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Recovering from substance abuse

Apr 4, 2017

Description of the following video:

For several years, I suffered from a substance use disorder and I’m currently in recovery. My addiction looks unlike most other people’s. For me, I come from a great family, two great parents. Fast forward, a couple years, I graduated. I had internships and I had a great job.

I lost my job, went through a really rough breakup. And one thing that I’d been doing for quite a long time at that point is I’d been medicating myself. So many in the media and so many people in the public don’t realize that number one, this is a chronic illness.

This isn’t something that you just take a pill for it and it goes away. And number two, it is something that is treatable. After my sixth overdose I finally had the humility to accept help. So I was humble enough at that point to say, I don’t know. And that’s when everything changed for me.

The only thing you need for recovery is humility. One thing that I’ve come to accept is that most change is uncomfortable, and I had to be okay with that. In my recovery, in that discomfort is where I found my passion in helping people. So for the past, little over two and half years, I haven’t used any drugs or alcohol.

And for most of that time, I’ve been working with people with substance use disorders and mental illnesses. Change is a team sport, at least it’s best played that way. I recently enrolled in IU’s master public health program at the IU Fairbanks School of Public Health. The cool thing about the School of Public Health and public health as a profession, there’s so many directions you can go, and there’s so much good that can really be done.

And my hope is to be a part of that change.

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