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I ended up at Orienta House after legal trouble as a result of my drug addiction.

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But I remember feeling

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heartbroken because I had lost

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drugs

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and drugs were the most important thing in the world to me.

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And it was my top value, you know, as sick as that sounds, I put drugs before my family,

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my daughter, everything

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and

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I was grieving that loss, the counseling that I had here that

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I always remember my counselor Rhonda.

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She, I remember her being so realistic

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with me and I was so unreasonable.

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I remember telling her like you don't understand,

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you don't understand what I'm going through.

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You don't understand what it's gonna be like.

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And she would flip it in a way that made so much sense.

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Although at the time, I didn't want to admit that it made sense.

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It did. And I just will always remember how kind she was.

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Even when I was in such a dark place, there was a class called Thinking Errors.

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And

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I remember learning in there about the entitlement and about

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how I was thinking and how truly unreasonable it was.

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And I remember being in that class realizing that I, I

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have very sick thinking and that this isn't

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normal, this isn't how the rest of the world thinks.

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But I also learned how much

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brain damage I had caused myself from the drug use and how it was going to take a

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significant amount of time for everything to, you know,

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snap back into place so that I could make good

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decisions that I remember learning in that class. Life is

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so wonderful. I'm so truly blessed to be in recovery.

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And it's an honor to even be sitting here speaking with

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you about it right now when I was three years clean,

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I became a counselor and I'm an LCDC two now.

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And I've spent the past five years doing that and I now

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own a business and I get to help people all the time.

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I run a driver intervention program and

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the people that I see they have OVIs and I hope by

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the time they leave that they've changed their thinking like I did

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and that they won't make that choice again.

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I've got a daughter that looks up to me

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and that my goal in life is to hopefully show her the example that, you know,

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she doesn't need to go down the road that I went down.

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Hopefully, I've made the mistakes so that she doesn't have to.

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My parents are proud of me.

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They get to see me clean now, you know, almost nine years clean

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and they're so proud

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and I've created this life, you know, in recovery that I refuse to check out on,

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I refuse.

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It's, it's too good, too blessed. Support I think is so huge.

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And if you don't have that family, there's resources, there's people everywhere

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that will help and will listen and that have been there.

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And so in line with the surrender; surrender support. Boom, there's the key.

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There's the answer.