I ended up at Orienta House after legal trouble as a result of my drug addiction.
But I remember feeling
heartbroken because I had lost
drugs
and drugs were the most important thing in the world to me.
And it was my top value, you know, as sick as that sounds, I put drugs before my family,
my daughter, everything
and
I was grieving that loss, the counseling that I had here that
I always remember my counselor Rhonda.
She, I remember her being so realistic
with me and I was so unreasonable.
I remember telling her like you don't understand,
you don't understand what I'm going through.
You don't understand what it's gonna be like.
And she would flip it in a way that made so much sense.
Although at the time, I didn't want to admit that it made sense.
It did. And I just will always remember how kind she was.
Even when I was in such a dark place, there was a class called Thinking Errors.
And
I remember learning in there about the entitlement and about
how I was thinking and how truly unreasonable it was.
And I remember being in that class realizing that I, I
have very sick thinking and that this isn't
normal, this isn't how the rest of the world thinks.
But I also learned how much
brain damage I had caused myself from the drug use and how it was going to take a
significant amount of time for everything to, you know,
snap back into place so that I could make good
decisions that I remember learning in that class. Life is
so wonderful. I'm so truly blessed to be in recovery.
And it's an honor to even be sitting here speaking with
you about it right now when I was three years clean,
I became a counselor and I'm an LCDC two now.
And I've spent the past five years doing that and I now
own a business and I get to help people all the time.
I run a driver intervention program and
the people that I see they have OVIs and I hope by
the time they leave that they've changed their thinking like I did
and that they won't make that choice again.
I've got a daughter that looks up to me
and that my goal in life is to hopefully show her the example that, you know,
she doesn't need to go down the road that I went down.
Hopefully, I've made the mistakes so that she doesn't have to.
My parents are proud of me.
They get to see me clean now, you know, almost nine years clean
and they're so proud
and I've created this life, you know, in recovery that I refuse to check out on,
I refuse.
It's, it's too good, too blessed. Support I think is so huge.
And if you don't have that family, there's resources, there's people everywhere
that will help and will listen and that have been there.
And so in line with the surrender; surrender support. Boom, there's the key.
There's the answer.