Nadége I
I was a whore
I deserved it that’s what I kept thinking while this guy was hitting my face
and raping me…..then I left my body and thought
I’m going to die here in this unknown field on unknown grass spattered with mud and blood
Then I thought of me little and of my favorite tee shirt and the orange skirt that moved
when I walked and how I loved to wear them together even though everyone said it clashed….
but I didn’t care , I thought of the smell of my town and the church where I hid laughing in the back….
then I would taste the blood in my mouth its ok I thought cause I won’t live to remember this I know this is it ….
funny how life is you see….then I went off again …my brothers smile his death my grandfather’s abuse the noise in the restaurant where i grew up….
more blood taste in my mouth and no strength to even fight
So that’s how you die 20 needles in your bag middle of the night field grass mud blood in your mouth wondering if anyone will ever know
The footsteps of everyone in the stairs of my childhood the fear I always lived in maybe this was all over
This blood taste good…….. I hope I will die
Here is how it all started
I grew up in France in a little town.
I was only a baby when I was taken to a Foster family and felt fear for the first time I remember being on the floor crawling and feeling terrified, and this was to be my childhood life, fear every single day.
I started being abused by a Foster family member didn’t say anything because I thought it was my fault, I was around 7. Its much later that I realized it wasn’t but the damage was done.
Nightmares at night and dealing with it during the day. Also when I was 7 my real father and mother started coming back in my life I instantly hated my real father
and my real mom and was in even more fear because now I was afraid they were gonna take me from my foster family the only refuge I knew even with the abuse . What if they never brought me back?
I basically leaved in fear and what I did to deal with was cutting myself with glass….
I didn’t know where I got the idea and how it started but one night I was standing there on the top of the sink with blood dripping in it,
it was a relief that was all I knew . Life went on like this in fear and wanting to find something that would stop me from feeling…..
I was 12 when my reel mother took me back and what I feared the most happened and I thought it was all gods doing .He hadn’t listen to my prayers
and right then I stopped believing in god and thought I was really alone, me against the world so the sexual abused stopped and my reel mom emotional abuse started….. I used to cry in my pillow at night for my foster mom to come and get me
and I waited each day for her to come but she never did…When I was 13 , my real mom just left the house and didn’t come back leaving me with one of her boyfriend.
The boyfriend called my real dad after 2 weeks and I was put in a house for delinquents by my own choosing the choice was my real dad or the house for delinquents.
Here I am with a bunch a girls my age and older all abused or abandoned and lost. Everybody wanted to not feel…
I found alcohol and pills then I found drugs by the time I was 15 I was doing heroin and I was staying in a room by myself given by the government where I saw a social worker once a week that was it.
Life went on cutting myself and doing drugs and alcohol until I fell on the floor….I had found something that made me not care about anything and I loved it, I pretty much decided this was what I wanted and if I died it was fine.
Whatever I went though was ok if I had enough drugs to shut it down At 16 I was in love with a guy older than me I got pregnant
and after wrestling with it for 2 and a half month I decided to end the pregnancy, I didn’t want too
and it sent me even more over the edge and using a lot more. I ended that relationship when I met someone else.
Then I did the relationships drugs rock n roll. Always met anew guy before leaving someone so I was not physically alone, yet I felt alone all the time
and different and kind of being outside looking in but not a part of this world, with the huge noise made by the gaping sound of silence.
At 18 I met a guy who was doing drugs too and there we went walking into the sunset…..
