The Moments That Changed Everything

I think about where everything went wrong more than I’d like to admit. Not in a dramatic “standing in the rain while sad music plays” kind of way. More like sitting in traffic or folding laundry or staring at the ceiling at 2am wondering, “Huh. At what exact point did my brain decide to completely ruin my life?”

And honestly? There are a couple moments that stick out.

The first one was when I was probably 22. Maybe 23. Time gets blurry when your hobbies include jail, blacking out, and making deeply questionable decisions with absolute confidence.

At that point I already partied constantly. I drank every day. I’d experimented with pretty much everything. Weed, coke, meth, crack… whatever showed up to the function honestly. But pills? Pills were different in my mind. Pills were “doctor drugs.” Pills were for people with back pain and insurance.

Meanwhile I was out here smoking crack like a responsible citizen apparently.

I was dating this guy and he had these little blue pills. Tiny things. Didn’t look scary at all. If anything they looked kind of friendly. Like a Flintstones vitamin with a criminal record.

I asked for one because obviously curiosity has always been one of my strongest character defects.

He tried to give me half and I remember being offended. Like sir??? I smoke crack. Why are we acting like this tiny blueberry Tic Tac is going to take me out?

So I took a whole one.

Immediately threw up.

Naturally my response was:
“Give me another one.”

Took another one.
Threw up again.

“Maybe one more.”

And just like that, ladies and gentlemen, the opening ceremony of a 20-year opioid addiction.

At the time I had absolutely no idea how significant that moment would become. It just felt different. That’s the only way I know how to explain it. I had done every other drug recreationally. I could pick things up and put them down. I could binge for a weekend and move on with my life.

This was not that.

I think I took one of those little blue pills almost every single day for years before I fully realized I had a problem. And the craziest part? I didn’t even know what they were called.

That’s how dumb this whole thing was.

The guy I dated lived with the pill man in Florida during the pill mill days, so we had unlimited access to them. Handfuls of these things everywhere. Looking back now it sounds like the beginning of a Netflix documentary where everyone watching is screaming at the TV:
“GET OUT OF THERE, GIRL.”

But at the time?
I thought I was just having fun.

Then I started getting sick.

Violently sick.

Like “I am actively dying” sick.

And my boyfriend would be like:
“You’re withdrawing.”

I was like:
“From what???”

“The pills.”

“There is literally no way. Those are medically shaped.”

I genuinely did not understand what addiction was. I thought addiction meant homeless under a bridge shooting heroin with one shoe on. I didn’t realize addiction could look like a young girl with cute outfits and eyeliner going to the ER every other week convinced she had some mysterious terminal illness.

And because this was back before doctors were really cracking down, every once in a while the ER would accidentally reinforce the problem.

One time they found a cyst on my ovary. Gave me morphine and sent me home with pain pills.

Magically cured.

Interesting coincidence, huh?

Eventually I realized:
“Oh my God. I’m addicted to these.”

So naturally, being the stable genius that I was, I decided to quit cold turkey by myself.

No rehab.
No doctor.
No support.
Just vibes and severe dehydration.

After about eight days without pills I started hallucinating. Badly. At that point even I had to admit maybe this situation had escalated beyond “minor inconvenience.”

So I finally went to my parents and told them the truth.

I went to a doctor and they asked me what I had been taking.

And I said:
“I don’t know. They’re blue?”

The doctor was like:
“…Blue what?”

“I don’t know. Tiny? Round? Bad for me apparently?”

Turns out they were Roxicodone 30s. Roxies. Little blue demons in a pharmacy uniform.

And the wildest part is I had never even built up to them. Most people started smaller. Tens. Fifteens. Normal progression.

Not me.
Apparently I entered addiction like it was a Fast & Furious movie and hit the gas immediately.

My boyfriend eventually got caught stealing from his job and got fired, which was unfortunate because he lived with the pill man and suddenly couldn’t pay rent anymore. Around that same time I had moved in with them because apparently after dating someone for two months I was like, “Yes. This seems stable and wise.”

Somehow he ended up being the one who had to leave, so I just stayed there living with the pill man.

Convenient, huh?

And honestly that should’ve been my first clue that maybe my life was headed in a weird direction.

Anyway, we started dating if you can even call it that. He was awful. Like genuinely terrible. He’s dead now so I guess life handled the Yelp review for me, but at the time it was chaos.

The next few years are honestly a blur.

