Gabrielle S.
DOB: 11/16/58; Bethesda, Maryland.
So I started selling drugs in Junior High School, in Seventh Grade. And that paid for my habit, my acid. I was real into acid.
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When I was two years old my parents had a cocktail party and everybody had gone downstairs into the Rec Room to look at some art work or something that my mother had down there, because she was an artist.
And I went around the party and I like drained all their martini glasses and went into my crib and passed out and mother came in and she couldn’t figure it out, you know, she couldn’t wake me up and I smelled like alcohol. She was really freaked out and the doctor just said, let her just sleep it off. But that’s like my earliest recollection.
And that’s the way I was my whole childhood, just whole hog. I can remember when I was like eight standing in the hallway looking at my parents in the living room, saying, well, I’m nothin’ but a wino. I remember that I used to eat all the vitamins I could, get my hands on. If there was like a bottle of vitamins in the cabinet, I ate the whole bottle. I’ve had my stomach pumped at least fifteen times as a child.
I never learned. I was always doing bizarre stuff, I was always hurting myself. It was really weird, because my mother, I really think that my mother was an addict, and she lived in this fantasy world which was her theater and her poetry and her music.
And she created this fantasy environment for me as a child and that’s what I grew up in. I had — I was completely out of touch with reality my entire childhood.
And my father was like very conservative and strict and I was terrified of him. It just like reinforced the fantasy environment that I lived in. And I had a retarded brother that, stole, lied you know how retarded kids are when they are unsupervised because he was a real pain in the ass.
So I learned all these habits from him. I learned how to lie, how to steal, how to cheat, how not to get caught, ‘cause you know, that was the most important thing, because you can’t — I learned how not to lie so I wouldn’t like to have to cover myself up, you know, so I became really bold.
And I would say well — like they would say, “Gabrielle, where were you this morning? We checked your room and you weren’t in bed.” I’d say, “I went out about 12 o’clock last night and fell asleep on the playground, spent the whole night there,” you know.
And they’d buy it because they just didn’t want to deal with, they just didn’t want to go into it with me, because I would be so brazen, you know. I would stand up to them and say, fuck you, I don’t care what you think.
But it seems like my whole childhood was just like this illusion and I mean a lot of stuff went on over the years, being in and out of the theater, being up all night long, missing school. I would do stuff like I was very, very sensitive and I was real creative and was real into like being straight-up, and I would go through these periods of being straight-up and I would get slapped down.
So then I would totally go to the other end of the spectrum and just become really sly and devious and not tell anybody what I was doing and just totally isolate myself, spend all my time alone.
Then I bounced back and forth like this through my first twelve years of life. When my Mom left my Father and I stayed with my Father I freaked out. Because my Dad, he thought I was a horrible person. He never really had anything good to say to me. And I was terrified of him.
So there was no communication between us. So I started leaving home. I left home when I was twelve. And I did that for a long time. I would get arrested a lot. My Father would say, “Put her in jail.”
My Mother would come and bail me out. My Mother, she was very dramatic. She would like, she always had a young man in tow. She would show up with one of her young men at the police station in a white satin dress, full length leopard skin coat, bizarre animals with her, and people just thought she was really flakey, but I loved that. I liked that flamboyant style she had.
So anyway, I got shipped around a lot. I ran away a lot. I spent a lot of time with a lot of different relatives all over the country. My father lost his leg when I was sixteen. I remember him laying in the hospital telling me they were going to amputate his leg.
And it was the first inkling that I had in my, I think, entire life that he was a human being. Because he started to cry and I had never seen him cry and I thought, geez, he has feelings. I was so out of touch with feelings. I had been that way my whole life.
When my Mom left I started using drugs because I couldn’t to reinforce my fantasy world. I couldn’t deal with my father in what he wanted me to be. And how he wanted me to act. Except my Mom wasn’t there to reinforce my previous behavior. I had to — like he wanted to compel me into this other behavior, and I didn’t want to be that way.
So I started stealing drugs from peoples’ houses. I stole a whole bunch of morphine from this doctor down on Dupont Circle when I was a runaway at one point. And when I went back home to my father’s house I had all these drugs.
So I started selling drugs in junior high school, in seventh grade, and that paid for my habit, my acid. I was real into acid.
