Catholic Life Ministries

By a friend of the Fontanas who wishes to remain anonymous

I’d like to briefly share my struggles with drug addiction and the road that led to my recovery in the hope of inspiring anyone who may be struggling or knows someone who is struggling.

I am middle age and a software engineer by trade. My childhood was a tale of two cities. On one hand, I was blessed to belong to a very large, supportive, and loving extended family. But on the other hand, at home, in a low-income neighborhood, my immediate family was very dysfunctional. My mom and biological father separated when I was a baby. My mom remarried and my stepdad became my dad. My parents divorced when I was 5 years old, and my siblings and I were left living with our single mother who struggled financially with a minimum wage job and four young kids to support. She then married a physically and emotionally abusive man, got hooked on cocaine and crack.  From there our home life was filled with chaos, violence, and pain. Mom died from a drug overdose when I was 13 years old.

After she died, my siblings and I went to live with our father who had remarried a woman who drove a wedge between him and our family. I wasn’t fond of her, and began to act out. I was putting a strain on his marriage, so he told me it was best that I leave. I called up my grandparents and moved out at 16. He and I are still estranged to this day.

I started to smoke pot. My weed use led me though different social circles, where eventually I met a girlfriend who introduced me to meth. I immediately loved the euphoric feeling it gave me. It suppressed all negative emotions and only amplified positive ones. There were no more feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing.  This revelation then inspired me to try anything and everything else I could get my hands on; crack, cocaine, heroin, LSD, mushrooms – you name it, I consumed it in abundance. My late teens and 20s were a complete blur, oscillating between addiction and sobriety, my grandma’s house and slapdash living arrangements, unemployment and various odd jobs like a delivery driver, auto mechanic, and bus boy.

Miraculously, during one of my sober stretches (imposed by a very bad DUI conviction), I graduated from the university with a degree in mathematics. Shortly thereafter, I landed my first professional job as a business intelligence developer.  I was dating someone again, but a week before my first day at the company, the perfect storm happened. My girlfriend and I broke up, and while in despair I bumped into an old acquaintance with whom I used to do drugs, and we smoked some meth. From that day forward, every day for the next 5 years, I was a full-blown meth addict.

For a while I was a high functioning meth addict. I would crush it up and mix it with some juice or coffee that I’d keep at my desk and just sip all day long. I used it every day – before work, during work and after. While everyone around me was moving forward in life, getting married, having kids, getting promoted, going places – I was content just standing still, hunched over a computer screen in a corner, getting high and writing software. At the end of the day when all my colleagues returned home to their families, I returned to a drug den to get high with very bad people. I was under the illusion that they were the people I belonged with, the unwanted, the outcast. That’s the narrative I force-fed myself, and eventually believed.

This went on for 3 years. A day came when I was barely functioning at all. I would go days without sleep and show up to the office with pupils so dilated my eyes were black, barely able to string together complete sentences. My personal hygiene had gone down the drain, not showering or washing my clothes. I started to skip important meetings with executives, missed critical presentations, and disregarded important deadlines. And my attendance started to slip.

During all this time, my manager, who was a very empathetic person, had tried his best to reach out to me, as he obviously sensed something was profoundly wrong. He repeatedly made efforts to help me – vacation time to rest, flexible scheduling, new projects to work on. But it finally came to the point when one day he took me into his office and gently fired me.

My addiction had fully metastasized and taken over my life. I hung out at dope spots, getting high and going nowhere. Within 6 months I was completely broke. I had burned through my savings and was 80k dollars in debt from maxed out credit cards. My car was repossessed. I was borrowing money from as many people as possible and not paying them back, burning bridges left and right, flaking out on anyone who still bothered to be in my life. I had reached a point of total desperation, as I had an insatiable drug addiction, and no money to buy drugs. The only vestige of stability left in my life was living at my grandmother’s house, but I managed to screw that up too when I stole from her to buy drugs and was kicked out onto the streets.

My life was a living hell surrounded by the walking dead. I was homeless for an entire year and ran around with addicts, dealers, felons, thieves, and convicted murderers. I slept in green belts, gutted RVs, backyards, front yards, cars, tents. I did whatever I could to get dope. I had multiple encounters with the police. I knew people who died from gun violence, suicide, and fentanyl overdose. My entire life revolved around one sole purpose which was to acquire meth.

For a while I had accepted my fate because I truly believed I possessed no inherent value as a human. In a way it was all a penance, a restitution for being unworthy of love, and for bringing shame upon my family. But from time to time, I would reach out to certain family members with a borrowed cell phone just to maintain a tether to the land of the living. Sometimes I’d talk to my brother, other times my cousin. Late one night as I was walking aimlessly through the streets, I had the epiphany that I had hit rock bottom, and it wouldn’t be long before I was either in jail or dead. I realized I wanted to live and so the next day I called my cousin, and he helped set up an intervention with my extended family. This intervention included my biological father who was a big part of my recovery.

After the intervention, my family generously put their money together and sent me to Mexico to receive an experimental treatment known as Ibogaine, which is one of the world’s most powerful hallucinogens, derived from a tree bark indigenous to Africa. It’s an intense therapy where you are administered a large dose and then monitored by nurses in a controlled hospital setting as you hallucinate for 24 hours straight. It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. At first, I relived the most painful events of my life, but later in the trip the fear slowly faded away into acceptance, forgiveness, and finally a deep peace that I’ve carried with me to this day. Ibogaine was nothing short of a miracle drug for me. I’m happy to see that its applications to not only addiction, but also depression and PTSD, are becoming more well known.

When I returned to my family my lovely aunt and uncle graciously allowed me to stay with them.  They housed me, fed me, helped set up outpatient treatment, treated me like their own child. After 4 months there, I moved into a halfway house where I lived with other recovering addicts, gradually easing my way into independent responsible living. Within 2 months I landed a job as a data engineer and had my own apartment.

Fast forward 8 years and I am still sober. I’ve paid off 100k in debt, got another car, gone through numerous promotions at work, and recently bought a house. I was able to reconnect with one of the guys I knew on the streets and started sponsoring him. He’s been sober for 3 years now and has completely transformed his life. Most importantly, I repaired my familial relationships, including my grandmother whose heart I once broke.

It’s a wonderful feeling to be loved by so many people. Rather than having 2 parents, it’s like I have dozens, which is pretty special. In the end I realized that love is the one redemptive force in the world, and family is its purest form. From love extends all good things in life: forgiveness, redemption, peace, sobriety. All it takes is for one person to love someone else, to show that person they are worthy of love and in doing so, perhaps most importantly, teach that person to love themself. Luckily for myself, I had dozens of beautiful people to teach me: brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, nieces and nephews. 

I am also especially grateful for my siblings, who, having gone through the same painful experiences I had, were much stronger than I, and managed to process and overcome their pain without succumbing to the pitfalls that befell me. Their strength is an inspiration to me.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

God Bless.