell that had become my life. I had gone too far. I had not an ounce of hope. I decided that I should end my misery and take my life.
Few people can say that their mother brought them into this life twice — I can. Our relationship had become strained when I got back together with the boyfriend, and I had disconnected from her in order to hide my heroin addiction. She had put the pieces together that I was using. On the very day I decided to end my life she had a gut feeling and came to my house to confront me. Her mother’s intuition has always been strong.
She saved my life. She picked me up from that bed naked, unconscious, and bleeding from my track-marks. Not only did she get me to the hospital, she never left my side. She never stopped telling me to hold on and fight to stay in this world. She refused to believe that I would be partially brain dead, in a wheelchair, and in diapers for the rest of my life. She wouldn’t let go of my hand as I convulsed in seizures and my organs began to fail. My mom told me to hold on because it wasn’t my time to die. She held me until the very moment I was released from the hospital and checked into rehab.
My entry into rehab was the beginning of my journey into the world of drug treatment.
I attended various treatments for the course of 10 months. What soon became apparent was that I was fighting a battle that most were losing. I watched friends in each treatment facility die before ever finding sobriety or peace of mind. I witnessed more failure than success, more death than life, and more families being destroyed. I sat in each treatment center determined to be the exception to the statistic that was constantly broadcasted to its patients: that heroin users have a 90% chance of relapse, and that many of us would die. Through extreme hard work, long-term treatment, health consciousness, support groups, determination, and the unyielding support and love of my mother I not only survived my heroin addiction but I learned how to thrive.
I decided to make something of this improbable second chance that I was given. I enrolled in college and studied International Political Science with a focus on the socio-economic development of opioid drug treatment programs, Cultural Anthropology, and I became internationally certified in several recovery coaching programs. I graduated with top honors. I learned through my journey in school that I could take my personal experience as a heroin addict and apply it to the larger system of drug treatment and policy. It was this realization, which began my journey into my professional career.
For nearly a decade I have been working in the drug treatment field. And I wish I could tell you that its working, but the truth is, it’s not. Too many people are falling through the cracks, too many people lack access to any form of treatment, and those who have the access are often over promised, over charged, and are under delivered.
I knew the realities of the difficulties of this world because of my personal experience, but over the years I have gained a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of the issues. Early on I made a promise to never settle for the system as it is, to not give up on people, to not just sit back and say this is how it has always been. Instead, I decided to fight this system, to create, to innovate.
I guess you could call me a system changer; I have had the opportunity to do things different in my roles a consultant and one of the Directors of WA States Largest Youth Medicaid facility, which had multiple locations across the state.
Throughout the years I have worked as a consultant and set up numerous sober livings, designed holistic wellness services, I was involved with the WA State Medicaid Transformation through the organization I was working with at the time, where we integrated physical and behavioral health care into local organizations. I helped create a trauma-focused whole person care treatment model, I helped raise over $15 million dollars to help support low-income youth in need of treatment, as well as sex trafficking and homelessness services. I was a founding board member for the SAFE alliance with the DEA Operation Engage fentanyl program, and for the past few years I have been heavily involved in creating an entire new system for youth who have been sex trafficked. I was a part of HB 1775, which ends childhood prostitution in the State of Washington. Part of this bill was to create a new system for youth when they have been identified as being trafficked by FBI and law enforcement. I helped design and implement something called the Restorative Receiving Center, a 30-day trauma focused stabilization program designed to address mental health, substance abuse, case management and care coordination, with access to transitional living and discharge planning. It was the first program of its kind in WA state and the second in the Nation.
You see, I believe I am alive for a reason, so I will continue to innovate, to create, to share my story, my expertise and knowledge, and most importantly my hope with others. Because, ultimately, I firmly believe that hope, above all else, is the unstoppable force that guides us towards profound healing.