That seems to be what my whole teenage life was about: just doing as many drugs as possible, staying out as late at night as possible, avoiding my family as much as possible, avoiding anything to do with the real world.
Just before I turned seventeen, I left home for good and I became very aware of the fact that I couldn’t ever get arrested again, because I was responsible for myself and there wasn’t anybody to bail me out anymore. My family was pretty sick of my behavior at that time. I didn’t realize until that point that I was responsible for myself, when I finally took the decision to leave.
That’s how I lived my whole life, in sporadic jumps. All these major decisions were made in spontaneity and irrational thoughts, but it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I had to go out and support myself.
I had been raised to believe that everything I wanted was going to be given to me. What I found out was I didn’t get anything and that pissed me off. It made me very angry that nobody had prepared me, nobody had ever dealt straight with me.
I was just so fucked-up, I had no grip on reality and I didn’t know where to start.
So I found some guy to support me, started working. He was real into race cars. I hung out with the race car crowd. I went out drinking every single night, hustling drinks at bars, because my boyfriend worked at night. Then I would screw same other guy and I would be home before he was.
I continued that for a long time, for a couple years, then I split. I got fed up with him and split. It seems like I did that a lot.
That’s how I got clean. I did that one day, I was like, well, I think it was PMS, I really do, ‘cause so much of my life was like that. One minute I was fine, sedate, on an even keel, and the next minute I was just insane. And ready to leave. And I would do that. When I left him I just said, take my shit to my Mother’s. And I got in my car and left.
I went to Maine. I stayed there for a long time. I lived with a bunch of bikers in a club house and I got into motorcycles and all their old ladies were strippers. So I got into doing that. I’d gone up there with the intention — I had this one girlfriend that she was a diplomat brat. When I met her she had been a heroin addict since she was thirteen.
She had like a five hundred dollar a day habit, what was considered that much dope, but she lived in Thailand and Bangkok. She got her father thrown out of the Foreign Service because she just kept getting caught with all these drugs — -mandrax and heroin — so she was one of my very best friends in junior high and high school.
When I went to Maine, I went to Maine to see her and when I went to Maine I went with like a hundred rigs because like I was going to do it up. I was going to shoot some heroin. I was going to have a good time. I was like eighteen or nineteen. One of the bikers I was staying with found my stash of rigs and broke every single point. I was so pissed off. So I never did shoot any heroin.
It goes on like that for six more years, just bouncing around. Basically everything that I did in my life that was self-destructive was precipitated by some big emotional upheaval having to do with my family. When my Mother left when I was twelve, when my Father and I got into that huge fight when I was sixteen and I left.
And then when my Mother died when I was twenty-one, I went into a real heavy depression. I started shooting drugs and I did that for like the next six years. I lost touch with everything. My family disowned me.
My lifestyle — I worked for an insurance company and I got so fucked up that I couldn’t work anymore and I shot all this dope all the time and I never left my house, my apartment, and I O.D.‘d a lot.
When I finally ran out of drugs and money, like six months later, I went through about fifteen thousand dollars, then I had no place to go.
I was out on the street. I put all my shit in storage in some person’s garage. I went to stay with some friends of mine. I was pregnant, I had no-money, my girlfriend’s father paid for my abortion.
Which was funny, because he was the city desk editor for the National Catholic News Conference. So it was pretty bizarre. He was a another great enabler for me. I had of lot of enablers. They didn’t want to see me suffer.
Then I decided that I was going to kill myself. I was so depressed and I was living in these people’s basement and it was horrible. It was one of the deepest depressions I have ever been in.
I have always been prone to depression, but I hadn’t been this depressed since I was thirteen or fourteen years old. So I pretty much decided the next day I was going to go downtown and get a bag of dope and just shoot it up, end it all.
It was weird. I felt like I was stepping off into another world. It was like I was ready to just like let go of the trappings that I had and move on. That was my thoughts, to move on. The next day this girl just called me out of the blue and she worked for a phone fantasy company. She said, come to work for us, and I made cash bucks and it kept my habit going for another two years.