he ended up beating me up for 2 and a half years at the same time with traveled all over Europe selling paintings door to door drinking a lot and doing heroin whenever we could we lived in Antwerp for a while the dope was good there
and often we went to get it in Rotterdam We knew we had a problem but thought heroine was it we didn’t know we were addicts we didn’t know about addiction
we didn’t know we were the problem and the drugs and alcohol were just symptoms so we kept trying to stop heroin while drinking until we fell, and sometimes doing speed,
anything was good if we didn’t do heroin we thought but drinking and the other stuff always got us back to heroin. It was already cleared that we were powerless and couldn’t stop
After getting arrested and thrown out of the country in Sweden. I decided to leave this guy realizing things were not gonna change and he was beating me up more and more,
I was bleeding every other day and I had decided I wanted to stop heroin for good and realize my dreams I left my extremely romanticized town of Antwerp
and went back to Annecy my small town in France, I took codeine pills to get over my dope habit and was hired to do a little radio show on a pirate radio…
for once I had no man. it lasted a month then my best friend man got into town and one drunken night he asked if I would go to NYC with him for free
I was like hey duh of course YES YES YES, never mind the fact that I didn’t speak English I was ready for the states.
We left a week later we like to have fun so we drunk and did cocaine a lot everyday really from 4pm on still under the delusion
that as long as we didn’t do heroine every thing was alright, not knowing about this disease living in the head cunning baffling, powerful.
New York was great and beautiful a while we partied everyday went to studio 54 and Danceteria and after hours club….I felt young and was pretty and insane and all that was good in my book we painted the town red as we used to say,
my blood was boiling inside cocaine and alcohol was my daily diet, but everything was ok as long as we were not doing dope…I almost got raped one night and got raped another but that was not because of my using I thought.
No it couldn’t be because I went into strange cars with strange man because they were offering more cocaine….
Nightlife day in day out for about a year and I still didn’t speak English when Pascal my friend was called back to France. He was to leave in 3 months finish the apt on park ave and the partys everyday without him what was I gonna do
Well in the mean time we decided to do heroin just once…..then twice then all weekend then we were hooked again. Pascal asked me to go home with him to France but I wasn’t having that I decided to stay even with no house no job and not speaking English.
Started a really dark period of me using and strong out in the streets of NY sleeping in Hallways and Tompkins square pan handling, until someone told me about dancing
Then I started to dance in bars and make money but I wouldn’t pay for hotels .You see all my money had to go to drugs
because there was never enough drugs, once in a while I would stay in a hotel but I mainly worked double shift from 12 noon til 4 am then I went to after hours and all night coffee shops to shoot up my drugs.
I was shooting heroin and cocaine and I was crazy all night crazy all day constantly looking for a vein, already not finding any and I was only 23.
One night I was at danceteria and some guy told me I should go to a meeting with him, he explained a little bit what an AA meeting was and I said I would check it out, it took a couple of months
but one day I went and now my English was better and I understood some of the stuff they were talking about and felt like there was some kind of magical thing going on there
even though I didn’t want anybody to hug me and I was a rebel I still saw something…..
I wasn’t ready to do all that stay clean and sober, not for me I am French I need to drink red wine its just not possible to stop everything so I went and listened once in a while
I started meeting some people and I was interested by a guy who was going to NA, that was enough to keep me going and they took me to breakfast and dinner and sometimes let me stay at their houses.
I didn’t understand the disease part of it and couldn’t fathom what the steps were about and you couldn’t mention God to me without me screaming
and all hell breaking loose. But I kept going, I used and I kept going I even used in the bathrooms of NA but went to the meeting.
It took 2 years but I eventually got clean started to go to meetings got a sponsor and for some odd reason stayed clean and sober 6 years
Yes this would be great if it ended there but it doesn’t after 6 years I got into a big depression
and stop working the steps and doing some key things of the program. One day I took the burning desire and left to go back to drugs.
I was 30 and entered hell from day one. The drugs were not working anymore but I kept going.
For 2 years I kept dancing even thought I was getting fired from everywhere there was still a couple of clubs who let me hang
but my looks were fading away my arms were infected I was loosing teeth and finally the last club told me not to come anymore…
I was left with this junky room I rented and no more work then everybody kept saying I should go down to 12th street were all the junkies sold themselves
and I couldn’t take that step for a while until one day I finally gave in
and I remembered walking to 12 street thinking OMG I m never gonna live that down this will kill me this will steal my soul….
and I took that dreadful step and became a prostitute me a prostitute I kept thinking OMG OMG OMG and it was horrifying from day one
and for 6 years day after day night after night was shame anger fear jails institutions
and expecting death. Wanting death, demanding death that was what my prayer was if there was a god please take me so I don’t have to live another hour of this life….
