The Story of Me: Part 1

I have been struggling with whether or not I should put this out in the open for some time now.  What I am about to write is about me, only a different me.  One that is so far removed from myself today, something for which I am very grateful.  I always want to tell the truth on my blog.  I want to write and not hold back.  This blog is for me: to remind me of where I have come from, what I have gone through, and what I will experience until my time here on this earth is up.  I write about the funny stories of my past and present, but I also write about deeper, sometimes darker times in my life.  This story details the darkest.

I tried my first drug when I was 11-years-old.  I remember that the plan that night was for all of us to pitch in five dollars for some beer.  I know: what the hell is an 11-year-old doing drinking beer?  I hung out with older people, but they were not old enough to know better to be careful, to watch out for younger, impressionable kids.

When the beer didn't arrive, I got anxious.  I thought I had lost my five dollars, and some of the people I was with were acting a bit secretive.  We were moving from dingy house to dingy house, and I was just following, not really paying attention to exactly what was going on around me.  Maybe that was my problem.

It was starting to get dark.  We were at a some guys house when I was asked those fateful words that would change my life for the next few years: "Have you ever tried acid?".  Acid?  I didn't even know what that was.  I had never even heard of it.  I shook my head.  The older boy whose house I was at placed a small tab of paper on my tongue and told me to suck on it.  I didn't even question it.

After a while things started going very fast.  My brain would not stop going around in circles, things were fuzzy.  I didn't know what was happening to me.  It was dark and scary.  An older girl asked me to come over to where she was standing and she kicked me.  Hard, in the crotch.  I thought I was dying from the inside out.  Someone poured an entire bottle of coke over my head and it got into my eyes.  I felt blind.  I wandered around the streets all night, eventually sleeping in a park until I was ok to go home.

I smoked hash for the first time on my twelfth birthday.  We hot-boxed the car and I went home and ate a popsicle.  I was so high that I had orange drool hanging from my chin and I didn't even know it.  

Eventually it became an everyday occurrence.  I would smoke weed before and after school when I was in high school.  My drug of choice was acid.  I started to skip in the 9th grade, but not enough to get me into any real trouble.  In the 10th grade I skipped over 200 times.  That was essentially my whole year.  When I was in class I had to ask a friend to pen mark the lines on my paper because I couldn't see them.  My teacher would ask who was smoking the stinky cigars.  It got to be too much to handle, to pretend like I was normal everyday, and I quit going to class.  No wonder I got expelled.

A 'friend' of mine gave me a joint one day and told me to enjoy.  I should have known better.  People who do drugs don't just give them away for free.  I was naive.  So I smoked that crack, unbeknownst to me.  I had to go shoe shopping with my mom afterwards and I kept nodding out.  She kept asking me if I was sick.  Enjoy indeed.  That bastard was trying to get me hooked.  Thank god it scared me too much to want to try it again, but it could have gone the other way as well.  In a heartbeat.  

Drugs made me paranoid.  So in order to curb my paranoia, I did more drugs.  The cycle is a vicious beast.  I quickly spiraled into a deep depression, and everyone saw the change in me, including my doctor.  She recommended to my mom that I go to a 'facility' for problem kids, one that would be nurturing and help get me back on my feet.  That facility was in the dark basement of a big hospital; one where we got locked into our rooms every night and were not allowed to leave the floor.  It was a psych ward.  I did not belong there.  People there were seasoned heroin users, some were veteran pathological liars.  Kids.  Like me.  Many of them were on so many meds they could barely speak.  I was not.  I was completely and utterly aware of my surroundings.  I rebelled.  We were not allowed any sharp objects and there were no mirrors.  Somehow we got a hold of a safety pin and some ink.  I wanted a tattoo.  That guaranteed a swift exit from that place as I broke an important rule.  I would have broken it a thousand times in order to be free from there.

But I was only home for a little while after that.  My sister and I left and moved to a city four hours away from my parents.  We couldn't get jobs.  I was 15-years-old.  We ended up on welfare.  We were hungry a lot of the time.  We hit rock bottom when we were expecting a welfare cheque and it never arrived.  We called the welfare office and they said that they had sent it.  We were making our last box of Kraft Dinner, wondering what we were going to steal later that day in order to eat, when we received a phone call telling us that someone had stolen our cheque out of our mail box and was trying to cash it.  That was the last straw.  It was time to go home.

End of part 1.