Hey everyone. Just felt like posting this to remind myself of how far I’ve come and hopefully give some hope to people new in recovery. I’m 33 years old and my sober date from heroin, my doc, is 7/11/13. God willing, in a few weeks I’ll be celebrating 11 years clean.

I’ll start by saying that I didn’t get sober the first time I tried, not the first rehab or the first detox. I got caught finally by my family when I was 19 and immediately went to a few rehabs that were awful. I didn’t want sobriety but I white knuckled a few good strings of sobriety in there. The longest was 2 years clean after my mom’s diagnosis. I started to drink at the time because I thought I was never a problem drinker. Within a few months it led me back to H and I relapsed with zero hope of stopping after. In fact, I chose to be homeless and to accept my fate as a future overdose fatality.

Before 7/11/13, I was homeless selling drugs on skid row Los Angeles trying to scrape by. It was the most horrific period of my life. I was raped, robbed, stabbed, and was shooting literally any drug I could get my hands on. About 6 months in, my mom couldn’t take it anymore and was going to pay for 1 more detox and then an apartment so “at the very least I know I could have put a roof over your head when you are found dead” a macabre reason and I’m sure it would have played out that way had god not intervened. My god tends to do this in ways I really didn’t expect and it came in the form of my overdosing on the way to this detox.

I literally did the exact same amount of everything I had been doing, but without the adrenaline and stress of homelessness to negate the downers, I ended up overdosing in the car on the way to treatment. My sober buddy who was driving me took me to the hospital where I awoke 10 hours later. Realizing it was too late to get into detox, I begged the doctor for some comfort meds. They slapped me with 51/50 or 72 hour hold!

So instead of being at this kush detox, I’m not handcuffed to my bed and heading to a psych ward in West Covina. Literally the only med they gave me was hydroxezine for one of the most difficult detox’s of my life. I’m sad to admit, I even shit the bed, I was so sick. However, there was a reason for this, god always had a reason I just had to accept the unknown. My mom finally came to visit and suggested that the only time she’s seen me happy since the whole situation was at the second treatment facility I went to. A men’s 90 day program that focused on physical activity. She was right, it had been the only time I was happy sober so she made a deal, one more attempt, and I could stay off the streets.

Luckily, by that time, I had finally accepted that I was powerless over opiates. I truly believe that homelessness was critical for me to experience because I thought the ultimate consequence of using was death. I’ve been dead twice from overdoses, where I woke up to burnt hair and an intubator and fucking catheter in my dick. Let me tell you, death was easy compared to being homeless and addicted. I had the thought that I wouldn’t die from continued use, id be a homeless junky for 20 more years instead of the easy way out and it horrified me. It scared me so bad that I finally was willing to just follow direction. I tried too hard to assert my own will into my life and it led me to the same spot over and over again. I haven’t done hard drugs since that day. I’ve not drank since that day. I reintroduce weed into my life when I was confident I could abstain from harder stuff. Weeds legal so I never risked being offered harder stuff as might happen if I needed a dealer.

Anyways, I wanted to give some hope to some folks who might think they are in an impossible position. I was the kid everyone expected would die before 27. I’m now 33 with a home, business, and am going back to school to get into cybersecurity which has been a passion of mine. I am seeing gambling become problematic for me and have started going yo meetings again which is why I’ve been thinking so much about this. I took comfort in seeing the people who’ve recovered in the meetings and have to keep reminding myself that I’ve already done this work and seen the results. They were beyond expectations and I hope to maybe be that hope for any of you reading this. I was ready to die by the needle as I had learned to live by the needle. The fact I’m still sober and where I am today still blows my mind.

I know it’s cheesy , but if I can get 10-11 years off heroin, I really believe that anyone can. You just have to get to a point where you know the consequences are worse than the benefits. Death, as a consequence did not scare me, 20 more years of skid row life while going sickness to sickness every day was so horrible I don’t think I can fathom using again. If I did, it’d likely be my last, I don’t think I could handle what I could when I was younger and honestly don’t believe I have another heroin recovery in me. Hopefully I’ll never have to experience that again. Good luck everyone, please reach out if you would like to talk. Recovery is possible, even if it comes in ways you don’t expect.