An addict’s story
Melanie recounts her fall into the abyss of heroin addiction, a path that took her from sniffing to needles, to get a better, faster high.
“I hated needles. I always hated needles. But I had this guy shoot me up. It took watching him do it once to make me do it myself,” she recalls.
“The unacceptable becomes acceptable. I thought it would never be me, but there I was.” She turned to dancing as a stripper to earn money to feed her habit.
Eventually, “the legal system intervened” and she ended up in drug court.
A court psychologist told her, “I give you a year. You’ll either be back here again or you’ll be dead.”
She was in detox three times. “I was stopped in detox. I was stopped in jail. My problem wasn’t stopping, it was staying stopped. My problem wasn’t heroin. It was the fact that I had absolutely no skill within me, I had nothing to live life with. My go-to was to get high, whether it was a good day or a bad day.
“When you live this lifestyle, you get caught up in this lifestyle,” she said. “You know to lie, cheat and steal just to make it through the day.”
People, counselors included, told her “just don’t use” and “don’t pick up the first one” but, she says, “If I could do that, I wouldn’t use. In hindsight I came to realize I had lost the power of choice over what I did.
“On Oct. 20, 2009, my mother slammed the door in my face,” Melanie recalls. “That was the best thing she could have done.”
Melanie says she knew her addiction — or the lifestyle she led because of it — was going to kill her. But it was the only thing she had.
Instead, she says, “I went into court. I had an enormous amount of warrants out for my arrest. I knew if I went in there, I’d be arrested. And I was,” she said.
Jail saved her life, starting with what would be her last detox.
“Everything changed after that. I learned a whole new set of values. I swear to God, I was sitting in the DWI trailer, I had 13 misdemeanors, all drug-related. I remember sitting there, surrounded by barbed wire, and looking up at the sun thinking I felt so free for the first time in my life.”
In jail, Melanie said she learned she wasn’t “crazy” — the counselors and the people who worked with her understood. “For the first time people understood,” she says.
She met a counselor who was a recovering addict — “a junkie,” a woman who was sober through the 12 steps.
“She introduced me to this God idea. I thought- ‘you’re out of your mind’ but I had nothing. I didn’t even have a bag of clothes. I looked at my life and you know, I really effed my life up. How bad could this God thing be? It couldn’t be any worse than what I’d done to myself,” she reasoned.
For the first time, she said, she owned it — the addiction, her identity. “Rather than being victimized by it, I was empowered by it. You have to concede to your animal self that you are this thing. That’s your ticket to freedom.”
All of the other things that “had grips over me” — being raped as a young teen, being abused by her violent father — no longer had power over her, she said.
“I started getting this soul food that let me deal with these things in a different way,” Melanie says. “It’s not the pain itself. It’s how you deal with the pain.”
Melanie said she needed to cleanse her soul. “The God idea, the soul idea, it sounds crazy to some people. But when you gain a relationship with God, it gives you a set of morals and values. When you get that relationship outside of yourself… you change fundamentally.”
After nearly six months in jail, she was released on March 25, 2010. She went to a sober house for 13 months, and then to a transition house. She got a job, bought a car, enrolled in Suffolk Community College. She has since graduated with an associate’s degree and a 3.8 GPA, making the high honor roll. She is working on a bachelor’s degree in education.
Melanie is engaged to be married and had a baby daughter in November.
She is a regular speaker in drug court and chairs a group for addicts in Riverhead.
“When you find out you’ve been given a gift, a miracle,” she says, “You have to give that gift away.”
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