It sounds kind of twisted but I really feel that was my Higher Power at work in my life. My Higher Power has been there through all, everything, all the hell that I have lived through, every place I’ve been, all the alleys that I slept in, you know. I think that’s the only reason that I am still alive, is because of my Higher Power.
Because there are just so many situations in my life that I should not have lived through. Not just drugs, but I mean being in bad situations, making poor choices, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, consistently. I never so much as had anyone put a finger on me. I mean I’ve lived on the streets since I was a kid. No one ever touched me.
It was like that my Higher Power saved me from myself. Even though I just went on with my existence, I went on. It goes on like that. There’s lots of circumstances like that. I seem to go on. When I was ready to quit, something just propelled me forward past that point, past that gap.
One day I woke up and I was really — I was just in a lot of pain, emotional pain. I was working a straight job. I was out of the escort business. I was out of the phone sex business. I was working as a courier, shooting a bag of dope every day, drinking a lot of booze, living with one guy, fucking this other guy, and I woke up and I felt like there was no hope left.
I felt like I had lost touch with my Higher Power, my guardian angel, the thing that kept me alive for so long. I felt like I was just gone. There was no contact there anymore. You know what I mean? Have you ever had that feeling, a conscious contact?
It was horrible. I left, and I went over to my friend’s house to buy a bag of heroin and I was sittin’ there in the living room and I was thinking about, you know, what I was thinking about was that I had been to some meetings where clean addicts were sharing about their recovery with this friend of mine, like the year before with my ex-husband, and I remembered what they had said about the progressive nature of the disease of addiction which leads you to jails, institutions, and death.
I remembered these stories. I heard some sick stories in those meetings. I thought these people are really sick, they are really fucked up, they talked about ripping off their friends, being hookers — all kinds of shit — and when I was sittin’ in Frankie’s house I was thinkin’ about my options.
Which were to continue working as a courier and start working on K Street to make enough money to supply my habit, because I wasn’t making enough money to supply my habit and pay my bills, but I was making a lot of money, but it wasn’t enough, and I sat there and I thought about that and I thought about going back to work for the escort agency that I used to run, as one of the girls, and I thought — I think my ego got me clean at that point. I couldn’t do it.
I went to the phone and I called a friend up who was clean. He was asleep. He got up, came out and met me at a meeting. And I started going to meetings. I came to this meeting on K Street. I was really afraid — harsh and cold. I looked like a hooker. I would go into a bar and everybody thought I was a hooker because I had that hopeless, frustrated look.
The next night I went to a meeting on Connecticut Avenue and it was an anniversary meeting. Someone was celebrating a couple of years clean from drugs. And it just blew me away. I got up and picked up a white chip and I was crying. I had the desire to stop using drugs. I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. I could just cry. I felt like this was my last chance. My very last chance.
In a way now that I have been clean a while I feel it is my very first chance, because today I know what reality is. Today I know what being responsible is, and I know I have emotions and I have feelings. I have friends. I am not alone anymore. I am not in the dark. I’m not bricked up, in some way really suffocating. I’ve shut down so many things in ivy life, when I was using drugs. I shut down my creativity and my hope and everything.
At a very young age I decided that I was never going to lose control of my emotions, lose my temper, let anybody know how I felt, and I never did for twenty years after that. So I missed a lot. I am bitter. I think I am very bitter. And I work on that. That’s like the hardest thing for me now, is to not be bitter, but to be grateful. That’s weird, don’t you think? That’s weird, to be at odds like that.
But most of the time I am pretty positive.
I need to be positive. To grab on to life. Today I still consider suicide and I still think about it. It depends where I am at — if I am in a spiritual plane — if I am working on being in touch with some sort of spiritual aspect of my life.
A lot of time I feel like I am not on the ground anymore and I have just lost my center, and my ground, and I feel like I’m just ready to go off into space. Sometimes I feel like I just want to kill myself and go ahead. Just to like release and go ahead and then there are other times that I am feeling sorry for myself, I just want to kill myself because I need the sympathy.
Thank God I don’t have to do any of that shit anymore. I don’t think I will ever stop thinking about it anymore. I never stopped thinking about getting high, I asked myself a lot, almost, would say, on a weekly basis. I would ask myself: someone like tie me down and offer like me a needle -full of ready drugs to do — would I do them? And I used to say: well, gee, I don’t know. I don’t think I should be in the same room with water soluble chemicals.
