Annette G.
DOB: 5/2/58; Baltimore, Maryland.
Now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Click Here for Addict Out of the Dark and into the Light – 14_Annette.mp3
I guess I thought I was insane, because I come from a very insane family, and it would have made sense that I was just insane and that I was also an artist and realized that my kind of disease was very acceptable among my friends.
Although the friends thinned out over the years because I became steadily more and more crazy.
Well, I guess I should start off by saying my name is Annette and I am an addict, because if I don’t say that I won’t get as much out of myself as I want. The only reason I am alive today is because I could finally admit that my life was unmanageable and that I am powerless over my addiction.
I knew that I suffered from some kind of disease, but I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t think there was a need. I guess I thought I was insane, because I come from very insane family, and it would have made sense that I was just insane and that I was also an artist and I realized that my kind of disease was very acceptable among my friends. Although the friends thinned out over the years because I became steadily more and more crazy.
I picked up my first drug when I was eleven. I loved it and swore I would never put it down. I was into basically at that time alcohol and speed. So whatever kids can get. And I felt I needed something and didn’t know what it was because I felt abnormal. There was something wrong with me, and I always felt there was something wrong with me. I felt very confused about a lot of things.
I can remember as a child being very part of things. I was born the way I am and perhaps I inherited part of this from my parents, or maybe I always was just this way, or the environment that I grew up in. But I always was very violent. I was always beating my little brother up which was trying to kill him really.
I felt always very extreme about everything. I always thought that people knew me when I’d walk down the street. This was when I was a little kid, like four or five. I was paranoid. I was just really fucking paranoid, and I thought that I was going to be a star. This is another thing I was obsessed with, thinking that I was going to be a star: rich and famous and successful, everything, you know.
And I also felt that my parents were trying to kill me. I had — I thought my mother hated me. I was convinced that my mother hated me. I tried to be close with my father and it sort of lasted until I was five years old and then it turned around on me and everything got really shattered after that. It later developed into a sexual relationship between me and my father. It went on from the age of nine until thirteen.
From the years five to nine, when there was nothing sexual happening, I was going through all these feelings of wanting to kill my parents, wishing something would happen to me so I could die. Not knowing what I was going to do, feeling very confused, acting out a lot, stealing a lot, skipping school, causing trouble, always in trouble. I didn’t stop getting in trouble really, in that kind of trouble, until I started using drugs.
So that’s why I felt that using drugs was for me. Because I felt that I had a disease that required medication for my symptoms and I felt I had found a way to function. So the drugs enabled me to feel like I could function like other people. And I liked the people that I ended up with as a result of using drugs because nobody was prejudiced, nobody was.
It seemed like everybody shared on the same level and I came from a very prejudiced neighborhood that hated Jewish people. I was constantly getting harassed for being Jewish. My brother was always getting beaten up. They used to try to beat up my parents. It was really insane where I grew up.
So I just had a very negative self image and when I started getting high I just became part of whatever I was part of, hanging out, like doing everything that you do when you are high.
Well, things started getting really bad in my house, like me and my father’s sex got more intense and sick and fucked up and I was charging my father money for this and that’s one of the reasons I . . . It was like my mother was a very intense feminist, but she hated my guts, so it was like I couldn’t get support from her. So I used to read my mother’s feminist books and I would always talk about prostitution and I used to think that it was all very confusing.
I am growing up in a very Catholic neighborhood, there were no Jewish people around us, so I would go to church, worship the Virgin Mary. Then I would go home and charge my father money for sex, you know, and not thinking there was anything wrong with any of this.
And during the time I was just using drugs and skipping school and fucking up and just doing everything I did and it just got more and more crazy till I finally got so frightened of my father that I went to Family Court because my father tried to have me arrested because I kept running away.
So I finally told somebody what was going on and at first nobody would believe me because my father is a physics professor. And they thought, “Well, you come from a nice Jewish family, you know, your father is an intellectual. People like that don’t do that shit.” This was in the time when nobody talked about that shit.
So I ended up being put into a detention home. Later I got put into a girls’ home and I was around people much sicker than me and I started using drugs more, just getting sicker and sicker and sicker, till a point where everything was messed up.
