Melissa is a 37 year old woman struggling with addiction. She is fighting her way through addiction with the help of the Brighton Recovery Center for Women.
In an effort to put a face on addiction, FortThomasMatters.com is documenting her journey. It’s real and raw and relevant. She is our Northern Kentucky neighbor. She is our heroine. Her story is important.
Here’s Mel:
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First, thank you all for those who have read the first part
of my story and are interested in the rest. I figure I should share how this
all began and what my life was like growing up.
I was raised by loving parents
and I have a sister that is five years older than me. Nothing happened to me as
a child that I can blame any of my life choices on. I had a great childhood and
was shown plenty of love. I was very active in soccer and strived to be the
best; a character defect that I fight with still today.
My inner spiritual
maladies appeared at a very young age. As a child I would throw temper tantrums
when things didn’t go my way and always had to be the center of attention
whether it was in a good way or bad. I
have no idea how my mother survived my childhood especially my teenage years.
God must have carried her through, because I treated her horribly as I got more
and more defiant and out of control.
I went to school and fought it every step
of the way, the only thing I looked forward to was soccer. My freshman year I
tried out for the High School team and didn’t make it, to say the least I was
absolutely devastated. No longer having
soccer in my life gave me plenty of time to myself and that was absolutely the
last place I wanted to be….alone.
I
began drinking and drugging in my spare time because it was a release from
self. The drugs that were popular in the 1990’s were pot and LSD, neither hard
to find. I got my first DUI when I was 16 years old coming home from a party I
was drunk and on acid. The phone call to my parents was definitely not a
pleasant one. I was put on probation. My parents didn’t know what to do with
me, they put in a hospital for adolescents with “issues” this was to be the
first of many trips to Behavioral Health units.
I never saw how much my
drinking was affecting my family and how it began to dominate my life……
