G, 29

"Right now I have 70 days of sobriety. I’ve gotten up to 8 months before. I used everything, but my drug of choice was opioids, mostly fentanyl. I struggled also with alcohol and crack – those were the big three.

I probably realized that I had alcoholic tendencies when I was 21, when I really started drinking heavily. I realized that I wanted to feel like this all the time and I couldn’t get enough. I couldn’t drink like other people. Then when I was 23 I was prescribed a bunch of opioids. It wasn’t the first time I got prescribed them, but it was the first time I started abusing them. It was kinda the same thing of wanting to feel like this all the time, forever. When I was 24 or 25 I got re-introduced to them.

I first tried to get sober in early 2020. That was the beginning of my recovery journey. But I quickly fell back into substances because I was hoping that sobriety would make me feel good right away, the way drugs did. But it didn’t, so I relapsed after a few months.

Things escalated a lot quicker that time. After about a month I ended up losing my job. I was holding on to a lot of my own reservations, my own beliefs, my own thinking and I was just miserable the entire time. I felt very disconnected. This last time it was at the point where I was going to kill myself, and I ended up in a hospital instead. I was trying to overdose and die, but eventually people intervened and got me into treatment. It was a last resort, like if I’m going to die I might as well try this. That’s where I’m at today.

Trying to live life on my terms wasn’t working. A part of it was also that the drugs stopped working – they weren’t doing for me what they used to do. My depression was still seeping through. I’m at the same treatment center now where I went to two years ago, and a lot of the people I was there with were just as fucked up as I was, and now they seem a lot better, they seem brighter, they seem happier. They seem like they found some solution, and that gives me a lot of hope that maybe there is some solution.

I think that people like myself are just trying to feel okay, or even just normal. People use drugs because it does something for them. For me, it helped quiet my depression and made me feel loved, and I think that’s something that everyone deserves to feel. It’s not just about getting fucked up and being crazy. My using was because I wanted to fill a basic human need, and at the time it was the only way I knew how. There’s not a lot of empathy around that; these are people that are hurting, who just want to feel okay. Public opinion is that these are just junkies who are wasting away life because they just want to get fucked up.

There’s kind of a cliche that I’m still trying to grasp myself: don’t give up before the miracle happens. Addicts have been conditioned, and their brains wired, to expect instant gratification. That's only how drugs work. Very few things in life work that way. Things take time, recovery takes time, healing takes time. And it takes work to get to that place. But those things are worth it. To the people that are still using, I would say that it doesn’t have to be so black and white – like you can only be working on yourself if you’re sober. Harm reduction – things like Narcan and clean needles – help, but also therapy. You can still ask for help and support if you’re still using. Practice honesty with yourself. Is this serving me? Or do I need to go do something else and change?

Carry Narcan. I’ve been saved by Narcan and saved someone’s life with Narcan. Even if you don’t think you’ll need it."

M, 28

"By college I was using harder drugs: Xanax, a lot of alcohol, a lot of weed, hallucinogens – anything that I could get my hands on.  I had this mindset that whenever I could celebrate or wanted a good time, it would always be with drugs. That was what I rewarded myself with. I didn’t know how to have fun without substances. After college, I had started taking oxy pills – which were probably fentanyl, but I don’t know – now and then, usually with friends to go out. And then it slowly became once every weekend, and then after my ex broke up with me, I was pretty distraught so I started taking it every day. That’s when I consider it converted to a full-blown addiction. I took it for 6 weeks straight and I knew that I was going to have to go through the withdrawals, but despite that I kept using.

The whole time I knew I couldn’t do it for a long time. I knew it was bad for me, that it was wrong, that it was a problem and that it would only get harder to stop. So even at the 3- or 4-week mark, it was in the back of my mind that I needed to stop very soon. I weaned myself down, which is really hard to do and I don’t think I could successfully do that later on in my addiction. By that first time I was very highly motivated, so that made it a little bit easier. I still remember the withdrawals being horrible. My whole body hurt, I felt depressed, there were weird muscle twitches, I couldn’t sleep. I was depressed for at least a week or two. I didn’t tell anyone at the time.

I relapsed a bunch of times. Honestly, a lot of it is blurry. I think I used for weeks at a time, but never as bad as six weeks. It was really hard to permanently stop using. I remember trying to quit a bunch of times and going back to it. So eventually I realized that I needed more help and that I couldn't quit. One of my friends had taken naltrexone -- Vivitrol -- before, so I found a doctor who would give it to me and that was when I first started medication treatment. At the time when I was on it, I really thought it saved my life and it was the only thing preventing me from relapsing. But I’m not sure how true that is. Acutely, it helped because it kept me sober for the month. The problem is that I would relapse every time near the end. It did the work for me, so I didn’t have to put any mental effort into resisting taking the drug. But that fucked me over because as soon as the Vivitrol ran out I would go right back to using.

When I moved and started graduate school, being away from my dealer and being super busy really kept me sober. I would still get cravings and relapse, but it was less often. My last relapse was in January (almost 1 full year ago). I attribute it more recently to taking Kratom because it took my cravings away. It’s definitely not the level of highness that I achieved with fentanyl, but it probably satisfies some drug craving where I don’t have to deal with tiredness or uncomfortableness in the moment. But I don’t see it as fully substituting one drug for another. I see it more similarly to methadone and suboxone, where maybe stimulating the opioid receptors helps to keep you clean. 

