Sharing Tales of Addiction and Recovery

The very personal nature of addiction and recovery means that the journey into (and out of) addiction is rarely, if ever, identical for those that find themselves immersed in alcohol or substances. With this in mind, the more of us that engage in actively sharing tales of addiction and recovery, the better we can let people struggling know: you are not alone.

Over the course of these collected essays touching on personal struggles and family entanglement with drugs and alcohol, the judging panel was emotionally moved on more than one occasion. We cordially invite you to review these powerful, poignant submissions and hope you share the sense of pride we feel in the students who shared their heart and souls through their words.

1. J.P. (University of Maine – Orono)

Whether it be the bottom of a bottle, the forgotten particles of cocaine leftover, or empty pill bottles, addiction kills and creates complacency in the mind.

Regardless of the media’s vision on drug abusers, it’s not something that should cause brutal punishment; it should be a thing that’s constructive, not something that creates an endless loop of physical and mental imprisonment.

Personal Struggles as a Path to Insights

I, someone who has personally struggled with a cocaine addiction in the past, believe that one of the most powerful influences to break a habit is to figure out one’s determination or passion. I believe that some sort of direct therapeutic counseling on figuring out a passion in life would work wonders.

It would be very in-your-face. An individual counselor would be for that specific patient, rather than a large group of multiple patients. That way, a counselor can home in on a patient’s specific needs. Next, after strenuous interrogation on previous passions, the patient would be given resources to seek out others interested in the same kind of dream or passion.

Sharing Tales of Addiction and Recovery

My thought process behind the direct intervention is it would be not negative, but rather gives a light at the end of the tunnel. Rather than slapping wrists, their benefits would be reaped from themselves in the long run.

The one-on-one therapist is necessary for this plan. They need to dive deep into the minds of these individuals and find their flame. I say it so casually but I believe that’s the answer.

New Forms of Narrative for Group Therapy

The groups that are given out as a resource connect these individuals with passionate people and not other victims of addiction. I would want something that focused on building yourself up, not a meeting regarding the reason one’s suffering.

All and all, I do believe that this plan would work well. Of course, it’s not gonna be foolproof, but it’s a starting point. It will enable more people to spread positivity in the long run rather than society forgetting about them. I’m damn sure that in the end, there will be some people locking up their wine cellars.

2. C.S. (Huntington Beach, California)

After a drawn-out battle with his addiction to opiates, I lost my older brother Nathan in December 2020. Nathan was one of my three older brothers. He was not only my best friend, but my role model too, and I will never forget our time spent together.

Family Members in the Throes of Addiction

Most people are not educated on the deadly grasp that addiction can have on their loved ones. Most people did not see Nathan as the loving, hilarious and outgoing brother that I knew him to be.

Therefore, we need to educate people on addiction and how they can help their loved ones and community members achieve a sober lifestyle. In order to reduce people struggling with addiction in The United States, we need to start with our education system.

I think if the facts about addiction and drug use are given to children at an early age, they may find healthier ways to cope with their stressors. I believe that if children are taught healthy ways to manage their stress, they may feel less inclined to reach towards drugs and alcohol.

The Difficult Conversations that Can Save Lives

Of course, people are introduced to drugs in unusual ways, and it is not always this simple. I know that many people want to shelter children from the cold hard facts about real world problems. Having difficult conversations about the reality of addiction can save a life someday.

Sometimes I wonder if my brother could have just talked about his mental health and his struggle with his addiction he would not have passed away. I think making it OK, to not be ok could save lives.

If children are taught in school that it is normal to not always be in a good mood or it is normal to have a difficult day, then maybe they would never look towards recreational drugs as an escape. I think this can begin in elementary schools. It would be great if our educational system could teach children healthy ways to manage hardships and challenges that they come across.

Developing Peer Supports and (Healthy) Coping Mechanisms

For example, in grade school whenever I would pass through the hallways and ask someone, “how are you doing?” I always received “good” as an answer. I always wondered how many of those people were not actually “good,” and it hurts my heart to know that this has been the norm in The United States.

If we could normalize feelings and educate our youth on coping mechanisms, we might be able to prevent addiction. The children of The United States with shape the future of the country. If we can create a class that will educate children on how to cope with life’s stresses, we can save a life.

