Welcome! Let me introduce myself…

My name is Nicole and I have been in recovery from addiction to narcotics since March 30th of 2009. In about a month, on 3/30/19, I will be celebrating 10 years clean and sober time. The impending celebration is one of the reasons I chose to create this space. I know everyone has a story of how they came to this exact moment in their life and even though I have had my share of self-created suffering, I love my journey. What follows is the extremely abbreviated summary of my addiction “qualifications”, if you will.

ED.. meet Oxy…

Bulimia is a big part of my journey, and my very first destructive coping mechanism that utterly depleted my spirit and light. At a very young age I began eating disordered behaviors because inside there was this constant nagging feeling that I was never enough and that I was not ok. I hated my body and I felt like I was trapped in a life sentence in the prison that was my imperfect body. It has taken me many years of dedication to myself and recovery to get to where I am today. I am absolutely not perfect, nor am I saying that my relationship to my body is “peachy & perfect” but I am finally at a place of acceptance and gratitude for all my body has given and afforded me.

As I got more and more lost in my eating disorder, what I didn’t see coming was a forming dependency on drugs and most specifically, opiates. Oxy was my drug of choice and for 4 solid years I “lived to use and used to live”. Not using Oxy left me sick and using Oxy usually left me asleep. I loved my friends and family but my desire to not feel my feelings and get high over rode any real desire to connect with them.

Amidst the fog of daily use, I was offered help by my parents who asked me to go to treatment. I was bought a one way ticket to Tucson, Arizona, where I was given the gift of a treatment center that staged huge changes for me. It was actually a treatment center for eating disorders called Mirasol. My mom was the one who thought of treatment as an option but she really had no idea the extent of my drug use. She knew I was nodding off and thought I was smoking too much pot. I accepted the offer but my big plan was to go so I could get off opiates. I had graduated to IV heroine use and I know that if there was any hope fore me I should try to kick the hard stuff. But at that point I fully expected to be still using hallucinogens, pot, and alcohol upon exiting. What I didn’t expect was to see my desire to be free of active addiction grow over the course of those 38 days.

A New Beginning

I did manage to stay clean when I returned home. I was sent directly to out-patient treatment and an SLE (sober living environment) and my decision not to use was very much one I had to make every day, hour, minute… I made many appointments in my head with the bong, being completely ready to blow my small amount of accumulated clean time. Every time I made the decision to use, it would be foiled in some way. I finally decided I would go to a festival I always attended every year called Harmony and my plan was allow myself to smoke there on my 90 day sobriety anniversary. I went to the festival and every time I thought about using I just couldn’t bring myself to lose my clean-time. Earning 90 days felt like an eternity and I just could not imagine starting over and that’s when a part of me knew I wanted to try to see how long I could go.

I made friends and started a relationship in recovery programs. I did step work and found another addict to help guide me through recovery, and my life got better and better. Soon I was living a life that was previously unattainable and with the power of recovery, literally anything became possible.

My goal with this blog is to tell my story and continue to talk about my journey. I invite you to share your experience, strength and hope with me along the way because you matter and your story is important. I think we all have light to pay forward. Thank you for joining me.