Let me assure you that you have read that correctly, and it’s true. I used the Law of Attraction to leave my addiction in the dust. No AA/NA. No groups, rehab, or outpatient services. That’s right. It’s been a hell of a ride, but here I am. You should also know that I used to internally poke fun at those who believed. However, I’m not laughing anymore, and I am willing to let the walls down and share my journey. So please keep an open mind. If it worked for me, it can and will work for you too. You only have to be curious enough to keep reading.

It probably won’t surprise you that I was raised surrounded by addiction. I was raised by a single mom who never graduated high school. My mom is the hardest-working woman I have ever met—the most functional alcoholic/addict I have ever seen. Looking back at the partying that controlled my childhood, I don’t know how she did it or continues to do it. My mom was always on the hunt for the next love of her life. Spoiler alert: she still hasn’t found him.

Addiction Always Has a Beginning

My mom partied hard, long, and loud. I remember one time my sister and I were sleeping in our room while they were partying downstairs. They were always partying downstairs. While we lie there listening to the commotion, we suddenly hear a sound, and we see our bedroom window begin to open. I still remember that paralyzing fear. I couldn’t move, and if my sister were awake, and I am pretty sure she was, she was just as paralyzed as I was.

We watched as the outline of a foot began to slide its grimy way through our window. I was so shocked and scared that I couldn’t even process enough thought to create a plan, though I am always better under pressure, so that may have been for the best. I knew it was one of my mother’s low-life friends trying to crawl through our window because they were all sickos. Like the lowest of the low, but there was a better plan for this guy because about the time he sat his butt on the windowsill to slide the rest of himself under and in, something happened. In slow motion, we watched the leg reverse direction and disappear until nothing was left.

Substance Users in the Making

Stuff like this happened quite often, and looking back all these years later, I can clearly see that there was another carefully crafted path for us. We had all the markers for substance users in the making. Pre-disposed to addiction on both sides, growing up with a constant party with adults who just wanted to get rid of us, no nurturing, a nightmare of an environment, very little room to grow, moved around every year for fourth through eighth grades, and the list goes on and on. I remember my sister and I made up a code word for when mom was getting high so the other could know not to bring friends around and be embarrassed. My mom was embarrassing, and she was constantly with different dudes.

We moved back to Vermont in 1994 when my mom returned with her third husband. Things were a little more low-key after that but still wild at times. My sister and I started fighting and having these wars where when one of us would come home and see what the other had done to her room, we would rage and do the same right back. We destroyed one another’s clothes with bleach and mud, broke stuff, etc. Looking back, it makes me sad that we could be so ruthless to one another at such an early age. Neither of us would have survived our hell of childhood alone. Nobody could have. On the bright side, we are two of the strongest people I have ever known.

Pregnant at 14 With Twins

My sister never really got into hard drugs, but there was a good reason. She hooked up with a nineteen-year-old when she was fourteen. She was pregnant with twins shortly after. When referencing, I say that we were both searching for something. My sister went to love & sex. I went right to drugs. When she told my mom she was pregnant, my mom actually took it pretty well. When they returned from the doctor’s, they were both in tears. I was waiting for them. My mom walked in looking a mess. “Your sister is having twins.” She said and went to her room and closed the door.

I should take this moment to say that my mom was an awful mother, and I honestly never felt loved by her. There was a long time after she and my sister moved away that I couldn’t be in a room with her for more than fifteen minutes before we would start going at it. Then, at the age of fourteen, I came home from some hippie tour I was on for a week, and everything in our apartment was just gone, except for my bedroom, which remained untouched. I was homeless after that for almost two years, and I held a lot of resentment for that. I stayed in the apartment until the proprietor boarded up the windows. Luckily, I had a fantastic group of friends who camped out with me and helped me out.

I Forgive Her

My mom and sister did eventually move back to Vermont, and by then, I was dying to get off the streets. I went back, shortly after is when I used heroin for the first time. My mom and I get along all right today, and she is a fantastic grandmother to my kids. I forgive her because she had demons of her own, and being a single mom struggling with addiction to drugs and alcohol, she did what she could.

The first time I used heroin was shortly after my sister told my mom she was pregnant. I had an older girlfriend. Her name was Jessei. Jessei was kind of out there. She died when she took 90 of her maintenance pain pills and ran outside in the below-freezing Vermont winter. When they found her, she was barely alive. She was on life support for almost a week when her family shut off her life support because they claimed she was brain-dead. Let me ask you this… If a person wakes up, squeezes your hand, doesn’t even ask where they are or what happened, then tells you they love you and call you by name, are they brain dead? I know, I know. We can save this story for another day.