I don’t face stigma because nobody knows. The only people who know are either addicts themselves or people who already know me extremely well and who I trust. I definitely am scared and don’t want to tell a lot of people. If you have no idea that someone is using drugs, you’re not going to guess that some behavior change – like being in a really good mood – is from opioids. We can attribute behavior to so many things, so it can be hard to tell. 

Fentanyl is just extremely addictive. It makes you feel amazing. It takes all your worries away, you feel confident, you don’t feel pain and it’s just a feeling that I think most people would always want to feel again.

I wish people would understand how horrible withdrawals feel, just so people generally can have a little bit more sympathy for people going through them. There’s definitely an element that feels out of your control, and I think other people struggling with substances feel similarly. Which is why I think NA goes on and on about relinquishing your control after a certain point. You give power over. I’m not religious and I don’t do NA but I think there is a point where you have to at least acknowledge that you need help, and ask for help. Because at some point you’re just going to want to use again. I had to learn that even in the moment, no matter how badly I wanted to quit or how confident I felt, there’s going to be a time in the future where you’re going to want to use again.

I forget sometimes that I ever had an issue, or that fentanyl was ever a part of my life. Now that I’m in school, it largely takes up what I think about most days. Right now I feel like I’m never going to use again. Unless someone put it in front of me, then I don’t think I’d have the self control honestly. This is kind of sad, but sometimes when I do really think about how it made me feel, I do think that one day I would want to try it one more time. But maybe not actually. I don’t know. I know it’s bad. I go through moments where I do get very scared and I think Oh my God, what if this never goes away and it really destroys my life? I think about how bad it is, and I get anxious about people ever finding out. And other times I feel like it’s not that big of a deal and it’s not an issue anymore and I’m fine. It’s hard to change my relationship with it. I think if I do use again, it would be nice for the first couple of hours but then all of the terrible memories and feelings will rush back. Then I just want to take the naltrexone to get it out of my system, I don’t want to wait. The longer it’s in me the longer the withdrawals are going to take."

S, 28

"The first time I used opioids was in freshman year of college. I used other pills then too, but I wasn't really getting my hands on opioids that often. After college I started using them more. By the time I was 24, I had my first real habit with opioids. I had had other habits and other addictions, but not opioids yet. From then until 27, I spent that time trying to get off of opioids.

I’ve been clean for a little over 11 months now. I go to NA every other day, 4 or 5 times a week. It helps a lot. Opioid addiction was more consuming than my other addictions. All addictions are consuming but opioid addiction felt like it was my favorite. It was the one that I would break my rules for, and my moral code. It was the one that got me to do that. The other ones couldn’t, but opioids could, they changed who I was.

Every time I used it I knew it wasn’t a good thing, but even when it had gotten to daily use I still said it wasn’t a problem, even though I knew very well subconsciously that it was. I’ve been going to NA for a few years now, but this year is the year I started getting it, finally. That was important because I never would have gotten that switch in my mind to get clean if I hadn’t been going to NA already. I had instructions on what to do if I was craving, and people would tell me stories about what worked for them. I was more willing to listen to them than to counselors and doctors who had never really gone through it themselves. 

The opioid addiction was obvious, there was no way to hide it. People felt sad when they saw me. I was barely conscious a lot of the time, always falling asleep, not really present even if I was there. So they didn’t want to be around me, understandably so. In the moment it felt offensive, it felt like it didn’t have to do with my addiction. I was in denial and thought they were just being mean. I had to convince myself essentially so that I could keep using.

I feel like many people don’t care, because it's never happened to them or their family or their friends. But with the opioid crisis going on, I feel like most people know someone who has gone through it, or if they haven't they will soon. It can affect anyone. Anyone can have an injury, go to the doctor one day and get prescribed pills and get addicted to them and so on. I really feel like it’s an epidemic for the whole country and the whole world, and people should care about it even if it doesn’t directly affect them because it could and eventually probably will. I don’t know why people don’t focus on it the same way they focus on other things.

It’s not a choice you make, it’s a symptom of a mental illness. It’s based on something else that you can’t control. I think using is a way of not addressing those things. Once you’re off the drugs, those things come flying at you and you have to address them, otherwise they’re just poking at you for your entire life. You have to deal with it in order to live a peaceful life.
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Most addicts spend years trying to get clean. Most are addicts for the rest of their lives even if they don’t use. They’ll have dreams, they’ll have cravings. The cravings will get weaker the longer you stay clean but you'll still have those sensations. The addiction is a symptom of a bigger mental illness and that's something you have to deal with for the rest of your life. And it gets easier, but like with any illness you have to keep it at bay. Relapse is a part of the story. I’ve gotten clean many times, but I’ve relapsed after those times – until the last time. The important thing after relapse is not to keep on falling down the hill but to catch yourself as soon as you do, to realize what led you astray. There’s a reason for why you relapsed, and if you do address it then you have a better chance at being clean next time."

N, 23

"When I was 15, my brother got wisdom teeth surgery, and I stole his hydros. I heard a lot of hype around opioids. I liked how the hydros felt, so I started to use them whenever I could get them. Then I traded a kid an eighth of weed for 90 pills of hydrocodone and really fell in love with how opioids made me feel. Throughout high school I started to do oxy too. I didn’t know this at the time, but when I thought I was doing hydros, I was actually snorting heroin.

