My Story...

As a child, I can remember the first times I really talked with God. I wasn’t even sure that He was out there or that He cared enough to listen to a little girl, but I said “Dear Big Daddy Jesus, please take me away from these people. They don’t love me and they don’t understand me. I want to live somewhere else. Please help me. Amen.” I was about 5 years old the first time I prayed something like that. Similar prayers, including praying for my parents to get a divorce, were frequent as I grew up.

I didn’t understand why I felt this way. I mean, my parents loved me and took care of me. I had friends. As I got older, I realized that there was an image that my parents wanted me to present. I constantly tried to fulfill this image. My parents wanted a perfect child, and as the oldest of the three of us children, I was first to try to measure up. They set the bar high, and for that I am thankful. By the time I reached high school, I was taking all of the advanced classes I could fit into my schedule. I joined as many extra curricular activities as I could. I got involved in church. I did everything I could to look like the perfect child, but inside I was being torn apart. Sometimes, I just wanted to relax. I didn’t want to put on the face that said everything was alright when it wasn’t. But I couldn’t let my family see that I was hurting.

That is when the lies started. My freshman year of high school I got hurt at a basketball tournament. After a trip to the emergency room, I was given a bottle of prescription painkillers. They helped my foot, but they also helped the emotional pain. After I ran out, I would sometimes complain that it was bothering me because the weather was changing, I did something to strenuous in gym class or at practice, or just whatever excuse I thought would get my dad to just give me a pill or two out of his bottle. I learned that one of the things that bothered my dad most was to see his children in physical pain. And I became a master at exploiting that. I couldn’t do that all of the time though, so I started using tylenol as a regular thing. It felt good to have the pain dulled.

I started dating a guy that was able to show my parents a total nice guy routine. What they didn’t see was that it only took 3 months for him to go from showing me that great guy side to raping me on my 15th birthday. I started drinking after that, and it felt even better than the painkillers, which I was given several prescriptions for over the next 8 years.

During that time, I quietly struggled with a lot of issues that no one suspected. I became pregnant twice, and suffered two miscarriages. I had started to put on weight which really bothered me. I actually set out to become anorexic, because I knew that was something that I could control and that would make me skinny. My mother unknowingly encouraged it, because she would frequently remind me that I was just getting fat now that I was “laying around the house all the time.” Someone at school noticed that I hadn’t been eating lunches even though my mom had written a check for my lunch money and I had been turning the checks in so my mom wouldn’t suspect. I thought that skinny equaled happiness.

So now I was drinking and mixing painkillers, usually tylenol, which is a potentially life threatening combination. And I was struggling off and on with an eating disorder. But I was numb, and that seemed like a good thing. I continued like that for several years.

When I got to college, one of the first things to happen was that I met a guy who didn’t go to the college where I was at. I was a little bit uncertain the first time I met him, since it was just a chance encounter. But he charmed me into giving him my phone number, and then into a date. Some of my new dorm friends warned me to be careful, and 4 of them went with me to meet him at the mall. When they came to pick me up, I told them what a great time we’d had and that he wanted me to go with him to meet his grandmother. That she would really like me, and that it would comfort her to know that he wasn’t spending all of his time taking care of her. So I went, and with his grandma in the next room, he raped me. But I was too embarrassed to tell any of my friends that. So I stayed silent, and went out with him again because they told me to not let a nice guy get away. I soon realized that I was, once again, pregnant. I quit using alcohol and painkillers again. A week later, I went home to see my family for fall break and while I was gone, he was arrested. He was charged with assault, and during his processing it was discovered that he was wanted for several other crimes as well. I’d known he had a prison record, but he had assured me that it was all in the past and that he was working on turning his life around.

When I found out that he was going to be released soon, I realized that I couldn’t stay with someone who made me feel that unsafe. I told him that it was over, and he was very upset by that. He wrote me letters threatening to kill himself if I didn’t stay with him. He kept calling me, and tried to convince me that the miscarriage was all my fault, that I had sought out an abortion just to keep him from becoming a father.

About a month after everything had settled down, I met the man who would become my husband. I was using again, and the problem was growing steadily worse. I was deep in denial, and just looking for my next escape. I was running toward complete self destruction. I spent the next four years hitting rock bottom only to have the ground give way and fall deeper into my addictions. During that time, several friends staged an intervention because they were so scared for me. I spent years experimenting with alternative religions, because I was certain that a loving God wouldn’t make my life like this. I found Wicca, and began delving deep into it very quickly. I liked the power and control that I felt with it. I learned how to do some very dangerous things. I started my own Book of Shadows, and started researching spells and writing my own. I began cutting myself, adding yet another addiction to my destructive patterns. Occasionally, I would try to stop using something but the withdrawl was so bad that I’d start again.