I got arrested 7 times, raped twice, nearly killed if I hadn’t jump out of a car on the FDR drive
Lived in fear of being arrested beat up or worse every minute of the day…..I lived in a middle of a thousand needles in my room,
and mice’s jumped around me. I couldn’t stop my arms were just big gaps of blood and puss
and I would stay hours trying to find a vein and ended up shooting in my neck.
Then came that day where I got raped violently and thought I was going to die in that field
and I didn’t stop there I went on another 3 months got arrested again until the day where my right leg started to hurt really bad
and I kept going a day later my leg had swollen and I was dragging it behind but I didn’t stop I stayed like that another 2 days until I was immobilized and couldn’t move my leg anymore
I then crawled to the wall and banged to call my neighbor and have him call someone to bring me to emergency. Once there I yelled at everyone to hurry up and fix my leg cause I had to go.
They took an x ray and told me what was wrong with my knee, there was a needle in it that had infected my whole body.
I said fine take it out but they told me I needed to be on IV with antibiotics for 15 days before they could open my knee,
I screamed at them to take it out right now I wanted to leave but they anesthetized me and I woke up at 1 am in a locked detox floor of the Bethesda hospital.
I was furious and screaming for methadone and telling everyone I wanted to go but it was useless.
They gave me methadone and codeine for my leg and it worked alright, I was so tired I thought so so tired, so I came down and just went along with the hospital after all I had a bed a TV a phone that I started using.
Yes I was calling people I knew were sober like something in me still wanted to survive after all this.
My friend Craig hinted that NY wasn’t a good place for me right now
and what did I think of going to Florida appalled me, in Florida hell no, but after arguing a few times, I realized he was right
and if my friends wanted to help me get down there and pay for my trip and halfway house maybe just maybe I should give it a try.
I did go down there hated it fought the program only to embrace it later I finally met an awesome sponsor, I did the steps and had a spiritual experience, where I knew god was in me and nothing has felt good as that ever .
Read the big book of AA with my sponsor it became my bible when you read that book with someone that knows it, it becomes alive and means something.
I then turned around and sponsored other women and ended up working in treatment where I am the best person I can be. When I help another alcoholic or another addict.
After doing all that I had stayed sober 10 year but addiction wasn’t gone
and when I decide to move back to France it came back, as soon as, I stop going to meetings after 2 years in France, I chose to take a drink thinking that now I could drink like other people around me at the time.
Well not so with me I am an alcoholic and can NOT use anything at all. I think I now know.. The idea had to be smashed.
I also know that if I stop going to meetings or work with another alcoholic or stop doing any of the suggestions given to me by the program I will use … I can not forget that
I got remain grateful and because I have a bad attitude problem, the easiest thing for me is to do is a gratitude list on paper.
I have tendencies to isolate I have to watch this or
I will start thinking and with me thinking is not good. I am sober again it has been a long road.
Doing the steps is NOT an option, it’s an everyday must for me. I was hardcore. I must be just as hardcore in my recovery, praying, and meditating is not an option either.
I seeked God like has been suggested and read some book.s I have come to find a God that works for me, sometimes it has a name, sometimes it doesn’t. Over all its God, and he loves me, just the way I am.
I practice giving my will over to him. I got to remain grateful,
and because I have a bad attitude problem and the easiest thing for me is to do a gratitude list on paper….
It works
I have learned how to forgive and that includes me.
Now about all the shame I could have….its a funny thing I realized one day that
there was in me, in my soul, this pure spot that nothing could touch
and was, as innocent, as when I was a kid, I feel it sometimes when I pray. I hear it when I laugh,
and when I love unconditionally, it’s there and it’s a big and brilliant light
and I know it’s in each one of us.
email now ! to Nadége I
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