I did get clean for a while, but he still sold pills and we had this rule where nobody was allowed to do them in front of me. Which sounds very mature and responsible in theory.

Then one day somebody broke the rule.

And that was all it took.

Immediately right back off to the races like my addiction had just been patiently stretching in the corner waiting for its moment.

I didn’t miss a beat either. I was taking three Roxicodone 30s at a time, three or four times a day. Just absolutely obliterating myself on a daily basis.

Oh, and the bars. I'd snort one and eat one when I woke up just to get the day started. Then I'd go to work. Like... who does that??

The level of insanity that comes with that kind of lifestyle is hard to explain unless you’ve lived it. Everything becomes chaotic. Your emotions. Your relationships. Your sense of reality. Every decision feels urgent and catastrophic and somehow also completely normal.

My life was reckless and completely out of control.

I was miserable.

The relationship was abusive in every possible way. There were so many nights with loaded guns involved that eventually I lost count. Black eyes became common enough that I started planning makeup around them.

And then one day I got a Facebook message from some random guy asking if I knew where to find “tens” or something.

Which, to be fair, was not exactly a secret at that point.

I’m pretty sure my response was:
“Lol. Tens are for pussies. Call me.”

And somehow that is how my future ex-husband entered the chat.

What’s funny is I always dated the same type back then. Kind of thuggy white dudes. Tattoos. Chaos. Criminal records used as personality traits.

But this guy was different.

He was country. Redneck-ish. Funny. He made me laugh constantly and, weirdly enough, he was actually nice to me. Which at that point felt suspicious.

We started spending more time together while my current relationship was actively imploding. Eventually the pill man went to prison and me and Cole started dating.

Now Cole wasn’t nearly as experienced with drugs as I was.

Unfortunately I dragged him straight to hell with me for a while.

Eventually things got so bad that he basically had to leave the state to save himself. He moved to Nebraska and about three months after he left we were still talking every single day.

Meanwhile I had started dabbling in heroin and needles and even I knew my life was taking a terrifying turn.

So when Cole said:
“Move to Nebraska.”

I was like:
“Yeah okay. Because that’s definitely going to magically fix me.”

But somehow… I went.

I packed everything I owned into a couple suitcases and moved to Nebraska with a raging drug problem and a few Suboxone.

My first week there I was violently sick. Full withdrawal. Absolute misery.

But once it finally stopped?
I felt weirdly cured.

Like maybe changing locations had somehow reset my brain.

Spoiler alert:
It had not.

I remember one day Cole saying:
“You need health insurance and I need a wife. Let’s get married.”

And I said:
“Okay.”

So that’s exactly what we did.

Very romantic. Truly the Notebook.

I don’t even remember how long we stayed sober in Nebraska before drugs showed back up. It wasn’t long.

We lived right next to Colorado so obviously we smoked a ton of weed. Then within weeks I found someone selling pills because of course I did.

The only difference was Nebraska wasn’t like Polk County. I couldn’t find 30s anymore. Mostly just tens.

But it was enough.

Enough to keep that demon alive for the next few years.

And weirdly enough, from the outside, my life started looking successful.

I got a good job with Dollar General. Worked my way up toward district manager. I was making good money. I had the number one store in my district.

By all appearances I was doing okay.

At least compared to where I came from.

I just didn’t really have a healthy baseline for what “okay” was supposed to look like.

So I ended up giving this girl a job, which several people warned me not to do.

But I’ve always had a soft spot for people who struggle because I struggled. I believed in second chances because most of my life had basically been one long unauthorized second chance.

Anyway, one morning we were working together and she walked out of the bathroom holding a DVD case and a debit card.

Then she licked the debit card.

Now if you know, you know.

And unfortunately… I knew.

So naturally my first thought as a grown adult woman with a management position and approximately zero survival instincts was:
“Well. I would also like some.”

She was a meth addict and before long I started dabbling here and there with her. Just enough to convince myself I wasn’t “that bad.” Which is addict math for:
“Things are about to get substantially worse.”

Then one day a customer came into the store and casually said:
“Hey, you know anybody who’d want some Percocet?”

And I swear my addiction sat straight up in its coffin like Dracula hearing someone open a Capri Sun.

LOL yes, my dude.
As a matter of fact…
I sure do.

Now I had a plug again.

And once that part of my brain woke back up, it woke up hungry.

That’s the scary thing about addiction. It can stay quiet for years while you convince yourself you’re fine now. Functional. Different. Mature.