And today I feel like I know, the answer within me, within myself, within my heart, but I still like junkies. I used to hang out with junkies. I like their attitudes. I like their extreme “isms,” I guess. I don’t feel so apart when I am with other clean addicts that are recovering.
I feel connected. Living outside of society for so long — it was so destructive. And I am still real prone to that, just isolate myself and live in my own little world and kind of revert back to that fantasy land that I grew up in. That everything is peachy keen and Mom and Pop are real happy. That was never really true.
I think that the symptom of middle-glass America that everything looked good on the outside and it was all shit on the inside. My family was very into looks and appearances for everything. And what happened at home you just didn’t talk about. My friends I used to gall them because I never lost my temper,
I never lost control, I never got too drunk, I never got into trouble for anything because I never got caught. It was like I was so, into control, and I learned that from my family. Don’t ever show anything. “That’s sick. my friends would goad me. How are we going to get her?” I could go on for hours.
I felt a lot of pain as a child, I was always in the middle because my retarded brother: protecting him from my family and protecting him from the kids in the neighborhood, protecting him in school, protecting myself from ridicule. You’re weird when you’re not perfect. That’s the way it seems when you are a kid. I think now I can be perfectly weird. You may not be perfect but you’re perfect for me. My life before is so removed from me now.
So I have two viewpoints. I can look at it like the way I looked at it when I was living it or I can look at it the way I can look at it now, with information, in recovery, and understand it. So it’s like feel it or understand it. So every time I look at it I see something different. All the crying out I did as a kid, all the rejection which today I understand. I understand where the rejection came from.
I feel sad for the child that was crying out for help, but now when I look at it, that way, don’t feel like it is me anymore, because it’s not today. Today’s the only thing I can, handle really, I have hopes and I have plans for the future and stuff like that. But today is where my emotions are centered.
Today is where I have got to be constantly vigilant in my behavior, right now, ‘cause right now I could die right now. Sure I could die yesterday or tomorrow, but right now is where I am concerned. It’s what’s happening in the moment that makes it.
I had a lot of drive and I used to have a lot of dreams. Today I feel like I have compromised. I shuffled all my dreams away as unreal, as part of that fantasy existence, kind of like into the mundane drone syndrome of the daily humdrum existence. That’s new experience too. Would rather talk about todays rather than yesterdays. They’re more positive.
It seems as though my Higher Power does stuff for me. A lot of my dreams — passing fancies really, totally unrealistic things, have come to pass today, are real today in my life, stuff that I never expected to happen. Stuff that was just too far fetched. I get surprised on a daily basis, just continuing. I feel like if I continue to put in, to contribute to this spiritual net that I am a part of, that I will continue to receive.
But that’s not really even a condition, because I have always been on the receiving end of that. It comes from my guardian angel. I feel like I talk to my, Higher Power a lot. I feel like they are listening to me all the time, and I feel like they’re testing, but that they’re teaching me and testing me at the same time. They’re giving me experience tests.
And how I come through them determines my self worth.
It’s a lot of unformed beliefs, that I have about my Higher Power. I believe that my Higher Power has always been there, has always been loving, has been in the heart of my Gods.
Because I have always reached out to them one way or another. I have always sought spiritual growth. In the Seventies spiritual growth was LSD, you, know. In the Eighties it’s the new age, which is okay. That fits into any line of thinking.
I feel real safe and centered when I am surrounded by water and I feel a real contact. I get these half formed ideas. I get these thoughts, like I was reading the other day in this book which is about Welsh lore and Irish lore, where it talks about, like, the dark side of our minds, you know, the little cynical part of us that says, “Ah, you don’t want to trust this guy, he’s really a schmuck, what you want to do is rip him off and take his money, roll his ass, dump him, and get the hell out of town.”
And it occurred to me when I was reading this book, that what it was really talking about was the good and bad aspects of ourselves. The little voices in our minds that weigh the pro’s and con’s of what’s going on, on a daily basis. But in the book it was written up in the form of these little pro’s and con’s where gods were demons.