The Village

Jessei, M (my friend), and I decided to go to Thompkins Square Park in Greenwich Village, NYC. It’s a public park in the Alphabet City part of the east side. Jessei had gone there before and copped (purchased drugs) on the street, so that was the plan. We had to run to my mom’s house and grab some things before leaving, and somehow, we picked up my fourteen-year-old pregnant with twins, baby sister. She had been posted up in the house for her whole pregnancy, and neither of us had ever been to many incredible places at that point, and she wanted to come. Jessei loved my sister and felt for her, so she allowed it. My sister didn’t know then that my intention was to try heroin for the first time or that I was over the moon excited about this. Sad, but true.

We arrived at Thompkins ar around 3 AM. This may have deterred other people, but not Jessei. We walked around the streets of the village with my belly big as a house pregnant fourteen-year-old sister, my best friend “M,” who was, luckily for us, a dude, Jessei, and her new puppy, Drexie. Within a half hour of arriving, Jessei had hit up some “gutter punk,” as they were referred to in those days, with a name resembling something close to a screw. He was our guy and continued to be our guy for many years. As sad as it is to say, Jessei felt terrible for him and ended up trading Drexie for a couple of buns before we left.

1st Act in the Show of Ruining My Life

Jessei drove us to a motel just across the Jersey Bridge. Jessei got us a few rooms. I am pretty sure she was using stolen checks because it took a couple of tries to find a place. She and M were secretive about this part. Jessei protected me a lot like that. I was younger than her by five years, so she may have just felt protective. Most who knew her would say she wasn’t capable of these warm feelings, but I saw a different Jessei than the rest of the world saw her.

My sister was getting the idea now of what was about to go down. What could she possibly do? She was a guest, and if she had tried to stop me, I would have laughed. Instead, she sat on the bed, Indian style, rubbing her belly while I made the worst decision in my life. I remember watching them prepare it like pros. I felt like a silly kid. If I had a second thought, I don’t remember it because before I knew it, all the pain was gone. It didn’t hurt, and I kind of liked it. I won’t get into the details; I am just trying to give you a blueprint of how I got where I am today.

I Didn’t Care What Anyone Thought

Looking back, I can’t believe how out of my mind I was. I remember lying back on the bed, smiling. My little sister asked me what it felt like, and I glorified it and made it sound appealing. To MY VERY OWN SISTER. I finally didn’t care what anyone thought about me, and I finally didn’t feel like a victim. Finally, the sky was the limit. I remember thinking that this was how it had to be from now on. I just couldn’t bear life without it.

That was the first act in the show of ruining my life. Let me reiterate: Jessei stuck the needle in my arm, and though that one use did not render me physically addicted. I was, upon the first kiss, mentally and emotionally addicted. One use, and I was hooked. That’s all it takes. No joke. I’m living proof. It might not be like this for everyone, but it was for me, so it is definitely possible.

Needing to Feel Right

After this trip, I was on a mission. I needed to feel right. I needed to shed my five-times too-small skin suit so I could spread my wings and fly. How I hate reliving these days of my life. It’s so sad and small. I see so clearly now. Back then, I managed to do all right for a while. I graduated from high school and went to a community college. When I was eighteen, I got my licensed nursing assistant’s certification.

I got my first apartment with a girl I knew when I was eighteen. Eventually, my unhealthy habits spread to those around me. Some people couldn’t maintain on the outside as I did. I was working two jobs and going to school. My first roommate got out of Dodge. She told me she had to go because she was getting out of control. Smart girl. No sooner than she grabbed her last bag in a desperate move in fear of losing my home, I moved in my drug dealer. How could I not see how this would end?

I ended up being the first heroin raid my town had ever had. When they busted through my front door, I jumped into my closet. They came in screaming, and I watched them put guns on all of my friends and force them to the floor. Suddenly I was ripped out of the closet and thrown to the ground. I was told that their German Shepard would bite me if I had drugs on me, and I won’t comment further on that, but I was not a slow girl. I knew some things. As it turns out, it didn’t matter in the end, but that’s how the story goes.

Life On The Installment Plan

They never found any drugs on me. It turns out the dog wasn’t even a drug dog. He was an arson dog. Aren’t they clever? Pshhhh… When they busted through the door, my future codefendant tried to run towards the bathroom, which was towards them. They tackled her on the way and got 9.6 grams in her hand, almost nothing. I was charged because my name was on the lease, but if that was the case, then why wasn’t my first roommate charged? She was still on the lease. I was just saying. When we got to the men’s jail and were booked and put in holding, you will never guess who was already there. Jessei was sitting in front of the toilet, looking a mess. She got better real quick.

