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From Addict to Author
Before I found recovery, loneliness, and the feeling that I was different from everyone else is something I lived with all my life. My parents divorced when I was two. Maybe it was because of the way I was treated as a child. The physical and mental abuse I received for my mother, always feeling as if she hated me. Just after turning fourteen my mother showed me how much she loved me when she told me to pack my things and get out of her house. I never returned and I never went back to school That only reassured me that I was different in a bad way, from everyone else.
After leaving home, and the horrible events that followed. I learned that I could not trust anyone especially myself. The only time I was able to put my guard down and come close to trusting anyone, or have any fun, was after he took so much drugs and drank so much alcohol that I was too wasted to even care.
As time went on I became addicted to anything mind altering. I survived many traumatic events. I blamed my parents for everything that happened to me. I felt like I was the only kid in the world without a home or parents who loved their child. I became pregnant at the age of sixteen, and I got my daughter taken away from me when she was five, to my addiction. At the time I blamed my parents for not loving my daughter or me enough to help me with her for a short time to keep Child Protective Services from taking her away from me. And at the same time, I blamed and hated myself for letting this happen to my daughter and me. I missed my daughter so much and fell deeper and deeper into my addiction to escape the pain that continued to grow within me. The loneliness and the feeling that I was a terrible person ate away at me with each passing day, and left me with absolutely no hope that I would ever be normal, happy, or ever see my daughter Jessica again.
Along with drugs and alcohol, I delt with physical and mental abuse, I suffered two seperate violent rapes. And was assulted by a man, of which I survived only after having life-saving emergency brain surgery. In addition to all that I was a regular at the Ventura County Jail and much more. It is all in detail in my book. I hated my life. If it weren't for me hanging on to the thought that just maybe, someday I would see my daughter again, I would have most likely ended my life. At the time, I believed I deserved everything that happened to me. I now know that I endured a life that no one deserves. The last time I went to jail saved my life. I was lucky enough to be placed into a drug rehabilitation program. In this program I was given an assignment to write my life story and read it in front of the class. I did not want to do this. I did not understand how this would help me. But I did it the best I could at the time. Writing my life story forced me to take a close look at how I had been living the past thirty-one years of my life. The truth is, I was not living at all. What I was doing was slowly killing myself. That is when I realized I had to change my life if I wanted to live. Only I did not know how to live, and I was so scared. I doubted my ability to change. I really thought I was different than everyone else. But after listening to others read their life story. I started to realize that I wasn't much different after all. When it became my turn to read my life stroy, I was so scared and shaking. It was VERY hard to do. But after reading I felt a sense of freedom that I never felt before. And the support I got from the people in my class and my counselors was amazing. That is when I started learning that maybe someday it was possible for me to trust others. It was