When I was 18, I was exposed to fentanyl. The first time I did fentanyl, it was very much an “I made it” moment. It was like, this is how I've wanted to feel for a very long time. From that point on it got pretty dark. I would go on runs where I was either sleeping on someone’s floor or staying in a shelter and doing anything and everything I could do to get high. I kept relapsing. I tried suboxone, but I wasn’t in the right headspace - I just didn’t want to be sober. But I figured that suboxone was better than nothing. So they put me on the highest dose of suboxone, but I just tapered myself off in order to get high. A friend of a friend’s overdosed and I remember calling my parents and crying because I thought that was going to be me, and I really didn’t want it to be me. But regardless, a month later I relapsed again.

Throughout my use there were a lot of moments when I had used too much, and I would wake up and I had thrown up or had no idea how long I was had been out for. I was sleeping on a towel on the floor of a drug house, and this woman who really cared about me called a wellness check, and I was actually overdosing. So Narcan saved my life. Two weeks after, I signed out of treatment and went to New York to do more. Opioids are just very powerful. Thankfully I was stopped – there were 6 guys who knew, and they saved me from myself. Then I got a call that my best friend in Minnesota had overdosed. I told myself that I would try to get sober for him, and it didn’t work. I relapsed again with my other best friend, who is like a brother to me. And I knew that opioids were going to kill me, so I tried to get sober again but my best friend didn’t. A month later I called the police to search his home, and they found him overdosed. That just made it very concrete to me that opioids were going to kill me and that I probably was not going to make it to 22.

Now I’m part of a 12-step program, and I’m coming up on 2 years sober. I’m in college with a 4.0, I have a job that I really enjoy, I have a girlfriend, and a really strong connection with my family that wasn’t there for a long time. When I was using, I had no friends. The only people I would associate myself with were the type of people who would probably leave me dead and take my drugs. In my family, everyone kinda stopped talking to me except my mom. My mom was the only person still trying to keep me alive. When I was around 19, every time I would go on a run my dad would beg my mom to let me die and to stop fighting. From 17 on, my entire family was convinced that they would receive a call someday that I was dead. And today, I have a little sister who I get to support. I have a weekly phone call to check in with my older brother, and my parents and I are on great terms. We talk at least once a week. They’re super proud of me, they’re blown away by my life today. They don’t worry about me nearly as much as they used to. The big piece for me was seeing my two best friends die. That’s the reality of opioid addiction.

I was young and an idiot. I liked how weed and alcohol felt, so I figured I’d like how pills felt too.

To people using – stay safe. Don’t use alone. There’s harm reduction clinics everywhere that have safe supplies and a bunch of Narcan. And to people who don’t have an understanding of opioid addiction – your depiction of a junkie is probably not an accurate representation of an addict. It could be anybody. I just do believe that as long as the stigma is around, more people are going to lose their lives for no reason. If we keep pushing people to hide that they’re struggling with addiction, it’s going to be more parents losing their sons or daughters, or siblings losing their siblings, or kids losing their parents."

B, 39

"My first ever exposure to opioids was when I broke my thumb. I was fifteen, and I was rightly prescribed 5mg Lortab every four to six hours. My family had a long history of opioid addiction going back four generations. I took them, I remember feelings of euphoria, all the problems were gone, being wrapped in a warm blanket of euphoria. I remember an urge to take more and faster than I was being given them; that was my first exposure.

My second exposure was when I was seventeen, I had a spontaneous lung collapse. They gave me a shot of morphine, and it was the greatest thing I’d ever experienced. When I was eighteen or nineteen I started buying pills on the street. Lortab became Percocet, became Oxycontin, became Heroin. I’m that generation who was a big fan of Purdue’s work at the time.

In my generation, in high school people just took pills. We had parties, we took pills, that was normal. People smoked pot and took Xanax and took Lortab and that was just kind of how you partied. This would have been between 2000 and 2004. So I didn’t really understand, I knew that you could get addicted to them but I grew up in the D.A.R.E. program, they taught us the name of everything and where to buy it and that if you smoked pot you would immediately go to jail and die or overdose. And when you smoked pot and that didn’t happen, it was like okay it’s probably all bullshit. So we’d take them, we partied, and it really didn’t seem like a big deal. Then we could go to the doctor and say oh I have a sore throat, and they would give you hydrocodone cough syrup all the time, as a minor. It was just like that. They were trying to have patients not experience pain, so we just took opioids all the time. You got a cold, you got the flu, you got opioids. You have teeth pulled, you got Percocet. They gave the shit out all the time. I never really had any withdrawal symptoms, I never felt “hooked” so to say. That happened later, after college, when I started dating a woman who sold pills and I was just taking them all the time.

I remember waking up one day and I felt like I had the flu. Body aches, pains, nauseous, couldn’t hold food down, all that kinda stuff. We didn’t have any Lortabs or anything, then finally I took some to feel better and everything was instantly fine. That’s when I realized, oh, this is opioid addiction. I’d been taking them for months, every day.

From there I got really strung out, it got really bad, started using IV drugs, I was homeless for a year, in and out of jail. Only minor charges but I mean, in and out of jail, all the time. Lost everything, lost family, stole 100,000 dollars from my father one time, when he was in the hospital. He tried to force me to get treatment, I refused, he passed away. Stole my sister’s debit card, which was really horrific. She’s a foster parent. She had adopted kids. Two grand from her, and her and her husband basically said that I can go to jail or I can go to treatment. So I went to treatment, my insurance only paid for me to be locked up in a mental health facility, not a rehab. That was for four days when I was in full blown withdrawal. Then I went to an IOP program, I was there for two weeks and I couldn’t stand it. I went off, I was in and out. I went to detox thirteen times, I went through an IOP program ten or twelve times. One time I went to sober living, it was a great place but I just wasn’t ready. I got six months sober – actually abstinent is probably the right word – then I relapsed.

