Fighting Her Way Back - An Interview with Rachel

Rachel's^* drug use started out as a way to "have a life." She says, "Even at age eleven, there was this huge emphasis on having a life. If you don't have a life and you're not cool, you're nothing.

According to Rachel, drinking made her feel accepted; she believed it was something she needed to do in order to have a cool and exciting life, a common misperception among youth. "The kids who came to school drunk and acted loud and crazy looked like they were having the most fun," said Rachel. However, her experimentation quickly grew into abuse.She smoked, drank heavily on occasion and tried virtually everything that was introduced to her. "Parent-teacher conferences went from 'Oh your daughter is the perfect child. ' to 'We're really worried. Maybe she should go into therapy.' I wasn't happy anymore," she says.

Rachel was sent to boarding school, and quickly struck up relationships with other students who used drugs. She even began taking prescription drugs, given to her by a friend, to self-medicate her depression. Despite the fact that Rachel knew that things weren't right, she still felt like she had everything together. To her, life was fine because it appeared that way on the outside. "I felt like things were getting out of control, but I rationalized (that I was OK) because I was a preppy, cute little freshman," she says. "No one ever thought I was the kind of person who would do drugs and I hid behind that."

After being expelled from school on her 15th birthday due to a drug-related incident, Rachel became extremely depressed and started visiting therapists. In their evaluations, no one even thought to mention drugs as part of her problem. "We were told that any kid who doesn't experiment with drugs isn't normal, and that I was just unlucky because I got caught," she says. Unfortunately, they didn't realize Rachel's 'experimentation' phase entailed smoking pot three or four times a day.

Spinning Out of Control

Rachel eventually returned to boarding school and to her prior drug behavior--she experimented with Ecstasy and began to abuse cocaine. Her life quickly began to spin further out of control and the image of perfection rapidly deteriorated. At one point, drugs took over every aspect of Rachel's life. "My best friend quit the crew team so we would have more time to do coke together, but while she was still on the team, there would be some days she would have our supply of coke," she says. "I would sneak in the boathouse while she was at practice, go through all her stuff trying to find it, go into the boathouse bathroom, do some lines, and then put it back in her bag and never tell her. It was the only thing I cared about."

A drug arrest finally put an end to her charade of normalcy. "I was driving 60 miles per hour in a 40 m.p.h. zone on a Friday night (with my friends). I had tons of drugs in the car. I was asking for it, but I figured, 'Okay, we'll get a speeding ticket. It's no big deal.' My basic attitude was, 'I don't care. I'm not worth anything. I have nothing to lose.'"

"The police officer asked everyone for their ID. My friend kept the cocaine with her ID in this tiny four by nine inch Louis Vuitton purse. If she opened it, he would see the bag of cocaine, so she said she didn't have an ID. The police officer saw her purse and asked, 'Whose purse is that?' She tried to open it without him seeing, but he spotted the cocaine and said, 'Okay, this is now a drug investigation. You're all under arrest-I'm going to have to handcuff all of you.'"

Looking back, Rachel is glad she was arrested that night, "Frankly, I'm grateful I was arrested because I had no intention of stopping anytime soon," she says. Rachel and her friends were caught with five tabs of Ecstasy and about an eighth of a gram of cocaine, enough for a felony charge.

Getting Her Life Back on Track

Two weeks later, Rachel was enrolled at the Caron Foundation, which offered a 28-day residential treatment. "Lots of people came in angry and acted out, but I had long ago adapted to looking nice and smiling and saying 'hi.'" I dealt with things by being very together on the outside.

These very qualities enabled Rachel make the most of the treatment process. "I identified with all the AA books we were given, all the packets we were given. I enjoyed talking with the other girls there, talking in group, going to local AA meetings. Caron was the first place I learned about addiction and latched onto it. They said, 'You have a disease. These are the symptoms.' I checked 'yes' to all of the symptoms. They said, 'This is what you need to do' and I said, 'Oh!' (It finally) clicked for me. Of course, you can talk the talk, but it's harder to walk the walk. But I was really looking for something to save my life and this seemed to be it," she says.

She also realized she wasn't alone. "For me, the best part of Caron was becoming friends with people my own age, which I hadn't done in a while. I also started to realize that the feelings that I felt and the things that I had gone through really weren't unique," she says.

"When I came out of Caron, I joined Phoenix House's IMPACT program, which is a group that requires two-hour meetings with your peers twice a week and one meeting with your parents on Monday nights. I also went to private therapy and AA meetings. The Phoenix House program continued my education in addiction and started working on the emotional, which of course is a never-ending process even for people without drug treatment," Rachel says.

When asked what made her commit to getting clean, Rachel replies, "I don't know if there was one instant. It was more that I began to see how I could feel and what life could be. The more I faced my drug problem and other problems, the more I realized that if drugs were in the picture I would be unhappy. I never wanted to feel that way again. I wanted to have a life, and I learned at Caron that drug use had cost me my life."

"I wrote an essay for Phoenix House that included the line 'as long as I don't pick up a drink or a drug, the sky's the limit.' I certainly feel like that today," she says.

^* Name has been changed.