DON’T JUDGE THE JOURNEY –
Dec. 8, 2022 – With one glug of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine, my world changed. I felt euphoric and relaxed, a lovely state my brain encouraged me to reproduce. So, I got drunk frequently, then added weed, then pills, then acid. At 16, I found my drug of choice, methamphetamine. With the initial snort, I experienced true joy for the first time, but this bliss was short-lived.
Within a year, when this high wasn’t sufficient, I shot up. I lost so much weight you could count the bones in my back. I picked at my face and gave myself a staph infection. I hallucinated people in shadows. Many times, I overdosed to the point that my heart pounded so fast I barely could breathe.
I spent the next 15 years in this severe meth addiction, although I did better in college, until I was gang raped by three men and then moved in with a violent boyfriend. For the ten years after I graduated from UC Berkeley, I worked my way down the corporate ladder, destroyed relationships, and shattered my physical and emotional well-being.
I believed this was the best life available to me because of the intense pain from all of the trauma. I thought that, if I stopped using drugs, my brain would snap, and I’d be committed to a mental institution or I would commit suicide.