I wasn’t treating the underlying causes of my drug addiction, I was just not using drugs. Then I had a really terrible relapse. I was homeless for a year and I lost everything. I stole from one of my best friends, so he beat me to the point I had to go to the hospital. I ended up homeless, I was in jail. One of the last times I was in jail it kind of clicked that when I looked back on my life, the only points I was able to remember were when I was in rehab or when I was dopesick. Everything else was just a blackout between being in acute withdrawal and being in jail. Here the jails are really overcrowded, so there were supposed to be two in a cell but I was the fifth. Full-blown withdrawal, they didn’t give me anything for that.

I got out of jail, got high, went back to the hospital. Went back to a PHP program. I had to be in a terrible SRP program, which is where felons and criminals go when they’re parol released. A lot of them were getting high, and they would drink bleach to attempt to pass drug tests. That never worked – I don’t know where they got that from – but anyway, I was there for two weeks and then I was finally able to go back to a sober living facility. It was a wonderful place. I got a sponsor, I started working a twelve step program with him. He took me through the process, and at first I was just gritting my teeth, hands balled up in fists, just full of anxiety and irritability and fear and guilt and shame.

Working through the 12 step process was an incredible experience. I went through all the steps and really got to see how I wasn’t a victim and take responsibility for what I’d done. And to see that drugs really warp your perception, it’s this twisted reality. You can’t really see what’s true and what’s false, to be honest. The fourth and the fifth step was the first real, glaringhere is the reality of the situation. I started sponsoring people. Taking people through that process, seeing it from a third objective perspective was really eye-opening. Incredibly helpful to see the true nuances of the disease. It helped me separate the horrific actions of people on drugs and who they actually are. These people are incredibly sick and mentally ill. It’s not an issue of morality, it’s an issue of mental illness and chemical imbalance. From there, I worked in the 12-step program as a volunteer and did a lot of trying to spread awareness in the community and help heroin addicts get sober.

Then I got involved with Dr. Karen Cropsey at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. She was doing a study to prove to the legislation that if people beyond medical staff – police, firemen, myself, citizens, whoever – had access to Narcan, then it would save more lives. And at the time they were freaking out, we had 14 people die of an overdose in Jefferson County that year. Last year we were at 460. Just that’s to show… it’s gone up so much in 12 years. I worked with her, helped spread awareness. 

t was wild back then. They finally approved for people to start carrying Narcan, and we helped distribute it. Distributed it for free to various recovery centers, sober living. I’ve had to use Narcan on many people. My wife. She relapsed really bad, I’ve saved her life twice with Narcan. She’s been sober now. But both those times I found her locked in a bathroom, blue and unresponsive.

To give you an idea of what it was like before… when I was a kid, in college, in my 20s, if you were partying with someone and they overdosed – especially with how the laws were written then – you would dump them in a ditch. I have not done that. But that was what people did. And the reason that they did that, is because if you would call the police, you would get a murder charge. You would get drug charges. There was nothing to do, there was no immunity, if someone was dying or had died, the last thing that you wanted was to have them found at your house. My brother-in-law, who passed away from an overdose last year, overdosed one time fifteen or twenty years ago, and we didn’t have access to Narcan. We had to literally carry him into a bathtub of ice water and basically beat him until he became responsive. Make him walk around, do all that. If we called the police or the paramedics, we probably would have all got charges. It’s not like that now, but it was back then. People would die, and people would be left abandoned.

Even though the overdose rates are so much higher with all the fentanyl and carfentanil and all that stuff, and tranq, Narcan really had a major effect on saving lives. Now, most everyone I know who is even remotely aware of this carries Narcan. I don’t know why you wouldn’t. It’s like having a fire extinguisher in your house.

I’ve lost three family members to opioid addiction. I’m in a middle, upper-middle class white family in Alabama, not that it has any bearing, I just want to say that I see it hit the wealthiest, and the poorest. It used to be mainly a white thing. Now it’s all just shot through the roof, especially after COVID. In 2020 and 2021, and this is no exaggeration, I knew two people who died every week, for two years. It was every other day, someone died. It was crazy.

My sobriety date is July 27th of 2012. I have almost twelve years. I have become over the years a really big believer in MAT, specifically Vivitrol and Suboxone treatment as an aide. Especially in conjunction with the 12 steps.

A lot of the thing with drug addiction is that you feel so isolated. You’re very self-consumed, of course you are, when you’re going to have the worst case of the flu and feel like someone beat you half to death. Of course you’re going to be self-consumed. One thing I always say is that the twelve-steps programs are free. There are meetings in every city. It doesn’t matter where you came from, if you have health insurance, you can just go. They will be very welcoming to everyone. Look up any 12-step meeting and just go. Just ask people what to do. You will not find a more pure and wholesome group."

