Vicky’s story

I was my biggest and only enemy. The only thing standing in my way to live a full and happy life was me.

I had a normal upbringing with the highs and lows of any teenager. Dad worked while my Mum stayed at home to raise us kids. My two brothers and I were very close, we always stuck together. I was about 17 when the highs seemed to stop and the lows felt endless so I visited my GP who prescribed medication in an effort to make me feel better. I was prescribed these on and off over four years.

During that time I trained as a veterinary nurse and for the first time in my life I felt a passion for something. I felt capable and confident working with animals and I had, I felt, a purpose. It was during my training that my knowledge of prescription medication and their effects grew. I had been educated in school around drug abuse and the types of drugs used, such as heroin, cocaine, hash, etc. so I didn’t ever consider myself to be a drug user. After all, I was on “medication”, not taking drugs. There was never a mention at school about these types of drugs when it came to drug abuse. As far as I was concerned, ME? A DRUG ADDICT? NAHHH!!

But the more I learned through work and the more sleepless nights I was having the more I began to think that I had a problem. It took a while but I stopped taking the drugs, and I believed that as no one was aware of my drug use in the first place, there was no harm done.

Over the year or so I really began to focus on my career, I gave it my all (yeah, Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt), because the reality was I wasn’t coping at all. I buried myself in work and isolated myself from friends, family and the world around me. I had replaced my drugs with work. And it did work for a while. But then my Nana died and my world fell apart. I didn’t want to face it so I turned to the one thing I had learned would make me feel better, drugs.

For the next 2 ½ years, I worked to use and used to work. There were times I’d manage to be clean but it didn’t last long. As soon as I found things too difficult, I went straight back to the one thing that would fix me.

The last year of my active addiction was and remains the worst year of my life. I felt totally alone, no friends, work was the only connection I had to the outside world. I felt worthless and frozen on the inside. I viewed the world as a cold and empty place. I lost my job, and with it all hope I had. I gave up and didn’t care if I lived or died. Drugs were all I had left and I used them at every given opportunity.
In April 2006, I linked in with Coolmine and in June I started on the Drug Free Day Programme. Doing this programme was one of the hardest and scariest things I had ever done. I was under the illusion, that once I stopped using drugs and stayed clean I would be grand, cured! For a while, I had convinced myself I was working the programme, doing what was suggested but found myself getting more and more frustrated because how I felt on the inside wasn’t changing. But I began to realize that I wasn’t working the programme at all. I wasn’t getting it because I was still resisting, still fighting and as the penny dropped I found out what my biggest problem was…

It wasn’t the programme, drugs, people, the world! It was me. I was still fighting with my biggest and only enemy, myself. The only thing standing in my way to live a full and happy life was me. I came to realise this when I stopped fighting, let my guard down and began really letting people in. This is something I had never done before, and it terrified me, but I did it.

Surrendering to a life without drugs is one thing, but to surrender to myself was quite another. But it is paying off, because today I have found a new passion, passion for life. This is something I have never had before. I want to experience life for all it has to offer, both the good and the bad. I still have a ways to go, but I like the person I am today. I am happy with the life I have and very grateful for my second chance in life. More than this, I am forever grateful for the continuing support from my family, my great friends and everyone I have had the privilege to meet while in recovery. I truly believe that regardless of what life wishes to throw my way, with the support from the people I have in my life today, there is nothing I can’t handle.