It was like totally messed up and they were going to send me away to this institution upstate and I was really nervous and scared and I felt that I had to get out of this country because I was being destroyed. I didn’t know where I was going to go. I thought to join the Army maybe and go to Germany or some weird shit like that.
I never felt like I needed school. I couldn’t concentrate ever in school and didn’t know why. I thought I was stupid, I really did. My father told me that I was stupid all the time. I believed him. But then later I came to find out it was all the drugs, the alcohol, the cigarettes, everything. I was destroying myself. I didn’t realize it because everybody around me seemed to be doing the same thing.
Well, I tricked my mother into giving me the address of some relatives in New York. The thing is, we were very cut off from the family because everyone felt we were outcasts.
Anyway, my mother was always pretty out-to-lunch and my father was pretty out-to-lunch. Nobody in our family got along with anybody, so I had to trick my mother into giving me the address of one of my aunts. And I did that and then I told her that I was living in a Catholic home.
I could say that probably my whole Jewish family is sick because they are in tremendous denial. I come from an upper-middleclass Jewish family where, you know, nobody does shit like this, they are in denial. You just go to an Orthodox school. You get a job as a case worker, get married, and fuck you, you know.
And if they found out that I was in a Catholic girls’ home, which I was in, that was like the worst thing that could ever happen to me. If I got sexually abused or whatever, that was nothing compared to the idea of living in a Catholic girls’ home. So of course I told them I was living in a Catholic girls’ home and they became — like they just overreacted of course, and they decided to send me to Israel to a religious school.
And so I solved my problem of getting out of the country. I didn’t have to join the Army and I thought maybe I would go to Israel for two weeks and come back to New York City because that’s what I really wanted to do. That’s not what happened. I ended up staying in Israel for two years.
But in that time I couldn’t take my relatives, so I made them put me in this — it was like this treatment center for emotionally disturbed young adults. And in that place, it was drug restricted. You weren’t allowed to do any drugs or shit like that. And I managed to sneak them off and on while I was there but I didn’t use them that much.
But during that time I did get a little better, but I was still pretty dysfunctional because it was a religious type of school in a way and the psychiatrist there was very religious and I guess I don’t know what it was, but I guess he didn’t want to accept the fact that I came from a very abusive household.
Therefore he was not able to help me and about the only thing I learned there was how to cope with other people because it was like a lot of group therapy and I had to live with other people, which was real hard. I was very dysfunctional. Even when I was living with girls in this girls’ home, I was constantly getting into fights and stuff. Because I came from the Addams family. My parents were so out-to-lunch.
I went out into the streets and took my behavior from home out into the streets with me. It was like I was going out there and speaking another language. Aside from the fact, I guess, when I was having sex or something, I don’t even know how to make this clear, but I became terrified of life situations because of always trying to do the right thing and always messing up somehow, not knowing why.
So I stayed in Israel for two years and I finally got my relatives to send me back to New York and the psychiatrist there suggested I go home and try to forgive my parents and try to live with them and go to school. And I tried to do that even though I knew what I was getting into. I thought, let me give it a chance, let me keep an open mind.
I went back to my parents and my father started trying to like get our sexual relationship going again and my mother was having nervous breakdown after nervous breakdown. At that point it was, you know, my father was like attempting to beat me up for not doing what he wanted.
So I moved out, tried to go to college, and I dropped out of it in three months and moved to New York City and he took all my tuition money, Went to New York and decided “fuck everything straight,” I am going to become a performer, the way I wanted. I had been doing music my whole life but I wanted to go to school. I wanted to be straight. I wanted to keep myself from being crazy because I was crazy already and somehow I wanted to be functional as a rebellion against what was going on in my life.
But it didn’t work out, so I took all the money I had from college, went to get a normal job in New York City, like as a cashier, playing in the clubs, doing my — I was doing like sort of just rock music, me playing guitar and singing my own original music, and doing cashier jobs and shit like that.
Nothing worked out. I kept losing jobs because I just couldn’t cope, I really couldn’t cope. So I went on welfare. During all this time I was using drugs. I don’t know whether the craziness, or whether they are all linked, but I went on welfare. I tried to get on SSI.