K, 33

"I struggled with addiction for as long as I can remember, it started before I ever even put a substance in my body. Initially I was addicted to feelings, like adrenaline and the feelings that attention would give me. I did bad things, got into trouble. Like when Pokemon cards came out I had to catch them all, and even stole to do so, at a young age. The first time I ran from the police I was nine years old – I ran and jumped off the roof of Publix, and broke both of my feet at 9 years old. Fast forward a little bit, I got sent away to military school and another international boarding school following that for high school. I experimented with things, I drank with my mom from the age of 13, smoked pot with her. She introduced me to cocaine when I was sixteen, and that was what really made me feel like it was okay to do drugs. Like it was fine, you just had to keep your shit together. When she introduced me to cocaine, I felt a degree of responsibility, like “I need to be responsible if I’m going to have fun and do these things.”

I wanted to get the partying out of my system, I had a lot of fun, experimented with some things, nothing really hard per se. But then I ended up having to go back and stay with my mom. At the age of 20, the first time I ever smoked crack was with her. She handed me the crack pipe. That set the ball really in motion.

The disease of addiction is a progressive illness, it does not necessarily mean you’re going to become an addict right away. But over time, those things that you said you would never do, you end up doing. There were things I never thought I would do, that I was dead set on not doing. I never thought I would become a drug addict. When I was a kid I wanted to be a marine biologist – that’s what I wanted to be, not a drug addict. In 2013 I went to sober living to be sober, and that’s where I first picked up the needle. That was something I said I would never do. Then I couldn’t convince myself I wasn’t an addict anymore. That was the reality. Shortly after that, I ended up homeless. From 2014 to 2016 I lived in a tent and slept outside, went to jail nine times as well as many psychiatric and rehab facilities. I wanted to stop but I couldn’t. I fantasized about suicide every day, then I attempted. I hung myself, turns out that’s actually extremely painful. I thought I was just going to pass out or something but that’s not what happened, I ended up pulling myself out of it because it was just too painful. I sat there crying.

Fast forward a little, I have a court order hanging over my head saying I can either go to a state-funded rehab, or I can go to jail for six months. I knew that was hanging over my head and I woke up one morning, I was so dopesick. I was doing everything, crack cocaine, flakka, heroin. This was mostly heroin at the time. I woke up so dopesick I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t even get up to get money. I was stuck in a place where I couldn’t imagine a life with drugs anymore, and I couldn’t imagine a life without them. That was my jumping off point, I got sober initially around 2017.

In the last few years I’ve lost sixteen friends and my little sister. It was actually after losing so many friends and finding my good friend dead – I’m sitting in the driveway, waiting for the coroner to get there – and I’m just so defeated because I’ve lost so many people already, I said that something has to be done. In the last three years we’ve lost over 300,000 Americans. And we’re on track to lose another 100,000 this year. This is the number one cause of accidental death. 6 out of 10 pills purchased on the street contain a lethal dose of fentanyl.

For me it really was being sold on a 12-step program, working those steps, finding community and finding purpose. That was an essential part. Most of us, when we first get sober, have no sense of purpose. We go from having a very, very powerful sense of purpose – to get high and stay high by any means necessary – to not having it anymore. My days were simple, I knew exactly what I needed to do: get money, get high, and stay high. When I got sober, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have an overwhelming purpose anymore.

Ultimately it boils down to honesty. I had to get honest. And there’s a lot of layers to that. It’s a degree of vulnerability, too. Once I was able to produce that degree of honesty and be honest with myself and others and the world, then I had some hope. And I could see that people were recovering who were just like me. They’re doing it so I’m like, okay, they’re able to recover. The honesty produces the hope, and hope is a very powerful thing if you experience it. I never thought I could be sober. I’m six years clean now."

K, 31

"I remember I tried opiates in high school, and I really liked the way it made me feel. I have really bad anxiety and ADHD so they coexist with each other and it’s often hard to treat both at the same time. So for me it was like it cured both of those things. I didn't really become addicted to them until way later. I used them sometimes in college. The more that I look back and talk about it in therapy, I noticed that I was using it before dates or if I had a presentation, so it was more for my anxiety that I was treating. I had really really bad social anxiety. So I would use it through school – through nursing school – and it wasn’t until I was working as a nurse, I went through a really bad breakup, I thought I was going to be with this person forever and it turned out we weren’t going to be together forever, and that just really destroyed me. My dosage started to increase. Not only was I using it to treat my anxiety, it carried over to, Okay, I’m going to treat my depression as well with this. I didn’t want to feel any emotion, I just wanted to feel numb. I started really increasing my dosage, I resigned from my position as a nurse in the neuro ICU. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt because of things that I was doing. That is something that is very important to me, patient care. That’s one thing I do pride myself on working in healthcare. I do put my patients first. I know that if I’m not mentally well then I will back down.

They call it epigenetics, where you can turn a gene on, and I feel like these little traumatic events happened and the cup started overflowing and the genes kind of just activated. Because after that there was a physician who has known me my entire life, knows my family, he had kind of been grooming me for a very long time. There was an encounter that happened that really traumatized me, I don’t want to get into detail about it but it’s a really big part of my story. I had this traumatic thing happen and it turned from drug abuse to drug addiction to using as a means of second-hand suicide. That’s kind of how I differentiate the three defining moments of my drug use. And so, after that, it was a three-month spiral where I would literally try to take as much as I could to OD. And when I would wake up I would be like Okay, we have to go a little bit higher. That was over the course of three months… I got into some trouble trying to obtain the medication and ended up having to surrender my nursing license. So even though I wasn’t working as a nurse, I surrendered my nursing license and I ended up going to jail on some pretty hefty charges.

