This experience has been amazing. I cannot say enough about the staff. The staff here truly care. When I first got here, I felt like I didn’t belong. After the first day, [I realized] that we all share the same disease of addiction. I could go on and on about everything I’ve learned. I’m inspired to do so many positive things. I want to go back and help my tribe. I would love to build a sober house and really involve myself with service work.

I started smoking pot the summer before middle school. It was a good time. I didn’t fall in love with it but it was fun. The DARE program had instilled in me that drugs are bad but I thought: “Yeah, they’re not so bad”. I met a girl who liked to “robo-trip”, which means you drink a bunch of cough syrup, and I started stealing a couple of my mom’s Oxycontin. That was the first time I did pills. Once again, I didn’t fall in love with them but they were a good time. Some people say: “I fell in love instantly”. I never really fell in love with any one particular drug the first time I did it.

Until I was thirteen, my life was like a fairytale. I had a stable family and my parents were seemingly in love. I was a happy kid and I didn’t have any conception of what stress meant. At thirteen, my life completely changed. Out of left field, my parents told us they were getting divorced. I started to take on all this emotional baggage. I wanted to solve my mom’s problems and I wanted to fix the stress in her life. My father would always lead me to believe that I wasn’t good enough; I needed to work harder and I was always sub par. That created a complex inside of me that manifested in a way that was out of control. I became an insane perfectionist. I obsessed over perfection and needed to be the best at everything. It complicated my life from that time forward.