My mom has been getting high, looking for ways to get high, or acting like a zombie from being too high ever since I can remember. This was normal to me. I had never being exposed to any other environment. I mean, sure, my grandparents and other family members tried their best to teach my sister and me right from wrong, and most importantly how bad drugs are, but it was hard to accept something other than what we had always known. Growing up, my life has been somewhat of a contradiction, and at one point it was spiraling out of control.
My mother was not the most stable of women. She had a temper, and was diagnosed bipolar at a young age. She suffered abuse at the hands of a close family member at a very young age, and has been emotionally distraught ever since then. She developed her drug habit at the age of 15, sticking mostly to prescription drugs but wandering from time to time. She moved around a lot, always into the home of a new boyfriend, which meant we also moved around a lot. That part was the easiest; being so young made the transitions smoother. My mom always tried to keep up the appearance that everything was fine, when in reality our family was falling apart at the seams.

She treated us more like her friends than her daughters, asking us for advice, confiding secrets, and making us keep secrets too. She was one of the best liars I have ever met, and could come up with an alibi in ten seconds flat, with the help of all her not too friendly friends. She tried to instill this “skill” in us at an early age, and to be honest she wasn’t exactly completely unsuccessful. It’s difficult to not act in a manner that has been almost all you’ve known all your life. For a while, I actually did think things were okay, at least until I turned thirteen.
I had been living with one of my aunts for roughly three years, and my mother had just regained custody of my sister and me. II was still twelve at the time and was ecstatic. I had missed my mom more than one would think possible, and at the time she seemed to be getting better, physically and mentally. I thought that was the end of all our problems. But in reality it was just the beginning of all mine.

When I moved back in with my mother, our relationship turned volatile. Her drug problem seemed to come back out of nowhere, and I was in no way prepared for it. Her anger was worse than I remember, and she was prone to screaming fits and violent rages.She evoked a sense of fear in me that I had never known before, and I soon started experiencing anxiety and what seemed like a permanent, overwhelming depression. When she started acting like the child, I had no idea what to do. Everything in the past was bleak and the future looked unclear. I was buckling under the weight of being the responsible one, and I soon found a way to cope with my constant depression and anxiety.
Growing up how I did, i was never really taught how to cope with anything.These episodes of extreme sadness and my newly developed anxiety attack habit were completely new to me. It was hard for me to talk to people. I knew nobody would understand, how could they? I didn’t even understand what was becoming of my life and my family. I decided I just needed to have fun and that that would definitely improve how i’d been feeling. So i did what I knew and what everyone around me did. I got high.

I smoked marijuana for the first time when I was 13, the summer before I started ninth grade. I went to a family friend and they happily obliged in “smoking me down” for the first time. The effects hit me like a ton of bricks. Out of nowhere everything looked a little brighter, I had perma-grin, and I could not stop giggling. It was a euphoric feeling, it was physical and psychological. Like nothing could bring me down. I hadn’t felt that happy in a very long time. Even if it was artificial, it felt good to smile again.

I hadn’t planned on becoming a pothead, but in a matter of weeks thats exactly what happened. It seemed impossible for me to go one sober minute without yearning for the release and happiness that the drugs supplied me with. I knew, a very small voice in the back of my head kept shouting at me, that what I was doing was wrong, but I couldn’t stop. I had seen what drugs did to both of my parents and despite that I didn’t want to stop. When I got high, I became myself again. It gave me a renewed self esteem and outlook on life, at least for a little while. I had become addicted to the person I was when I was high. I never wanted to let her drift away again.

My mom tried to act upset when she learned of my drug use, but I truly think that she was indifferent towards the whole situation. At the time it made life much easier, but looking back, I feel like i wanted her to be pissed. To ground, or slap, or scream at me. I wanted her to be a normal parent. But what I got instead was another partner in crime.

I started off slowly when I joined my moms circle of druggie friends. We just smoked pot and did the occasional whip-it, or inhaling carbon dioxide from a cartridge. The days started blending and blurring together and before I knew it, I was about to start ninth grade. I thought my life was ending, after a blissfully easy and ‘happy’ summer, I did not want to go back to reality.

The first couple weeks of school went by in a blur. I never really absorbed anything, and ignored all the knowing looks I got from my teachers, friends, and fellow students. I tried to convince myself that I looked normal, and did my best at covering the dark circles under my eyes and teaching myself to use eye drops. My perfume collection was rapidly dwindling down just as my anxiety from school and socialization coming to a head and my tolerance for weed was going through the roof. It wasn’t working for me anymore, so I soon began my journey down the darker roads of prescription drug abuse.