During this entire time I was an atheist – I was an atheist for 10+ years. And so I didn’t have anything left. Opioids were removed, and that’s what led me to the 12-steps program. A) court forced me to, but B) I didn’t know how to function, I had so much anxiety, and I just didn’t know what my future would look like and I was scared shitless. That in a nutshell was what the spiral looked like.

The recovery portion – I used to look back and be so ashamed of how I came into the rooms. I have a lot of compassion for my younger self now, I’m very protective of her, because she didn’t know what she was doing. She had never been in recovery, she genuinely was surviving and doing her best. I have compassion now when people come in and go back out because I completely understand that. I literally lied my first time the entire way through the steps. I was like, I’m so spiritual! Because I was so scared of what everyone was going to think of me. I wanted to feel like I fit in. There’s this thing called “war stories” in the room where it’s like the goal is to sound like you had it the worst. And I really didn’t have it the worst. I probably had the worst charges of anyone in there, but my experience wasn’t what I felt like others had to go through. So I just lied, tried to fit in. So the first time I went through the steps it didn’t really work out for me, but I wasn’t willing to believe in God or a higher power. And so I left the rooms and hit a mental health low. I ended up having to report that physician to the medical board for what had happened, and that took a big toll on my mental health. After that happened, I remember I said a prayer – it was the first time I said a prayer and really meant it. I asked God to basically kill me or I was going to do it myself the next day. And that night, I woke up and this peace rushed through my body. It was a burning bush moment where I was like, “God’s real and He’s got my back.” From then on it was like the worst was over. That’s all I just kept hearing. Since that day God has held to that promise.

So I kind of just grew with God for a little bit on my own, because I didn’t know how to talk to God, I didn’t know what God was or what it looked like for me to communicate with Him. So I grew with God, walked with God, and that led me to a church that played a really big impact on my life. I ended up converting to Christianity. If you had told me that this would be my life six years ago, I would have told you that you’re so full of shit. But I ended up in church, becoming a Christian, I went back to school. I was originally doing criminal justice in psychology, I really love school, and I wanted to go to law school. But God led me in the direction of getting my nursing license reinstated. And I’m so glad that He did because that’s something that is very important to me – my mom’s a nurse, my grandmother, my aunt, my great grandmother, and so I feel like I had tarnished our reputation of us as nurses. So this is like a living amends to them. And I just love nursing. I tried to tell myself I didn’t because I lost my ability to practice, but I was trusting God and the nursing board was willing to work with me, they didn’t have to but they did. So that was another miracle that happened. One of the requirements was to go back into a 12-step program, and I was like that’s totally fine, I can do that. So I got back into the program, day one I sat down and I said, “I don’t care what any of you think of me, I have a right to be here, and I’m doing this as honest and vulnerable as I can. And I’m extremely grateful there’s still a seat here for me.” That kind of changed the trajectory of my whole recovery. It was the first time when I was like Okay, I’m going to do this as honest as humanly possible. That’s made all the difference. I picked up my key tag last year on 9/11, so I’m about to pick up my one year of being in the rooms on 9/11. So I picked a really bad sobriety date, I didn’t really realize it until after when someone asked me what my new sobriety date is. I was like, “Oh it’s 9/11” and then I was like oh that sounds so bad.

It’s been the coolest experience coming and having that relationship with God that I have. I know in my soul that I left 12 steps that I would be okay, God would take care of me. And I know that I will stay sober as long as I have that connection to that higher power. People get sober in churches, or lifestyle changes, or other recovery outlets, so 12-steps isn’t end-all-be-all but for my story, God wants me there right now so I’m okay with that.

I’m a big fan of harm reduction and whatever works. That was one thing that kind of rubbed me the wrong way in the rooms, and still sometimes does. People get on their high horse and are like “you can’t have anything.” Like no, I would rather you have something. Recovery isn’t about being sober, recovery is about creating a life where you’re having joy and experiencing life in a healthy way. If you’re miserable, you’re going to be in that miserable cycle. I wouldn’t want that for myself and so I wouldn’t want that for anyone else. I tried suboxone for probably two months, but I hated it because I hated having to let it dissolve under my tongue. I’m way too ADHD to just sit there and wait for it to dissolve. So I would end up just flushing it down the toilet and I was like I’m just not going to do this. But I have friends that are on suboxone and other medications. It’s really important that you have a psychiatrist and you have a therapist. The rooms are great to aid in staying sober, but if you have a medication that you’re prescribed by your doctor you should by all means take that medication. You shouldn’t take medical advice from people in the rooms. I’m a really strong believer in that you need to treat your symptoms as they come. And eventually if you feel led to, you come off of it later. But as long as you’re maintaining a healthy lifestyle and you’re enjoying life and your life is manageable, I see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

I adore my parents and when I first got sober off of opiates in 2019, they didn’t trust me. I’d been on their nerves about it for years, and I had not been a good person to them for years. So they would get really irritated with me, they didn’t trust me. But since I’d been sober off of opiates, it’s allowed my relationships with them to grow. And allow God to restore those. After I had that spiritual awakening in 2021, that was when God really started working. Because I was willing to listen to a higher power. It’s funny because this past year I have actually been living with my parents and it’s completely different than what it was when I was moving. I just got approved for this apartment that’s closer to my work so I’m moving in two weeks. And my mom almost started crying because she didn’t want me to leave the house, and I’m not used to that. It’s literally twenty minutes down the road. But we got to have that year together where I got to be a daughter, she got to be a mom, and have that healthy relationship. And my dad was like “I feel bad that we weren’t more supportive when you first got into recovery, because we see how you are now, we’re so proud of you and we wish we had been more supportive sooner.” That was out of left field, I wasn’t expecting that at all.