My co-de’s parents paid for her to get the best attorney in our area, and I became the fall guy with a quickness. I was the perfect fit. Alcoholic-addicted parents, low income, no money behind me, a female, and addicted to heroin. My co-defendant never spent another day in jail. I, on the other hand, would spend the next twenty-four years going in and out of jail for my petty, non-violent, drug-related offenses. I often tell people I have done “life on the installment plan,” and this will be the name of my first book should I ever write one. No rehab, do not pass go, I was a low-life, and I was always going right to jail or, as I have come to call it over the years, finishing school.

Jail is A Crime School for Young People

I don’t want to get into my years of constant disappointment or the constant disregard for my humanity at the hands of the town and later at the jail. The jail where they would throw me in the hole for months based only on heresy or suspicion. I want to focus on the good stuff. On how I overcame my addiction to heroin and everything that came along with it. I quickly got worse and worse because jail is like a crime school for young girls.

I went there and learned how to be better at it next time. It was the absolute worst place that they could have ever put me. They throw you in a unit with like-minded individuals, lock us down from the rest of the population with no treatment options, and then hammer us when we engaged in drug-seeking behaviors. The state I live in has the most jacked in-justice system, but I do plan on calling them out in a future post all of their own.

“Manifestor’s.” Lol.

In 2016, I came across a YouTube video where a woman was speaking about the law of attraction and manifesting. I thought that she was out her damn mind, and I thought it was a joke. I sure was laughing pretty hard. These law of attraction videos kept coming up in my feed, though I had never subscribed to anything like them. I was NOT down with the “manifestor’s” as I called them. I thought that they were a joke, but look who was thinking. In 2015 I found myself in a really bad place.

I got a call from my best friend, T, he told me that the guy I was seeing had died, and he thought that I had provided him with the heroin that killed him. He told me to get rid of all of the Buggati bags of heroin that I had to sell. I told him I hadn’t seen or talked to the guy in two days. Good, he said, and then he hung up. The worst part is that the guy that passed didn’t even produce a tear from my eyes. Nothing, but he was a wicked dick and not a very good person. Next thing I knew, my best friend had been charged with second-degree murder as a habitual offender, and I knew he didn’t do it.

Finding Myself Alone

There I was, watching the Superbowl by myself. They should have been there. Instead, I found myself alone in my mess of a life and feeling very unsatisfied with the way my life was going. By this point, I could barely use my hands because of all the damage that IV drug use had done. My hands are still permanently puffy and discolored, and it’s so humiliating. It’s a vanity thing. We use our hands to represent ourselves and our feelings, and my hands have left me with little to no self-love or confidence.

Doctors won’t help me because they say I did it to myself and that the odds are that I will do it again. Like seriously, that’s what they said. I feel lucky to have them because the jail told me that I was going to lose my hands because there was no blood flowing through them. It’s a horrible feeling to have such an issue that the only person to blame for it is yourself. Let me know if you have any issues like this; maybe we can talk about it more in the future.

Aaron Doughty & Dr. Joe Dispenza

I woke up a few days later to an Aaron Doughty video on YT. Almost positive that it was the video where he was sharing his experience with Ayahuasca. I had my eyes closed, but I was listening. I listened until I started to feel the sickness closing in. Man, I do NOT miss that. I got up and did the thing that I was physically forced to do every morning, and as I did, another video played. It was a video by Dr. Joe Dispenza. In this video, he talks about what happened to him and how he had broken his back in five places and was told that he would never walk again. Here he was, walking and sitting and not actively having a back that had been broken in five places.

The thing about Aaron Doughty and Joe Dispenza is their excitement. I could not ignore this. I dedicated myself to finding a video from one of them where they weren’t excited. When they talk about their passions, they speak with excitement that one may experience the first time they speak of something they are passionate about. Aarons is a bit toned down, but if you watched the video where he and the hot chick are doing the ice dips, how could he not have been excited?

Ice dip aside, of course. Every single video, and there are a lot, they emanate the excitement of that first time. You can’t fake that. My subconscious mind knew that, and I was drawn to it. I didn’t know this then, but this was my path. This was the way, and I went from making fun of these people to become one of them, and more so with every day that passes, even now.

Reading Again

The harder I worked to disprove these spiritual beliefs, the more I proved them. Dr. Joe Dispenza is the science behind spirituality. This man has coached thousands of people through their own personal healings in his workshops. I began reading again, and I have always been a reader. After spending most of my life in finishing school, what else is there in there?

