For 19 years, heroin was my safety blanket. It wrapped around me, numbing the pain I didn’t know how to face.
My spiral began when I was 14. I’d grown up a daddy’s girl, but when my parents divorced and my dad moved away, I felt rejected and abandoned. At 14, I went through a painful abortion. The guilt, shame, and feeling of failure that followed were too heavy to carry. I didn’t talk about it — I just buried it. But inside, I was broken.
I started smoking cannabis, then taking party drugs. By 18, I’d moved on to heroin. At first, I thought I was in control — I could take it or leave it. But slowly, it took over everything. My life became a cycle of scoring, using, and trying to block out reality.
Heroin didn’t just dull my pain; it stole my health, my relationships, my children, my self-respect. Violence and crime became normal. I started injecting, and when my veins ran out, I used my groin. I hated what I was doing, but I couldn’t stop. I slept with men to fund my habit. The names people called me — “smackhead, thief, scum” — became the names I called myself. I believed I was worthless.
In 2004, my body gave out. Septicaemia, pneumonia, and a heart infection left me fighting for my life. I was so ill they called a vicar to read me my last rites. I remember lying there, looking at a picture my son had drawn, and praying, “God, I don’t want to go. I want to see my boy grow up.” The next morning, the infection had dispersed, and the doctors said it was a miracle I was still alive.
That should have been my turning point. But after leaving hospital clean, I relapsed. I tried methadone, subutex, detoxes, counselling — everything. I’d get clean for a while, but inside I was still that same broken woman, so I always went back.
By 2010, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. My mum begged local services to send me to rehab, but they said I wasn’t “motivated enough.” Then, in a waiting room, someone told me about a Christian rehab called Teen Challenge. I didn’t care it was Christian — I just knew I needed to get away.
On 13 September 2010, I walked through the doors of their rehab in Wales. That day, everything began to change. For the first time in my life, I stopped just treating the addiction and started dealing with the brokenness inside me. I met Jesus, and I realised I could be forgiven — that I wasn’t beyond hope.
It wasn’t easy. Recovery never is. But I learned to live without drugs, without drink, and without hiding from my past. I began to see myself the way God sees me — loved, valued, worth saving.
Fast forward 14 years. I’m completely free from heroin and alcohol. I’m hepatitis C clear. I’ve been restored to my children. I’m a qualified counsellor. I walk into the same prison where I was once locked up — but this time without handcuffs — to bring hope to women who are where I once was. I’m married to an amazing man of God, and people who used to spit at me now greet me with respect.
The woman who once thought she’d never be free now knows that freedom is possible. I am living proof that no one is too far gone. No matter how deep the pit, there is always a way out. And that way, for me, was Jesus.
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