That’s the way I kind of look at my Higher Power, as God’s pieces. Beams of light that are forever enfolding me in their arms and they are forever enfolding the people that I love, that are alive and the people that are dead that I still love, that are still there in force and energy, because they are in my heart. When I am in need, I reach out to my Higher Power, and I say, “Help me, I don’t want to be alone. I need something.”
I say, “I need this. I need a new couch. I need a new work truck. I need a new carpet. I need a new rubber.” I don’t say it with force, like: “Give this to me.” It’s more like: “This would be nice. This would make me be happy.” Sometimes I get it, that’s what really freaks me out. Most of the time I get it, whatever it is, in the back of my mind that I have been desiring.
I have never worked for any of these things. What I mean is, I have never cajoled or connived with my Higher Power, or traded or made deals to get what I wanted. It was just laid upon me, put in my path, made available to me. I am not saying it was free. A lot of times I had to pay whatever was required. But it was put in my path, It was put there for me to use.
That’s the feeling I had that first night, that first night I decided to get clean, that it had been put in my path, that this was even though I had reached out, that I had done the work to get these, that had been made available to me by my Higher Power. And so in that respect, it was God given.
A lot of people maybe would say, “Well, you did it yourself. You made the phone call. You found the information.” It really wasn’t like that because the will that got me there wasn’t my own and the will, the same thing that happens on a daily basis, like when I want a new couch, which happened the other day.
I wanted a new couch for six months and I went to visit a friend. Said I felt bad about it because I hadn’t visited her for a while. And she had just bought a new couch, so she gave me her old couch which was brand new. And kind of like what I mean, a lot of stuff is just put there for me. Here, take it.
And everything in my life is a choice like that. I didn’t have to take it, it was my choice. It was a desirable choice. That’s the way my recovery is. It’s always a choice. Today, though, my desirable choice for me is most often the right choice because I have learned that doing the right thing pays off, feels so much better than doing what I want.
So that becomes the desirable choice for me. When I have my fears about the future, that’s what I think about: the desirable choice and the fact that I have learned to have faith that tomorrow can’t possibly be any worse than today. And that whatever happens tomorrow is what’s going to happen tomorrow, and that I will be there. The worst thing never ever happens. That helps me a lot. I tell myself that when I am scared.
I am lonely, the phone rings. It saves me from myself. I don’t like to talk about my dreams. I am afraid of my dreams. I haven’t worked that out yet. Why I don’t want to think that I am afraid of success, I don’t like to sabotage myself today, but I am afraid of rejections, or I am afraid of failures.
I am afraid of trying and failing. So l leave my dreams alone. Because I don’t think I would rather have them as a dream than as a failed reality, because in fantasy at least you can live on with it. Once it is real for me, it’s real.
The last thing I want to talk about is my family. It’s a constant. It’s like a little bee buzzing around in my helmet, stinging me on the face and stuff, making me cry. I don’t like to talk to them because I always get upset because they are so entrenched in, they are so much of my past.
They are the past for me. And the past is pretty bad. So when I call them I tend to bring that up. It becomes present. It becomes present through my recollection, but it also becomes present because they are still living in it. They are still living in that old behavior.
And so what I am working on today is just letting that go. I do not mean being irresponsible to my family. I’m always there for them if they need me. But I have stopped expecting anything from them. Today I don’t desire, out of bitterness and anger, to get back at them by taking things from them. I would much rather just give to them.
It’s kind ok fun too because it shocks them that I can actually have a conversation with them and not like cuss them out and freak out, and can actually contribute, deal with them on an adult level. But that’s rare. It doesn’t happen all the time.
I feel better when I just don’t talk to them at all. I’m writing them letters, telling them everything is fine, and telling them my little successes of the day. Letting them know that I care. I can’t let them in because they set off a chain reaction of self destructive feelings in me. That’s very hard for me to deal with. I don’t know how to explain it.
I have just come to the conclusion that I just need to leave them in the past and just go on! They haven’t supported me for fifteen years. I don’t know why I should get the illusion that they are going to support me today, emotionally or monetarily. I’ve got some goofy ideas.
When I got cleans I had this bizarre idea that I was supposed to be everything my family wanted me to be. And what I found out is that I am supposed to be me. That’s not what anybody wants except for me. That is my greatest gift today, is me. I have gotten that. It is kind of exciting.
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