One of my earliest memories is the three of us kids, lined up in a row in the kitchen, our mouths open like baby birds, waiting for the nightly spoonful of Actifed with codeine. It always felt warm, and we went right to sleep.

I also remember my mother getting drunk at parties and my grandmother scolding her like she was a child, in front of everybody. Holidays were always a disaster. Somebody always got drunk, somebody always got in a fight, something always got broken.

My first real high from drugs came when I was 14. I was very depressed. I was talking daily to the guidance counselor at school. Every day during study hall was my standard appointment. I told him I wanted to kill myself once, and he called my mother after I went back to class the next period. By the time I got home, I had come up with a really good story and nothing further was said about it. I started getting stomach aches. Really bad ones. This was 1981, before doctors asked kids with stomach aches "what is going on at home?" Instead he gave me pills. They had just a tiny bit of Phenobarbital in them. Not enough to even be a controlled drug, but I found out very quickly that if one calmed me down enough to get rid of a stomach ache, two would calm me even more. Eventually I was taking seven or eight at a time, and also supplying them to my best friend. Although I would never allow her to take more than two at a time. I didn't want her to become addicted to them. I would call the pediatrician's office, ask the nurse for a refill, ride my bike to the store with my Medicaid card and pick up the refills. Nobody knew how much I was actually taking. This went on for all of fall and most of winter. I was still depressed and still suicidal. At one point I remember the guidance counselor telling me that I could never take enough of what I had to kill myself. That even if I had Valium, I would never be able to swallow enough to actually die from it. Well, that stopped me for a while. But it didn't get rid of the depression and the suicidal feelings. Twice I took too many. But other than sleeping for a really long time, I was not hurt, and in fact, nobody even knew I had overdosed.

The third time, the time I almost died, was completely an accident. I had asthma as a child, and was also taking asthma pills, as needed. I was in school one day (March 1, 1981) feeling really antsy because I was completely out of the pills I normally took. I was so badly withdrawing that I needed something, anything. The only pills I had were my asthma pills, and I took 3 of them. This was sometime in the morning. By the time lunch time came around, I was really confused. I could not think straight. In my mixed up thinking, I remember thinking "If I took 3 and got sick, I only need to take more to be better." So I took the rest of the bottle. Somehow 3 classes later I made it to the nurse's office before passing out, and I woke up 4 days later in the Pediatric ICU at the hospital. I was supposed to have died, I was told, and if I did live, I would be brain damaged from not breathing and having convulsions for so long. Luckily beyond a few petit mal seizures a day for a few months, and then a few a year after that, there was no brain damage.

I managed to stay clean until I went away to college. I graduated from high school on a Sunday and started college the next day. Summer sessions meant lots of parties, but I resisted until the very last week. That week, I found myself in the dorm room of one of my class mates, where a big party was happening. Another girl got called to the telephone and handed me a paper cup she had been drinking out of, to hold for her. One of the guys said to me, "You might as well taste it, you know you are dying to." Well, he was right, and I did taste it, and the cup was empty by the time the girl got back from the phone. I remember how it felt warm as I swallowed it. I have no idea to this day what it was I was drinking that night. It doesn't really matter though because I knew I had found my answer. One drink and I was hooked. I wasn't the shy girl the guys only talked to when they wanted help with homework anymore. I was funny; people laughed at what I said. I was confident. I could say anything, do anything, be anything.

The next night I was also drinking at another dorm party when I was asked to go hear a local band play at a bar. I was 19 and could drink legally in New York at that time. For a few more months anyway, until the age was raised. But that is later. That night, I don't know how many bars we went to, or how many drinks I had. Only that I could not feel my feet when we walked home, and could not speak in complete sentences. I remember a girl named Karen feeding me Doritos and her boyfriend John telling me that she was bisexual. And both of them turning me on, although I had not started exploring sexually yet. The next day, I was experiencing my first black out. I could not find my shoes, or my keys, I had no idea how I had spent so much money. I only remembered bits and pieces of the entire night.