Give yourself grace while you figure it out. Just because you mess up doesn’t mean you have set yourself back. There’s no right or wrong way to do recovery, the number one thing you need is a connection with God. Listen to those intuitive hunches that God gives you, and give yourself grace. Now that I have it I wish I had it sooner."

X, 26

"When I was 17 years old I started getting – truly, out of nowhere – one day I was able-bodied, the next day I was chronically ill. It happened that suddenly. I obviously didn’t know I was chronically ill that day, I just started getting really intense chronic symptoms of migraines, chronic nausea, endometriosis, a bunch of stomach issues, all stuff that I’m still navigating. I was kind of thrust into the medical system. I’m from New York City, it’s not the prettiest place to be as a teenager with no experience. I come from an alcoholic household, my dad no longer drinks which is awesome – it happened after I got sober. But my entire life he was drinking.

When all of a sudden I got chronically ill I needed help, I couldn’t get through a full day of school. All of a sudden my perfectionism became a burden because I was sick and I didn’t know what was happened. I was so determined to find the problem and be cured, and I’ve learned that’s not really how most medical issues work aside from like strep throat or bacteria or a viral infection. Those are so much more straightforward.

I was misdiagnosed and told that I was really stressed out, that it was psychosomatic. I was so dismissed which was really harmful, as I’m sure you can imagine. After a while it was just like okay, we’re going to treat symptoms. I spent 7 days in the hospital. I got to [SNIPPED] college, and I got accepted into college in my hospital bed. It all happened my senior year of high school. So yeah. I wasn’t immediately exposed to opioids, but there was one day I had to take medical leave from my first year of college, because I was too sick. They put a catheter in my chest for long term antibiotic therapy, they thought I had chronic lyme disease. I couldn’t walk, I was in so much pain. I went to the hospital and they were like, you need to go to a specialist. They prescribed me percocets to get me through the weekend. I was 18 years old, for starters. I remember being like so angry that they just gave me a bottle of pills and told me to go on my way. And I took one in the taxi with my mom, and when it hit, I remember that moment so well. I was like “Ohh, now I get why they prescribed me this. Now I can get through the weekend! Like Oh my God, where has this relief been?”

I had smoked weed and stuff, I was never really an alcohol drinker because of the alcoholism in my family but this almost felt like permission because I was prescribed it and because I was sick. The underlying theme of my addiction was “I’m different, because I’m sick.”

That led to pain management doctors, and I learned it sometimes would be harder to get opioids. Slowly and surely I found my way to buying stuff off the street, that started with acid, ecstasy. But it opened up a whole availability of oh, drugs make me feel better and make it easier for me to cope. That’s how it started.

From 2017 I was definitely deep in addiction, I just hid it really well from family and everyone. People knew I smoked a bunch of weed, but people didn’t know the extent of everything else that I was using. I was so vulnerable too. I was 18 years old, chronically ill, not in school, super isolated and I met this guy who was five years older than me. He was 23 and I was 18, which like, what are you doing with an 18-year-old at 23? It’s only 5 years but at that age I feel like it’s such a major age gap. I was so vulnerable and primed for an abusive person to enter my life, which was exactly what happened. I got into a three-year-long, really emotional narcissistic abuse. I ended up having to go to court and get a restraining order against him so he would leave me alone. All of this again was 18 to 21, I was a baby when all of this stuff was happening. I’m still young and I just can’t even imagine, yeah.

I started using drugs daily during the process of getting a restraining order because I had to like, stand in front of a judge and my mom was behind me. So she was hearing all this stuff I didn’t want her to hear. I found out he has an ex with a restraining order, so he’s been through this before. So he knew how like play the system. I remember just shaking and wanting to cry and be like wait, he’s lying. It was so out of my hands. I just could not stay present for it. So I remember that was when I started using everyday and started to not really care if it was every day. Before that I was like, oh I’ll take a couple weeks off, take a month off – I’m not really an addict if I do that. Which also – non-addicts don’t think that way!

That was years before the moment when I was like holy shit, I’m a drug addict. In the middle of COVID lockdown, I reached out to my dealer and was like I need to re-up, I need more I’m out. It was like 12pm and I started sweating and I was like oh my God, are these withdrawals? It was a symptom I don’t usually get from my chronic symptoms. Which was probably why it took me a minute to put it all together – because any physical ailment I was like oh, it’s chronic flare-ups. But then I remember being like oh my God, I’m addicted to drugs. I don’t think people think that’s going to be their story or their experience. I remember my dealer came over – we’re actually good friends – and I was like “Dude, I’m like, an addict. Why didn’t you tell me?” And he was like “Of course you are, I see you every day.” It just goes to show that I was just on another planet.

From that moment on, it became a part of my identity to be a drug addict. It was something that I had to own in order to be protected. It’s really interesting the way our minds will try to cope with something to normalize or rationalize it. It went from using to have fun or have relief, to not having a choice and it being bigger than me. That was scary. Taking on the identity of an addict was a way for me to reclaim it I guess.

