Diary of a Junkie

I didn’t just wake up one day and decide, hey, I think I want to become an addict. It took many years, a lot of pain, abuse, guilt, and feeling empty on the inside to walk the road I chose to walk. My parents were never around, and when they were it was hell. My father was an alcoholic and he was a mean abusive drunk. My mother cared more about herself than she did about protecting her children. Growing up, I felt like I was standing in the middle of a crowded room, screaming at the top of my lungs, and yet nobody even knew I was there. I was invisible. For years I was abused by my father, ignored by my mother, sexually abused by my uncle, and I lived in the shadow of my older sister, the princess of the family. My father told me I was a mistake, that he never wanted me. He wanted a boy and a girl and he got two girls and a boy. This one moment has stayed with me for my entire life. This moment for me, confirmed everything I had already been feeling. I was unwanted and unloved, I was the invisible child. I always got straight A’s in school, did everything I could to get my parents to see me, even skipped a grade, but nothing ever worked. However, if I did something wrong, I got the kind of attention I never wanted. Even when my mother finally figured out that my uncle was sexually assaulting me, I was called a liar. How could an 8 year old child even come up with this type of story? I realized at that moment, nobody was ever going to save me.

By time I got to high school, I was such an angry teen. My grades started to drop around 8th and 9th grade. I tried to make friends with people, but I never exactly fit in anywhere. I was the girl with the alcoholic dad, the pedophile uncle, and the dirty house. All I wanted was for someone to see me for me, and I mean really and truly see me. I finally found a circle of friends that I thought I could really feel like I belonged with. Little did I know, this group of friends would give me my first taste of a life that I never could have seen myself living.