I am still very deep in my addiction at this point, and I actually became my BFF, as in I took the place of my incarcerated best friend. I was copping every day after I left the clinic and getting rides at that point with a high school friend and her boyfriend. One day, they picked me up, and she told me that she had to pick up her friend Pat. So we pulled in, and this smiley guy with kind eyes got in. I had an instant feeling that we would be great friends.

We had an hour’s ride over the mountain every day. We would jam out and laugh. On occasion, when our friend’s man was too drunk to drive, Pat would make him stop so Pat could drive before we were killed. Pat was a really good guy. On the way over, I would always count my money. I tested him a couple of times, and he never took a thing, even when he could have and probably should have. Sometimes I was short, and Pat would give me whatever cash I needed I needed to go to the hotel. Sad to admit, but I still charged him full price. We did all go to our friend’s house once a week, and the party was on me. The whole party. I wasn’t a complete ass.

GPS Instead of Finishing School For Once

Things were going alright. Pat and I shared the same love of the AMC series The Walking Dead, so we would shoot a call after a shocking turn and end up talking for the entire show. It was strictly friendly at this point. I forget what I did, but I believe FSU (they are basically second and third-shift babysitters for everyone out on what in another state would be called parole, but in VT, it’s called furlough or house arrest) found someone hiding in my closet. Instead of throwing me in finishing school for an unauthorized visitor, they slapped the GPS around my ankle for once. I spent most of the last twenty years either in jail or on furlough, and it was a living nightmare, but I can address that on another day.

This was a problem for me because though I could still go over the mountain to the clinic, and I would risk even going to the motel, I wouldn’t be able to serve people at my house because I knew they would be creeping, and I definitely couldn’t go meet my people, and I couldn’t think of even one person I could trust to do it. Though I was a drug dealer, I really was never about ripping people off or getting over on anyone. I didn’t like it being done to me, so I didn’t do it to others. Another guy that I got from wanted to come down that weekend, and I wanted the cash, so I told him to come, not having a clue how I would pull it off. I had figured it out by the time I got back from the clinic.

A Job Offer for Pat

I knew Pat would be down to make some quick cash, so when I was getting out, I just asked him. “You down for making some money this weekend?” He gave me a hell yeah, and I told him that I would call him later. I remember this day well. Had my city guy coming for the weekend, so we could both make some money, but I couldn’t stop watching those Law of Attraction videos. By this time, I had found Jerry, Esther, and Abraham Hicks. I didn’t think that they were off base at all, and I decided that even though I wasn’t willing to make any major changes at that time, I would make some small ones. This is when I chose to start with my thinking.

I have always been super resilient, and I had a way of cheering all the girls that I was in finishing school with up by acting foolish. It was kind of my thing. They all had kids that they were away from or that they were losing, and I just had never had any interest in kids, as I may have mentioned. No maternal bones and all that. I was able to laugh in even the worst circumstances, and I thought that this was a good start. I loved laughing, and I was good at it, and I believed that I was on to something.

The Weekend Turned into a Month

Pat worked hard for me and for himself. He never cut my stuff, and nobody ever complained. He was honest in that regard. We were best friends. We slept in the same bed for a month before he told me he had a thing for me. I tried telling him that a girl like me was the last thing that he needed. Also mentioned often that at some point in the future, I would return to finishing school, and he would feel more helpless and powerless than he has ever felt in his life. I didn’t want to do that to him, so I tried really hard to deter him. It was hard not to be attracted to his work ethic, honesty, and determination. He was making us serious flow, and I also didn’t want to lose his friendship. I knew better.

After a few more weeks, I gave in. My feelings had grown, and I couldn’t shake him. I waited another month before sleeping with him, and a month after that, we were standing in my bathroom staring at a pregnancy test, VERY scared. He told me that if I was pregnant, he would be there for me. At the time, he didn’t get that there was a reason I wasn’t pregnant.

The End, but Not Really

If you want to know how the rest of the story goes, please subscribe to my newsletter, like, and share. I will be posting Part 2 in the next few days. Sorry, guys. It was getting way too long, so I figured I would break it up a bit. I will be sharing with you the exact recipe that I used and continue to use to kick my addiction’s ass. These are easy, actionable steps that ANYONE can incorporate into ANY lifestyle. If any of this particular part of my life resonates so far, please let me know in the comments below. If you like hearing about my sober life, please check out my Supernatural article here. I just want to help other people by letting them know that change is possible. It really is. I promise. The grass is so much greener on this side. Stay tuned.

Post Off Quote

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

-Walt Disney

Post Off Affirmation (Until Next Time)

I am in control of my own story, and I can choose the narrative. I CHOOSE to have a happy ending. I am worth a happy ending, and more importantly I am worth a new beginning.

Light & Love, everyone. Namaste.