The first time I used meth was at Birmingham High. My brother Kevin had gone there and people thought I would be like him. At lunch this girl came up to me and we started talking. She asked me what drugs I used. I lied and said meth. We went to the bathroom. We went into a stall, locked the door and she pulled a glass pipe out of her bra and passed it to me and said, “You hit it first.” I didn’t know what I was doing. I smoked it wrong and nothing happened. We hung out for about 10 minutes and she told me to meet her by a tree after school and we could kick it. The next day, I started to get the hang of it. When I smoked I really got high. The world was so different. It felt like I was in a dream. Things I thought I was imaginaing were actually happening. I loved it way too much. Later I was walking home and all I could think about was how good I felt.
I never thought I would get addicted. Seeing what meth did to everybody else, I thought that’s them, I’m a different person. I saw people lose weight fast. Their teeth would rot and they were angrier. I thought I was stronger than that. But instantly, I was using every day. I couldn’t stop. I felt depressed and sick when I wasn’t high. My body told me I needed it to feel better.
I used to be this polite girl—so nice people would take advantage of me. After I started using meth I completely changed. Every day I was fighting people (mostly guys). My knuckles were always bloody. I also wasn’t taking care of myself. I wasn’t eating. I was really skinny. I was like an empty skeleton roaming the world, just taking up space. I didn’t care about how I looked. I would just throw whatever on. I loved to wear tutus. I also remember walking around in a nurse costume with duct tape strapped around me. I had a thing for freaking people out. I would jump in trash cans, say and do anything. I didn’t care how bad it made me look as long as I got a rise out of them. Nothing mattered as long as I was high.
I was talking to people who weren’t there
One day at school I was sitting in the middle of the football field hallucinating. I thought I was talking to people, telling them not to use drugs. School let out and people came outside and saw me. I don’t know how long they were standing there. Then it hit me that I wasn’t talking to anyone. It felt like the whole school was watching. I opened my eyes and saw the world for what it was.
One day at school I was sitting in the middle of the football field hallucinating. I thought I was talking to people, telling them not to use drugs. School let out and people came outside and saw me. I don’t know how long they were standing there. Then it hit me that I wasn’t talking to anyone. It felt like the whole school was watching. I opened my eyes and saw the world for what it was.
Everything I used to love, I hated. I stopped singing, writing, playing sports and being with my true friends. I just wanted to be with people who were getting high.
I lied to everyone to hide my drug use. I only went to school about seven days a month. I made up friends to talk to my dad about so it would seem like I was going to school. I could tell in his eyes that he knew I was lying. All of us were meth addicts—me, my mother and my two brothers. I think he didn’t want to see my life falling apart, so he played it off as if everything was all right. I wish he would’ve stopped me and helped me get better.
Nine months after I started using meth, I overdosed. I was with a friend and she dropped me off on the street not far from my house at 2 a.m. I started walking home. I started hallucinating. It was scary. I was hiding underneath cars and trying to climb on roofs. I thought a swarm of cops and dogs were after me. I was running. I hallucinated that a cop dog had gotten me and that’s when I fell in the middle of street. I don’t remember what happened after that. Someone called the police. My dad was in the ambulance with me. He told me that my eyes had turned yellow, I wouldn’t stop screaming and I kept throwing up. They thought I was going to die.
At the hospital I woke up in a diaper and thought, “What the hell?” I felt like I was back to being a baby. I couldn’t do anything on my own. Two nurses would come and put me on a plastic toilet and I had to learn how to walk all over again. I had messed up my body so much. After I overdosed I thought, “I’ve just been caught for every bad thing I’d done.”
