I got very heavily involved in criminal activity. I sold just about every drug I could get my hands on and used just as much as I sold. This caused me problems with people who gave me drugs on credit. That’s when things got really bad because I was stealing from and robbing people to pay off my own drug debts. If you know the kind gentleman I am today, it would be hard for you to believe I was committing armed robbery, home invasions, and selling people fake drugs to supply my habits. I could have very easily been put into a situation where I killed someone else or they killed me. I even stooped as low as to steal my grandma’s 50th-anniversary ring. Things were not looking up.
On September 27, 2015 (my 21st birthday), I tried meth for the first time. Once again I made the mistake of thinking that if I just smoked it, I wouldn’t get addicted. Meth made me fearless when it came to all the criminal activity I told you about. It also made me very paranoid, depressed, and anxious. I would hallucinate and the stuff I saw was so scary. It led to the second time I was hospitalized. It also led to the first rehab I ever went to.
Meth broke me so fast that for the first year I did it, I wanted to stop getting high altogether. I went to rehab, but it didn’t work. So I was stuck in Florida and posted on Facebook about how desperate I was. I posted about how I was going to start hitchhiking back to Ohio. A couple named Adam and Valerie saw how desperate I was. They lived in Alabama, not too far from where I was. They decided to give me a chance. These two people and their 6 children are a huge part of my story. Adam gave me a job and he gave me a ride to another job every day. Living with them, I got about 4 months of sobriety and I felt amazing. Then I made the choice to visit home and never came back to Alabama. I got sucked back into my drug addiction so quickly.
For the next few years, I was stuck in a vicious cycle of active addiction, jail, and rehab. So much happened in that small amount of time. I witnessed things that I should’ve never witnessed. I lost many friends to addiction. Whether to overdose deaths, being murdered, or to prison. My friends Taylor and Destany passed away from heroin overdoses. My best friend Mike has been incarcerated for the last 4 years for manslaughter and gets released sometime soon. For some reason by the grace of something bigger than myself, my life was saved.