I couldn’t do that so I eventually met somebody in the entertainment business who was into S & M. And he was somebody who I respected, who was a very successful movie person, and I thought, if this guy can do this shit then I can. I also felt that God didn’t put my father in my life if he didn’t want me to be a dominatrix, which is what I became. I decided — it took me a while to get used to the idea because I was afraid at first because I had also been brutally raped the first time I had sex with anybody else except my father.
Okay, so I really didn’t want to get into sexual situations because I was too afraid, but I learned after being in the S & M scene for a while that people wanted me to abuse them. So I thought, what a perfect business to go into. So I steadily over the years got more and more into this, but unfortunately in order for me to continue doing this work I just had to get high more and more, in the club, and I just got very confused.
And what happened as a result of continuing to do the abuse to other people, I became masochistic myself and I started wanting people to abuse me. So the whole thing turned on me and I became very, very masochistic and I got more and more high, more and more sickening, everything got twisted.
I really just kept doing it. I could not stop. And all along I was pursuing my music too, which saved my ass in a way, because I was so afraid that if I put myself all the way into the S & M scene I would lose my ability to do music.
I lost my ability to do music down the line further when I started getting more and more into coke, heavily, but it took a while, it took a while. I think some of the decisions that I made while I was high led to things that made me so depressed I wanted to commit suicide.
So that led me to doing more drugs and being more masochistic also. Everything was a big surprise to me. I tried many times to control my using drugs but I wasn’t capable. I tried having functional, straight boyfriends from Wall Street. I really tried to change a lot of locations and scenes and things, I really did try. I tried many times.
I became a very strict vegetarian. I was reading lots of philosophy. I was really, really trying. There was never an answer. I couldn’t relate to anybody who was straight and I was very confused about my sexuality. So I met this guy who was gay and he had like a very bizarre story.
So I heard somebody who I identified with on a very major level and it gave me hope. It was very strange for me, very strange for me. More and more as I go on I realize the truth that it’s scary to face the reality, that I don’t even like to face this, ‘cause a lot of times I try to lighten myself up.
But I really feel that I am definitely here for some higher purpose, and it’s not for myself because I feel like I was in so many situations where I could have been dead. Not only that, I feel like I died when I got clean. And that I am only here a day at a time in recovery. I feel a very tight connection.
It’s very serious with me. There’s a lot of insanity going on in my head and a lot of paranoia. It’s hard for me to relate to people and feel a part of. I never used to realize how bad I felt about the things I did, how guilty I felt about a lot of shit either.
I’m coming up on three years clean. I made a lot of friends but I never really let anybody get that close to me. I never thought I was worthy of anything. I never thought I had anything to give. But I just tried to take suggestions and actions that were suggested to me by other clean addicts. I really tried. Even though I didn’t want to.
God, I don’t want to sometimes. I wish I was just this machine that could like create music, perform, fuck, get high, you know. I just want to be like this fucking blob with no feelings. But I know that when I go through the growth that I do get something out of it for me. And I like to be honest. I like to be real. It’s not that I don’t mind other people being phony, whatever. I don’t like to judge people, but I mean I like to be honest.
So that means that I also believe I can change by practicing positive thinking and stuff. But I don’t believe in lying about who I am, and if it makes somebody reject me or hate me I feel that it’s good for both of us.
I do believe that trying to really believe that there is this Higher Power of the Universe and that everything happens for a very good reason. Everything’s healing. The reason why I guess I said that I feel like I died every day when I got clean is because I’m not really afraid of death, you know.
I spent the first two years clean being afraid of dying of AIDS, you know, because of all the sex and shit I was involved in. But when I got over that I realized that it wasn’t, that wasn’t the real fear.
The real fear was letting go to a Higher Power and that I was only here but for the grace of God. I’m not saying that in a religious way. I’m saying it in a — I feel that when I die I’ll just be moving on.
I feel that I’ve lived a beautiful life if I look on it honestly, without judging it. I’ve had an amazing life. I’ve forgiven my parents, knowing that — taking actions that were suggested and hearing other people with my same exact story, very few, but knowing that the pathway to just a higher quality of living is through love and forgiveness and letting go and all this.
You know, I’m insane. I still act out. I’m getting on these fucking lines. I’m crazy. I have a lot of fun. I’m always writing shit down. I really take recovery seriously and the people that are in my life, I really value.
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