Healthy Community Initiative

Growing up, I had a pretty abusive stepfather. From a young age, he was not only physically abusive, but mentally abusive, too. He broke me down and made me feel like an outcast in my own family for a long time. He took away my confidence.

So when I started using drugs, it became a way to escape reality. Drugs gave me something I didn’t have anymore: confidence. They made me feel good. Ironically, my biological father was the first person who ever got me high on crank. When that happened, it normalized drugs for me. I thought, If somebody like that is using with a kid, it can’t be that bad.

I didn’t realize how much it would affect my life over the years.

By high school, I was skipping school a lot, and everything started going downhill. I didn’t want to believe the drugs were causing it. I told myself it was just life. Life had already beaten me down so much. I thought, This is just my life. This is how it’s going to go.

By ninth grade, I was missing so much school that, at 15, I was expelled from high school for two years and kicked out of the Faribault school system. I tried going to Northfield for a while, but I was still using. School wasn’t as important to me as hanging out with my friends and using.

Then, between 2005 and 2007, I lost my little brother tragically. My grandpa died from cancer, and I lost my best friend to a heroin overdose.

After that, I went all in.

I became an everyday user for 20 years. During that time, I was arrested probably 30 times or more. I moved around a lot. I couldn’t keep a steady job. Everything in my life was falling apart, but somehow, I still couldn’t see the drugs as the problem. I just kept telling myself, This is life. This is my life. This is how it’s going to go.

When my son was born in 2006, I thought, This has got to be the change. I’m going to get sober for him.

But it didn’t work that way. If anything, I went deeper.

I didn’t feel worthy of being a father. I didn’t feel like I deserved something so beautiful in my life. I felt like I was destined to be an addict forever and that this was all I would ever be.

His mother and I didn’t work out, and over time I saw my son less and less. I tried to make him a priority, but the drug was always more important.

Eventually, using stopped even feeling good. It started making me aggressive, depressed and jealous. I couldn’t keep a relationship. I pushed away or avoided the people who cared about me because I didn’t feel worthy of their love.

I had felt like a failure for most of my life.

It’s ironic that I’m standing here today because I used to come up here when I had nowhere else to go. I would come up here and cry. I felt like such a failure.

My mom never gave up on me. My son never gave up on me. But being around them while I was in active addiction broke me to my core. So I avoided them. I avoided the people who loved me.

Even the people I was using with were afraid of me because I was so angry and all over the place. I could go from happy to sad, angry to confused, all in the same conversation. People didn’t want to be around me.

I didn’t even want to be around myself.

And I didn’t know how to change it. I didn’t know how to get away from that life.

Around 2022, I caught some serious charges. I was caught with drugs in my car, arrested, went to jail and eventually bailed out. While I was on bail, my house was raided, and I caught more charges. I was on the run for a while before I was arrested again.

I was looking at six years in prison.

By the grace of God, I was able to get into the drug court treatment program.

When I first got into the program, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. And honestly, I fought it for a long time. I went back and forth with my probation officer, the director and the judges. It was hard for me to understand.

I kept thinking, I’m never going to get through this program. They make it so hard.

But the alternative was prison. And if I went to prison, I wouldn’t see my son for another six years.

So I fought through it.

I kept fighting, and now I’m about to graduate.

When I first got sober, I had this idea that everything was going to fall into place. I was going to get an amazing job, have the car I wanted, a garage full of motorcycles, and everything was going to be perfect.

It doesn’t work like that.

I had to start from the bottom. I still live paycheck to paycheck. I’m still not where I want to be in life. But I think that’s where a lot of us in addiction struggle—we expect things to immediately be at this high level.

You have to start from the bottom. You have to work your way back up. You have to prove yourself. And you have to learn to count the small victories.

Today, I’m no longer angry. I’m no longer depressed. I know how to be happy. When something comes my way, I can face the challenge and figure out how to overcome it.

I couldn’t do that before.

Every time something got in my way, I ran away from it. That’s one of the biggest ways I’ve grown as a person in recovery.

I’m trying to find the things that make my life worth living. Recovery isn’t just about sobriety for me. It’s about the journey. It’s not about getting to some final destination. It’s about enjoying the little things along the way that make me the person I am.

My mom and my son mean the world to me. The fact that they’ve never given up on me fills my heart. They give me a reason to keep going.

There are still going to be days when I don’t want to keep going. Days when I want to give up. I wasn’t really prepared for that part of the fight.

But over these last few months—and especially these last few weeks, as I’ve gotten closer to finishing the program—I’ve started to realize that my life is more important than going backward.

I’ve gained so much. I’ve come so far.

At first, I didn’t want to admit that. There were times when I thought, As soon as I get out of this program, I’m just going to go back to using because that’s my life.

But the closer I get to the end, the more I realize that I’m becoming the man I’ve always wanted to be.

I look in the mirror now, and I’m proud of the person looking back at me.

My son is such a good human being. If he can learn from my mistakes, become a better person and choose a different direction in life, then everything I’ve been through will have been worth it.

I would rather carry that pain myself than ever see him have to carry that burden.

My mom had an addicted child—not just me, but all of her stepchildren went through addiction. Now that I’m sober, I can see what she went through, and it breaks my heart.

Because I know there is somebody’s kid going through this right now. Somebody is struggling. Somebody might be alone, without food or a place to go.

That breaks my heart.

So every day of my life, I will fight—for myself, for my family and for my friends.

I’m grateful for the people who are here today. My friends came out to support me. My boss is here. I’ve received so much support from the people who care about me.

I never had that before—or maybe I just wasn’t willing to see it.

Now I see it.

And it feels so good. It makes me believe that I really can do this, because I have people who actually care about me.

That’s a pretty incredible feeling.

So I just want to say thank you to everybody who came to support me, to everybody in this program, and to everybody here tonight.

Thank you for listening to my story.