That was the last night of summer session, then I had 2 weeks back at home, during which I stayed sober. When fall semester started, however, I was immediately drinking again, but this time only occasionally at parties or bars. I found I could spend the same amount at a liquor store and get a whole lot more. And I didn't have to share it or be sociable. When the drinking age went up, I found older students who would buy for me. That was never a problem. Freshman year is pretty much a blur. In fact, the rest of the 1980's and half of the 1990's are a blur. I had periods of not drinking, but it was never a choice I made to be sober. I never knew I was an alcoholic. I thought alcoholics were people who spent the rent money on alcohol, came home, threw up on the rug, and beat up their wives or kids the next day. I was not one of them. I found myself living with one of them. I never did the things he did, so therefore I could not be an alcoholic.

And pills continued to be something I used as well. In 1991, I was put in a hospital for being depressed. It was connected to the medical college my sister was attending, so she was told everything about my "case." I was really angry and was offered Ativan to calm down. I turned it down for 3 days, until the man I was seeing broke up with me, and I was devastated. Then I accepted it. A half hour after taking it, I thought I had been stupid for turning it down the other nights. I made excuses the next 2 nights to get more of it. Ativan took all of the feelings away. Everything. It just made me floaty, calm, nothing. Numb.

I also worked in health care during this time, and at one point worked in a group home for profoundly developmentally disabled adults. I was promoted to running the overnight shift, which involved giving medication in the morning, with no supervision. There were times, during the night, when I would document that a resident was in terrible pain and needed his narcotic pain killer. I would take it myself and give him Tylenol. The Tylenol worked, and he was non verbal, so I was never caught. I had 3 residents on Phenobarbital for epilepsy, and I really wanted that, but I was afraid they would have a seizure and I would be caught. So I never took that for myself. Just the pain killers. But I am not proud about that.

The turning point was in 1997. I was working at a shoe store, and one night two of the girls working there went on an alcohol run during their break. They were drinking in the back room and offered me some, but I was too afraid of getting caught and fired to drink with them. But I accepted a bottle from them, which I drank as soon as the store closed. And I went home and bought more because I could not stop. That was how I drank. I didn't stop until I was 1- out of money, 2- physically sick, 3- asleep, or 4- somebody else stopped me.

I became friends with somebody over the Internet who was a recovering alcoholic. I told him my family was alcoholic but I wasn't one of them. And then as I got to know him, I listened to him. And I began to think maybe I was one of them. I was already sober a week before I went to my first AA meeting. And I was amazed there were other people like me there. I had been going to ACOA for years, never even realizing that what I was doing was alcoholic drinking. I didn't know there were other alcoholics who found AA through the "back door" (of Al-Anon or ACOA).

My first 30 days, I couldn't even sit still at the meetings. I had to bring drawing books and pencils to keep my hands busy while I sat and listened. The really cool thing was that my sponsor and her husband colored along with me. They brought me home with them on Easter so I wouldn't be alone. I had known his sister in college. We had actually been to some of the same parties. That was interesting.

Since then, it has been a lot of work, a lot of pain, and a lot of joy. Learning to feel again was the hardest thing. They say when you start using, you stop growing emotionally. That means I was 14 when I stopped growing. And 3 years sober would make me 17 emotionally, which I think just about correlates to the things I am learning now. I still live with depression, but my mother, sister, and brother have also been diagnosed with depression. I now can see it is a physiological condition, and I function just fine as long as I take a maintenance dose of Prozac. When I started to learn how to feel, my counselor wanted to start with "bad, sad, mad, and glad." I needed her to reduce it to "good and bad." Four emotions were too much for me. Now I feel a full range of emotions. And even when I am sad, or upset, I am still happy that I can feel.

Recovery is a journey. I will never be healed or recovered. But I am alive, fully, and loving everything that life offers me. Life is amazing. I can't believe it is coming up on 3 years. Sobriety truly is an amazing gift. I have more back now than I ever lost while drinking and using. It is definitely worth all of the work. Truly.