I was very isolated as my addiction really spiraled out of control, it got the worst that it did during COVID. I lived alone. I was definitely unemployable at the time. My dad had a business that I was able to work for remotely, and one day – it was pay day – I saw my dealer during my lunch break, came home, and took a little bit to get through the rest of the day. It was not a lot compared to the tolerance that I had, and I remember I clocked back into work at like 1:30, and I don’t remember anything else from the rest of the day. I remember waking up, the sun was down, and I had like 8 missed calls on my phone, my dad, my brother. Someone was banging on my front door. I’m so lucky to be alive, because that is a moment when Narcan definitely should have been used. I don’t know how I ended up surviving. That was the tip off for my dad to know that something drug-related was happening. My dad had some experience, he had experimented with some stuff – so he could recognize that this was substance-related. I remember waking up and my first thought wasn’t “Oh I almost died, that’s really scary” – it was “Holy shit, I’m caught. Everyone needs to leave me alone. Everything’s fine, I was just really tired.” But people aren’t just really tired and then don’t wake up while clocked into work with a phone ringing. They had a family friend who lived nearby, he was the one banging on my door. I didn’t even open the door completely, I opened it a crack was like “hey, I’m fine.” I think he’s the one who told my dad that that is a person who is not okay. They need to be checked in with, something is wrong.

It was a week later that my mom, my brother and my dad all showed up at my door. They met up before, came together to check what they were going to do. My dad said that was the scariest week of his life, hoping I would survive so they could all get there. My dad started off by saying, “I just want you to know that we really love you, and I don’t care what’s going on, like no matter what you tell me, if you’re willing to say anything, I just want to help you and we just need to know what’s going on so that we can help you the best way.” And I just told them everything. Every drug I’d ever used, how long I’d been using them, the way I faked drug tests for work and everything. I gave them every secret. As I was going to rehab I was like “oh shit, I told them everything didn’t I?” But it was such a moment of willingness for me. I just hated my life at that point, my apartment was infested with cockroaches, I had no friends or support, I was so isolated. It’s an exhausting existence to be in. So we scooped my cat, all got in my mom’s car and started looking for a rehab. We didn’t know who to call or who to reach out to. I ended up going to such an amazing rehab in Connecticut. So my family is a huge support. My mom and I are so close. My dad is not drinking anymore, he’ll join me for a specific meeting every now and then. I think having a really supportive family is really unusual and I’m so blessed and privileged and lucky to have it. I’ve gotten a lot closer to both my parents in different ways.

When I was in rehab I tried the Sublocade injection, which was like the most painful thing. I try to avoid any additional pain because I live in chronic pain already. It creates a hardened thing in your stomach when it’s injected, and my pants would press right against it. And I was scared it would rupture. I was like no, I’m not doing that again.

So I do the Suboxone strips instead. I was in rehab and then I was in a sober house for almost my entire first year of sobriety, I had supervision the way I was taking the medication and honestly I really wanted to be sober. So that was the key as well – I had to be a support system to myself as well. I still take the Suboxone, I actually just started reducing the dose a few months ago. I have over three years sober now. Basically every suggestion that people had, I did. Medication assisted treatment, I did. As an opioid addict there are sometimes higher chances of relapse, it’s just such an addictive substance. I don’t really talk about using suboxone in 12-steps meetings, I just hear a lot of people’s negative experiencing and I just don’t need to hear it. Sometimes people will say, here’s what you should or shouldn’t do. But it’s been such a personal experience and decision of mine, it’s really helped me and saved my life in a lot of ways. So I protect it from outside opinion. I actually go to AA, I had a rough experience with NA, but my sponsor is in NA. I got to AA meetings, I have an NA sponsor. It’s kind of both. But I have a really strong community now. My friends and even my mom the other day were like, you’ve been so social lately! It’s been amazing, the community I’ve created for myself.

In terms of stigma, it’s been yes and no. The stigma I have experienced has been from people who don’t know anything about addiction. There’s a stereotypical junkie in people’s minds, who will hurt their family and live under a bridge. And addiction does make people get to those lengths, but it’s a short-sighted idea of what addiction is. I’ve definitely experienced – even if it’s not that blunt – it’s like, you can see the underlying roots. For example I had my first serious relationship in sobriety in my third year, and she just didn’t really understand addiction. She really wanted to be supportive but she had intense fears and was really fixated on me relapsing. I was about to have three years sober and I almost felt like she was treating me like I can’t be trusted, or that what I’m telling her isn’t the truth. Or if I have behaviors that are unusual that I’m acting erratically. And the people who she would speak to also wouldn’t know a lot about it. That was my main issue – you need to get your information from addicts in recovery of people who specialize in substance use disorders. I was like, “you would know if I was on drugs!”

I think opiate recovery is more stigmatized than alcohol, so sometimes I’ll talk about being in recovery but not for what. Even the suboxone and medication-assisted treatment, I don’t talk about that in recovery spaces, which I think goes to show the stigma around that.

I don’t think anything could have prevented my addiction, I think I’ve always been an addict. Before I was taking drugs I had such addictive behaviors in my relationships, in school, I’ve always been an addict. Some of that can be attributed to the environment I grew up in, but also, my brother grew up in the same one and he’s not an addict. So I do think there is something that I’ve always been that. I don’t know if it’s genetic or not. When I became an active drug addict might have been later or in a different way had I not been chronically ill and thrust into the medical world, or in an abusive relationship, or traumatized at a young age. Maybe it would have started in my 40s. I remember my mom blamed the abusive partner at first, but I was like, “No, I would have found him no matter what.” I just had that quality, that addictive behavior."