If we can create a class that will educate children on how dangerous and widespread addiction is in the U.S., we can save a life. It will not happen overnight, but I am adamant it will help save lives.

I would do anything to get more time with my brother. I do not want another sister to feel the loss that I feel every day, and that is why we need to change our education system to prevent addiction in this country.

3. H.S. (School Unknown)

Life is something we are put into and once born, we must learn to strive in the right way. We all want the white picket fence family; however, I did not come out into that world. I was born into a world with brokenness that began as early as a day old.

Both parents being addicts, you would assume I came from an unhappy place, and that assumption is correct: mother left by a month old, and my father up and left and took me from Florida to West Virginia to begin our lives.

Life was not too thrilling there either; we moved into my grandma’s one-bedroom apartment, where she was an alcoholic. With that, my life continued to be an interesting learning experience of what life should not be until it became what it needed to be.

Addiction in Our Family Background

I never understood who I was and what to be in a society that never accepted me or felt like I was not accepted. Social workers pulled me out of class and discussed my home life due to teachers calling social services, so my school life was not the best either.

I could never hide my life in the way it was at home because it was written all over my face, clothing, and who picked me up every day. I knew what drugs and drinking were early on, especially since my father was in and out of rehab, but do these situations create me? Absolutely.

My father went to rehab to quit drinking so that he could get with my new stepmom, and this is where I got my role as big sister. My little brother changed my life at a whopping age of eight, and from that day on, I took my part very seriously.

I became his caretaker until they divorced because my dad started to drink again. He went to rehab, and I moved back to my grandma’s apartment to finish my fourth-grade year.

Stability at Home and Prevention of Addiction

By fifth grade, my dad had another girlfriend; by this time, he was on number three, and I clung to all his women because I was looking for that motherly attention. They were sober; however, they met in rehab, which was not the best combination, and they mixed their addictions.

From there, I ran away and moved around to several homes because my father did not care. During all these transitions, I was taught to smile and withhold any emotions inside of me. Culturally people believe that girls need to put on a “pretty face,” which led to a further episode in my life (Chemaly, 2019).

At one home, I went mentally bizarre and wound up in a mental hospital, leading me to meet my biological mother. In that case, I had to move with my mother to Florida because I had no other option.

Changing the Paradigm to Achieve Recovery

At this time, I had been to eleven schools before my sophomore year in high school, this is the year I spiraled down. I turned to the item that I watched my father suffer for the fifteen years I was alive; I wondered the why behind everything he did.

Nobody cared at this time in my home, neither did I. One day, I was kicked out and put on the street; I called the teacher and her husband that was always there for me. She got me in 2020, the year of COVID. This is where I started to learn who I was.

I often find myself now asking the question of “Who am I?” I have tended to hide behind the label “I am an addict, and I am the addict’s daughter.” That is not who I am. I started as a fighter, fighting for what was right, and now I am a survivor of childhood trauma and addiction.

Now I am a different person since experiencing these situations and living in a more normal environment over the past year. I have moved into an environment where I felt accepted and loved for the first time in my life.

My teacher, her husband, and her two children have become my family and the only ones who have rooted for me. I removed everyone and everything from my old life and started fresh. This is where my paradigm shift began.

Exploring Self with Therapy

Therapy was my first step into learning who I was instead of being invested in my urges and triggers. I first realized that environmental aspects affected me: we have knowledge of human behavior and the social environment that allows us to understand human development and the importance of environmental influences to allow us to “sort” through and prioritize environmental issues (Schriver, 2020).

This was a part of me, my life, my home situation, and my social environment all affected me as an addict, also influenced me as I went into the development of figuring out who I was without substances. When you move from the environment of pure negativity to positivity, your mind frame must shift, and in the beginning, I struggled with this.

I wanted to be negative because purely I did not want to recover. My mindset had to turn, and recovery became my top priority every day. I was scared to become a recovering addict due to this being all I knew my whole life was being an addict. I did not know how to be someone without that label, so going in, I had to erase my past self to create the functioning person I am now.

The Importance of a Sober Support System

Before substances, I knew I wanted to be a Social Worker, and after my senior year, I knew I needed to get help to achieve this goal. During therapy, I overcame because I knew I needed to work past the issues than suppress them.