During the summer of 2008, my husband took me to my first Cornerstone Festival. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I had packed my Book of Shadows, because even though I had given up practicing Wicca, I still took it on every trip I went on as kind of a touchstone to who I was and where I had been. At the festival, I was introduced to some strong Christian women who really encouraged me to seek God and to get clean. I wasn’t ready to get sober yet, but I had to go the whole time I was there without alcohol because it isn’t allowed on the festival grounds. That was a real challenge. But the last night of the festival, some of the leaders of the Asylum and I stood around a fire and I threw my Book of Shadows in. I’d tried to throw it away before, but I kept going back and getting it again. This time I couldn’t. After I threw it in, the leaders that were with me stood around and prayed over me that I would be able to find God in the way
that I needed, not wanted, but needed to find Him.

My husband loved me enough to stay with me through all of this. He knew about my messy past and my destructive present. We knew that we wanted to get married someday. But he promised me that we would not get married until I was clean and had fully come back to God. He taught me that I had to learn to like myself, to love myself, before I could really love him the way I was meant to. So near the end of my 5th year of college, he marched me in to talk to one of the leaders. That Sunday morning, I met a couple of the leaders. I had finally reached the point where I was willing to consider that there were other options besides being the way I was. I didn’t start Celebrate Recovery right away, because I still had a few weeks before graduation.

After I graduated and moved here, I decided that I was really ok, and that maybe all I had really needed was to admit to someone that I had issues and it would be all better. What a lie that was. My husband pushed me to go to my first CR meeting, and I said I would think about it. I’d been burned by counselors in college, and I wasn’t interested in repeating the experience. But he continued to push me to go. So one Tuesday night in May of 2009, I walked into my first CR meeting. I didn’t want to be there, but I wanted him to get off my case. I wanted to be left alone to continue to be the way I was. I was so sure that I was the only one who had an abusive past like mine. I was certain that nobody would ever relate, let alone understand.

Little did I know that walking in that first night would change my life. What I learned in that first night was that other people had problems too. Some weren’t as bad, but some were worse off than I was. I wanted to figure out how these people who were way worse off than me still managed to seem so happy. That first night, I was told that I was probably permanently damaging my body just by the alcohol and painkiller cocktails I was mixing. That scared me just enough to get me to start tapering down my painkiller consumption, but I was still drinking.

On Friday, June 19th, 2009, I made another life changing decision. I came home after work and realized that for the first time in a long time, I had gotten up without a drink, gone to work without a drink, and was standing in my bedroom sober. I wasn't sure if I liked feeling sober, but it made me realize that I might be able to go a whole day without drinking. When I woke up the next morning, I asked myself, "If I can do this once, can I do it again? Can I go another day without a drink?" I continued to tell myself that I can go just one more minute, one more hour, one more day. But making that minute wasn't something I could do alone. I knew that God would give me the strength to continue on.

As I slowly got better, I realized that recovery didn’t mean that I could set a deadline for how long I had to go before I could have another drink. That would build up the anticipation of that next drink even more, which would just end badly. Instead, I had to play on my competitive side - to prove to myself that I could get to the next milestone I set for myself: a week, 25 days, a month.

I had come out of denial on my painkiller and drinking issues, but it took time for me to admit that they were like putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound. I had felt like I was doing something to fix the holes in my life, but I had just been covering them up instead of dealing with them. It was very difficult to begin addressing the deeper issues of my past because all I wanted to do was turn to my addictions. I wanted something to shield me from my own past.

I’ve continued to dive into my past issues, and I can’t say that it hurts less when something new surfaces, but I’ve learned to deal with it in more constructive ways. I am willing to stand here and be the first to admit that when I’m having a bad day, addictions that I thought were long since passed can come racing to the surface. There are days where it is a real struggle to not go get a pack of cigarettes, to find a blade to cut myself, or to pop a few painkillers and just zone out.

March 29th, 2011, one of my favorite uncles committed suicide. He had been struggling with depression for a long time, and finally gave up. I wish that I could have fixed it, that I could have done something differently that would have changed things, but I can’t. I spent several weeks struggling with guilt I laid upon myself, as well as anger at God. In the first few days after I was told what happened, I wanted nothing more than to cut into my skin and see it bleed. To feel the physical pain that was easier to bear than the emotional pain that I didn’t feel I could handle. I wanted to light up cigarette after cigarette. I wanted a heavy dose of painkillers, something to numb me up and make me forget.

Now, I’m glad that I didn’t light up or down a handful of painkillers. I know that it is just another way that I can see the change from who I was and where I was in the past. I wish I could say that I didn’t give in to the urge to cut, but I can’t. I can, however, say that it happened once shortly after his death and it hasn’t happened since.

As for that image that my parents want me to be, I’ve realized that I’ll never be able to be that person and be happy. I can honestly say that I love them because they are my parents. I’ve shielded them from my past to the best of my ability, because I know that it would only hurt them. As much as they don’t understand me, my faith, or my recovery, I no longer want to punish them for not always being the parents I needed them to be.