May 2, 2025
My name is Sarah, and for a long time, my life wasn't really mine. It was like it belonged to something else, this need for that next hit. It started out pretty ordinary, I thought. College was a lot, and someone gave me a pill to "take the edge off." It worked, at first. It made my worries quiet down, helped me focus, even made me feel... good.
That's the tricky thing about it, that first feeling. It's a lie, a bad joke. Because it doesn't stay. What stays is the need, the desperate feeling. The pills led to other stuff, stronger stuff. I was always trying to get back to that first good feeling, that feeling of everything being okay, but it was like trying to catch a shadow. It was always just out of reach.
I lost a lot. My grades went down, then I just quit school. My friends, the real ones, tried to help, but I pushed them away. I became someone else, someone I didn't even know, someone I didn't like. I lied, I stole, I tricked people. My family... they were the ones who got hurt the most. The worry in my mom's eyes, the disappointment in my dad's voice – I can still see those images clearly in my mind.
There were times when I could see clearly, short moments when I knew what I was doing, the damage I was causing. But the pull was too strong. It was like being in a strong current in the ocean, every time I tried to swim to shore, it pulled me back under. I overdosed twice. Twice, I woke up in a hospital bed, with tubes in my arms, feeling more shame than gratitude.
I remember one night, I was sitting in my car, parked outside a liquor store. I was shaking, sweating, and I knew, deep down, that if I kept going, I wasn't going to live much longer. That was... that was when things started to change, I guess. Not some big, dramatic moment like in the movies, but a quiet, scary understanding.
I don't want to make it sound easy. Getting clean was the hardest thing I've ever done. The withdrawal was like being in hell. The cravings still come, even now, years later. But I have help now. I go to meetings. I have a sponsor. I talk to my family. I'm putting my life back together, slowly, piece by piece. It's not perfect. There are still bad days, days when I want to give up. But I keep going. Because I have to. Because somewhere along the way, I realized that I deserve a life, a real one. And so does my family.
It wasn't just the addiction itself that made things so hard, it was also how people treated me. The judgment, the disgust, the way some people looked at me like I was trash. That stigma, that feeling of being labeled and dismissed, made it even harder to ask for help and to believe that I could ever get better. It added more pain and isolation to an already desperate situation. I remember going to a job interview once, and the guy asked me about the gap in my resume. When I told him I was in rehab, he basically showed me the door. It was like I had a big red letter on my forehead, marking me as "damaged goods."
And even some of the people who were supposed to help, some doctors and nurses, they treated me like I was just a junkie looking for my next fix. They didn't see me as a person who was sick and needed help. That really messed with my head. It made me feel like I wasn't worth saving, like I was a lost cause.
It's not about being "strong" or having "willpower." It's about being human, about being vulnerable, and about accepting that I can't do this alone. It's about learning to live with the scars, to forgive myself, and to keep putting one foot in front of the other, one day at a time.