The Girl With Nine Lives

As she stared down the barrel of a sawed off shotgun she had the euphony that her life needed to change or she was going to end up dead in a gutter or spending 25 years to life a federal prison.

That was 7 years ago but it seems like a completely different life. It was a completely different life, a completely different person. It is also one of my clearest memories. I am well adapted to blocking out most of those years, most of the time.

There was the shotgun in my face, the man whose name I can’t remember standing next to me, and the fact that I had to climb over a roof to get to the door. I remember his face, him sitting in my art room - tweaking out on some project, but his name escapes me. If I saw him today I wouldn’t recognize him. One of two things happens to the people I know from that time – they end up looking like the walking dead, eyes hollowed out, pick marks all over there face, ratty and unkempt; or they clean up and pack on some weight. The only ones I recognize these days are the ones I knew before we all ended up as addicts.

I remember the moment that I died, figuratively speeking, and was given a new life to start over with, but that is another story for another day. Although it was an entirely different life, I remember far more clearly then I would like to. I need to remember the day I had a gun pointed at my face with crystal clarity because that was the day I made the choice to save myself. No one will ever save you from yourself that is a choice that can only be made by an individual. After you make that choice there will always be help available if you ask for it. I’ve never been one to ask for help though.

Everyday I am in contact with wonderful people who never screwed up their lives like I did. I shouldn’t have either. I come from a middle class family where I was loved, I didn’t get everything that I wanted but who really does, my parents cared where I was and who my friends were but they were never over barring about it. I got my first car at 14 and got to drive all by myself to school. I lived in a good neighbourhood, was allowed pets, and have no complaints about my childhood. It’s the exact same story of so many of the students in college but for some reason my path took a detour through a darkened part of the woods.

There will always be closed-minded people who will judge me because of my past and I have judged myself with those same thoughts. I have spent years wondering how I was so lucky to get a chance to start over. Part of it was my ability to fallow the “fake it till you make it” theory and I was really good at it. Somewhere between then and now I really did make it and it had nothing to do with luck.

Your thoughts about what’s going on in the here-and-now and what will happen are formed while looking through the lenses of your past. It has taken years for me to break the haze of those old lenses and accept that what I have accomplished had nothing to do with luck. Your past experiences make you what you are today. That past has made me a strong person who works hard and fights for my goals and what I believe in. I may not be ready to embrace my past but I have finally accepted that I shouldn’t be ashamed of it. It shows how strong of a person I am and how hard I work to make my life better and more amazing everyday.

I was on a path that would have lead to 25 years in prison and I turned my life around. I have had the opportunity to be an RA, join a sorority, be the ad staff manager, get involved in campus, I volunteer on a regular basis, I have swam at the Great Barrier Reef, cuddled a koala, hand fed a kangaroo then ate one for dinner, I have been to the Van Gough museum and visited an old soviet block country, Paris, the Vatican, Pompeii, Athens, and have seen so many marvelous things. I got to do all of that because I made the choice to change my life. To bad it had to be a bad situation during a part of my life I wish I could erase. Without knowing the bad I wouldn’t work so hard to make my life extraordinary. It happens to be true that you can’t have the beauty without all the bad stuff, too. Ying and Yang.

This also proves that people can change. I won’t even listen to an argument against this because I did it. I changed.