Becoming a social worker to help others, I knew I needed to validate myself and heal at the same time. Healing would mean I will not project my feelings on others, so I do not do this to my future clients. I also had a great support system: my teacher, her husband, and two children, who I now call mom and pop, along with the girls being my sisters.

They were there every step of the way, from the withdrawals to my one-year mark and being able to move into my dream college. They continue to be my support as I shift into a functional adult other than a functioning addict. Now I know how to cope with the hard days and what to turn to other than grabbing my next high.

The Why Behind the Passion

Before my addiction, I had already had a passion for helping others, especially in situations I had gone through as a child. I knew friends at school who had home lives as I did, but with no intervention, this broke me into pieces as a middle school student. I knew from there I wanted to help them, but I did not know-how.

Going into high school, I started volunteering with The Salvation Army, which led me to my passion for social work. I was helping bag the food bags for the homeless, managing the stock pantry, helping at the thrift store, and so much more.

Well, I found out my good friend that I was helping was a Social Worker, and these were her roles, and from there, I knew what I wanted to be in life. I simply wanted to give back to the world we live in and the world that I have gained so much from.

As someone who is now learning to grow, I want to make a difference in this world. If I earn this scholarship, it will be more likely because then I can focus on my studies instead of money. Helping people is my life, and I cannot wait to be able to further the way I help others.

Conclusion: Growing into Ourselves in Recovery

Since birth, I have been a survivor but the challenging times I have been through, I hope to use this inside of my work. I intend to take what I have learned as a young girl into consideration as I begin to grow into my field of social work. My resilience will be applied outwardly to encourage what is needed in other’s lives.

Healing takes time, and I am ready to walk alongside someone as people have walked alongside me to help my future clients heal. I am who I am because of my past, and I shall move forward with positivity and continue giving myself room to grow. Being a functional person is what I wanted in life, and now I am currently growing into that being.

4. K.S, (North Carolina State University)

Everything starts with education. When abstinence is taught in schools, teen pregnancy cases increase (Hall, Stanger-Hall 2011). When safe sex is not explained, there is an increase in the rate of Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) and Disease (STD) transmission (Kirby 2012).

I believe that when abstinence from drugs is taught, it is easier to fall prey to addiction. It is a disease, but reaching the bottom where jobs have been lost, relationships have been ruined, lives have been changed, is preventable.

Early Education and Addiction

We can educate on warning signs of addiction, withdrawal, the middle path between abstinence and heavy usage, and when to seek assistance. Throughout my K-12 experience, I was introduced to the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program (D.A.R.E.) in middle school. The D.A.R.E. Program was created by police officers and teachers of Los Angeles (Nordrum 2014), not by prevention specialists. It’s main teaching is to abstain from substance usage.

While it is a great start in the resistance against drug abuse, youth are prone to experimentation. I learned about the harmful effects of misuse, but instead of talking about the mental and physical consequences, the course was geared towards legal repercussions.

I remember that children at this age did not take the educational points seriously, including myself. I agree that middle school is a good time to introduce the topic as a majority of stories I have heard in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) began around the age of 12.

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Addiction Information Designed for Students

However, the information should be less directed towards the legality of the matter and more towards the identifiable addictive patterns found within the stories of those afflicted by the disease. In high school, drug abuse prevention assemblies were held once a year, but again these became a time for students to relax outside of class.

I propose that recovering speakers go into classrooms to share their experiences, focusing on the warning signs and how they received help. I also propose that the science behind addiction become mandatory in high school Biology curriculum. Secondary education should follow similar guidelines.

Currently there is a prerequisite online course that must be completed to enroll for classes, but it is generally skimmed through and even still, not taken seriously. This leaves a majority of students without a solid knowledge basis of addiction. In my story, I did not know the signs of substance abuse nor the repercussions I would face mentally, physically, or socially.

Sharing Tales of Addiction and Recovery

I felt like I had lost everything to my addiction including college, relationships, money, and myself. Now as a young person in recovery, I realize that prevention starts with education, but knowledge does not always prevent addiction.

This is why youth should know the symptoms and where to look for help. My story could have been prevented, and I want to educate others so that my story does not turn into theirs.