Meanwhile it’s just sitting in the corner doing push-ups waiting for the opportunity to absolutely destroy your life again.

So I was doing my thing. Making it work. Functioning, technically. Which is my favorite kind of lie.

Somewhere in the mix, Cole, who was working for his family, decided at approximately 38 years old that he wanted to be a cowboy.

A cowboy.

Sir, we are already in Nebraska. Let’s not get ambitious.

We lived in Chadron, Nebraska, which was this itty-bitty, teeny-tiny town with one stoplight. I honestly didn’t know towns like that still existed in this day and age, but apparently they do. And the ranch he wanted to move to was in the town next door, about 45 minutes away.

And by “town,” I mean no stoplight. No real anything.

The house was 12 miles south of Crawford down a dirt road. No neighbors. No friends. No family. Just cows, trauma, and a whole lot of silence.

But Cole wanted to move out there and be a cowboy.

I worked in Chadron, and I knew there was no way I’d be able to make that drive every day, especially in the winter. Out there, if you get stuck, you’re stuck. You can’t leave the ranch. So how was I supposed to run a store and be at work every day if I couldn’t even physically get there?

But somehow, we decided it would be in my best interest to quit my job and move out there.

By “we decided,” I mean I listened every day to how I was a shitty wife and unsupportive because I didn’t want to move to the middle of nowhere and cosplay Yellowstone.

Eventually I gave up.

Fine. Let’s go.

So we did.

And I was miserable exactly like I knew I would be.

No friends. No family. No job. No anything.

Just me, Cole, the dogs, and enough isolation to make a Dateline narrator start warming up.

And then one day, something happened that still feels like one of the biggest moments where everything went wrong.

Because everything before that, as bad as it sounds, still felt oddly manageable. Chaotic? Yes. Dangerous? Absolutely. But manageable in the way addicts convince ourselves things are manageable while actively standing in a burning building saying, “It’s fine. I know where the exits are.”

That day I was outside throwing a stick for Bear and watering my sunflowers. Tending to my little garden. Trying to make this miserable little ranch life feel like something peaceful.

And somehow, the stick I threw impaled Bear.

It was a freak accident. I still don’t fully understand how it happened.

Cole came outside screaming at me that I killed his dog. That we had a problem. That something was wrong with me.

And you have to understand, we couldn’t have children. Our dogs were our life. It was me, Cole, Pablo, and Bear. That was our little family.

So this wasn’t just “the dog got hurt.”

This felt like the whole world cracked open.

We rushed Bear to the vet 45 minutes away. The stick had hit his femoral artery and vein. It didn’t look good.

But he had surgery.

And he survived.

That night, when Cole and I got back to the house, I was so unbelievably miserable I couldn’t breathe through it. The guilt. The fear. The isolation. The screaming. The ranch. The marriage. The life I didn’t even recognize anymore.

I had to do something to make the pain stop.

So I went looking for pain pills.

Couldn’t find any.

But you know what I could find?

Dope.

So I said, “Fuck it. Just give me like $40 worth.”

When I picked it up, they handed me a clean needle with it.

That had never happened to me before.

I had dabbled with needles back in Florida, but those days were done. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I wasn’t even interested.

But I took it anyway, mostly to be polite.

Which is insane.

Like yes, thank you for the complimentary destruction tool. Five stars. Excellent customer service.

I had no intention of using it.

But man, I was bored out there.

Bored, miserable, isolated, and curious.

A truly award-winning combination.

So I Googled how to shoot meth.

And I remember the first day I did it, the day went by so fast. For the first time in that house, time moved. The ranch felt bearable. The loneliness got quieter.

And I thought:
“Oh. So this is the answer.”

And that is how my full-blown intravenous meth addiction began.

Cole didn’t know at first.

Every once in a while, when I could finally get a bunch of pain pills, I would tell him about those and we would get high together. But he didn’t know I was shooting dope.

There were a few times I went to him and said:
“I have a problem. I need help.”

And he said:
“No you don’t.”

So I said:
“Okay.”

Because sometimes it only takes one person denying your reality for you to climb right back into the delusion like it’s a weighted blanket.

Until one day I was sitting outside, fully convinced I was hiding it so well.

And then Cole stormed outside screaming.

He had found my dope.

He had found my needles.

And the secret I thought I was managing had finally crawled out into the daylight.

To be continued.