For my anxiety I had my own prescriptions so thats where i started. I started taking a few more than prescribed just to see the effects. The first time I did this and went to school I had an accident. I was feeling slightly lethargic all morning but I didn’t mind because all of my feelings and emotions were dulled down to almost nothing, which is what I was going for. Walking through the crowded hallways was always a chore for me, but on this day it was worse. It felt like I was being pushed around by hundreds of people at once. I couldn’t maintain my balance and was running into everything. It was so difficult for me that I was still finding my way to class when the bell rang. This was preferable to me so I put my hand on the wall to guide myself and thought I was doing much better than I was, until I came to the stairs. There was a handrail that helped me for a minute, but I truly had no idea how of my depth perception really was. When I took maybe my second step down my foot slipped and I ended up tumbling to the bottom. Down four concrete stairs. I injured my knee pretty badly, and found walking the rest of the way to class unbearable, so I just sat there until I had to move due to other students coming my way. I made it to the office, called my mom, and left school. I couldn’t take it. And I could not handle making a spectacle of myself. I believed myself lucky that no one came across me that would get suspicious, or gossip about it. But now, I can’t help but wonder if it would have made a difference in my life if someone had. Anyways, that was the moment when I knew I had to make a choice, and in my drug induced stupor I made the wrong one.

I missed over half of my freshman year of high school. And I barely remember when I did attend. I had made it a routine for my mom to call me in, get high, and just spend the rest of the day wallowing in my self pity and trying not to think much about anything. The first time I did pills with my mom I took too much. The last thing I remember was swallowing four huge pills and sitting on the couch. When I finally ‘woke up’ they told me that it was five days later. I was in shock. They said I was out of it, but conscious most of the time. If that was true, why couldn’t I remember anything? Not one thing. I lost five days of my life. That was one of the hardest things i’ve ever had to cope with. To this day it frightens me more than almost anything else. The worst part was my mother. She did nothing. It didn’t make sense to me, until I realized she was most likely in the same state as myself. After that I began to believe that nobody truly cared about me. My extended family stopped coming around due to my drug use, my little sister was scared of me because of my newfound behavior and my, and my friends were just as bad as I was becoming. I was alone in a hazy world where nothing really made sense to me, and I wanted out.
I was struggling to get out of bed in the mornings, and nothing I did, or anybody said gave me any reasons to want to. Drifting in and out of consciousness for what felt like an eternity, I gave up on myself. I had no hopes that anything would ever improve or that I could be normal. I felt surely destined to spend the entirety of my life miserable and virtually alone. I also never envisioned myself ever functioning without drugs again.

What started out as an escape from the pressures and sadness of life, turned into an addiction. I was a younger version of my mother. The person who raised me to believe what we were doing was okay. The person who should have taught me the opposite. The person I never wanted to be. I hated that. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. I knew I needed to stop, but at that point I didn’t even want to. I had no desire to reacquaint myself with a sober me.

The last day of school is when everything changed. I decided to go, due to the fact that it was the last day and nothing was really expected of us. Plus there were some ‘friends’ I wanted to wish farewell. I had no idea that would be the day that everything changed. I was called down to the office, which was strange because I was under the impression that they turned their heads the other way when it came to me, and was greeted by a social worker. She explained the situation. Someone had called child protective services on my mother and they had been observing my attendance for a few months already with the help of my aunts and grandmother, who I assumed had given up on me. They made me take a drug test which i obviously failed, they then let me in on the plan that everyone seemed to know about except me. They were removing me from my mothers custody and I would be taken straight to a psychiatric hospital and put through a drug rehabilitation program. After the program, I would be moving to Kalamazoo to live with one of my aunts and her husband. I had no say, no choices, and no idea as to what was going to happen to me. I was scared of being forced to face my problems, but thats exactly what happened, and that is probably the main reason I am where I am today.

Detoxing off the drugs was one of the hardest, scariest things I have ever experienced. It was one of the most important things as well. The program was specifically designed for my physical and mental needs, which is why I believe it was so successful. I was there for a few weeks, and after the first I finally began to understand what I was doing to myself. It took me one week to realize I was on a path of destruction that would have led me nowhere in life. I was resentful, of course, because I had no say in my life anymore, but after a while I realized this ‘intervention’ was exactly what I needed. It was sad not to be able to return to my home. And I was terrified of starting over somewhere where I knew exactly zero people, but I did it. Even when I felt like I couldn’t go on, I did. Thanks to my clear, sober mind I made it through.
I started attending school on a regular basis. I got straight A’s. I even made some friends. I did all the things I knew I should have done all along, but never thought I could. I stopped getting high because I didn’t want to end up like my mother. I stopped getting high because I no longer needed to. I stopped getting high because I finally started to see value in myself from the things I was accomplishing while sober. I stopped getting high because I wanted to be my own person and not have to depend on anything or anyone to create my happiness but myself. I finally knew I had the power to do whatever I desired with my life and myself. I finally cared about myself and my future. I finally loved myself. I no longer needed to get high to be me. And for that I am more thankful than I ever imagine myself being for anything ever again.