The years between when he got arrested and when I finally went to rehab felt longer than my entire life combined.

Everything sped up. But at the same time it felt like I was stuck. In that short window of time, I didn’t just struggle.

👉 I plummeted.

The drug use got heavier. More frequent. More necessary. And after I told my dad what had been going on in my life, something shifted inside of me.
I don’t know if it was shame. Or fear of how I’d be treated now that everything was out in the open.

But I couldn’t be around them. Not the same way.
So I made a decision—whether I realized it or not at the time, I was going to figure life out on my own.
No matter the cost. And that’s exactly what I did.

I couldn’t hold a steady job.
I bounced from house to house. Sometimes I was asked to leave. Sometimes I left on my own because I couldn’t sit with the embarrassment of what I had done. And when I ran out of money, I found other ways.

I put myself in situations I should have never been in. With people who didn’t care about me. Doing things I didn’t even recognize as myself anymore.
Not because I wanted that life but because I didn’t know how to survive without the escape.

At one point, I started running drugs for someone connected to him. Not because the money was worth it because it wasn’t, but because of how it made me feel. The adrenaline. The temporary sense of control. The illusion that I was powerful in a life where I actually had none.

Looking back now, I can see how disconnected I was from reality. I was chasing intensity. Anything that could overpower what I felt inside.

Because being still, being sober, being alone with my thoughts, felt unbearable. And that kind of living, it catches up to you. Within that first year of being alone, I was sexualy assaulted. More than once. And at the time, I didn’t see it for what it was.

I thought I deserved it. I thought my choices had put me there and that meant I had to accept whatever came with it. That’s how low my self-worth had gotten. I didn’t fight. Not because I agreed but because my body shut down.

If you know what that feels like, you understand. And I’m sorry that you do.

After that, things didn’t slow down.
They got worse.
The drug use escalated. More. Stronger. More often. Until one night, I took too much. I overdosed on a friend’s couch. And if he hadn’t been there, if he hadn’t been paying attention, I wouldn’t be here to tell this story.

I woke up the next morning and for a brief moment something in me cracked. I went to my sisters and asked for help and for the first time ever, somebody actually helped me. They got me admitted into a mental health and substance abuse facility.

I stayed for a week. And that week mattered.
Not because it fixed me. Not because I walked out healed but because it planted something. A small awareness. A quiet realization that the way I was living was going to end one way. And it wasn’t going to be good.

But still, I wasn’t ready yet. That seed didn’t grow right away because healing doesn’t always start the moment you see the truth.

Sometimes it starts with just knowing it exists. And even in that season, even in the darkest, most reckless version of my life… God was still there. Because even when I was running, even when I was choosing everything that was breaking me.. He already knew where my story was going.
And He wasn’t done with me.