Whenever people ask me how it all started for me, or how'd I end up at this point in the first place I for some reason always find myself scrambling for explanations in my head, never able to really find or for that matter want to find the reasons why.

It’s hard for me to place my finger on the origins of my problem. There were no traumatic experiences growing up, there was no rough home life, there was no difficulty fitting in. The bottom line is there is no excuse for my actions, and one thing I learned in the past 4 years is that addiction doesn't discriminate.

Whether you are from Harlem or from Marlboro, whether you're rich or poor, whether you had a great childhood or a bad one, addiction doesn't care. It can take anyone with them at any time, blinding you and brainwashing you with your own lies and excuses until you forget who you even are in this world. For a while I had no clue who I was in this world, with a heroin addiction that had me clutched tight in its claws, I thought I was never going to make it out alive.

I remember thinking to myself, "There's no way I’m living past the age of twenty-five," and being perfectly okay with that. In the past year or two my life has gone through some dramatic changes, and looking back I can't believe I once had that kind of mindset.

The story I am about to begin will have extreme highs and extreme lows. It will either give you feelings of joy and hope or feelings of disgust - which I am perfectly used to by now. Maybe at the end, you'll feel a bit of all those. This is my story of how I became an addict, how I went through my addiction, how I came out of it ten times stronger, and how I will battle with it for the rest of my life.

As most people know, or can assume, drug addiction is a very hard thing to overcome.

To me, an essential thing in conquering a drug addiction is getting a rough idea on what started your drug usage in the first place. Now, believe me, I spent years trying to figure out what exactly started my addiction problem, and I still don't have any straight or completely real answers.

The only conclusion I’ve come close to making about my origins of usage is that it started long before I ever even picked up my first needle. I was always a shy kid growing up and always got embarrassed very easily whether by friends or family. I’ve always had anxiety issues and compulsive problems when I was younger up until about the time I hit middle school, which just so happened to be the beginnings of my pot smoking days.

Unlike most kids in school that start smoking, I was not peer pressured into doing it at all. At the time I was playing a lot of guitar and had idols such as Jimi Hendrix, Slash, and Kurt Cobain. I loved the whole "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" scene at the time, and found myself getting more curious about the drugs part.

I remember specifically depicting the older kids that I knew smoked and going up to them and spontaneously asking for it. I smoked the first couple times by myself but couldn't get the hang of how to do it, until I brought it to school one day, and asked the kid in the bathroom I was with, (who was a known pothead), how to do it. This is where all my bad luck began, and where my life went completely downhill for the next seven or so years.

As soon as the janitor walked in and caught us I knew I was a dead man.

The only thing I remember from that day is my father coming to pick me up at the middle school and taking me straight to a barber shop to cut my long “hippy” hair off my head as if that was going to help. From now on I was known as the “pothead” of the school and mind you I only started smoking a week or so before and hardly even got the hang of it. Every parent in town was telling their child to “stay away from that kid, Dom Arena.”

I guess you can say something in me wanted to say screw it I’m going to live up to this new name. The next three years of high school was constant battling between me and my parents over drugs. They would catch me smoking and ground me and constantly search my room and search me personally when I came home. I don't blame them at all for these actions or even think it's crazy that they did that. My parents just loved and cared and didn't want me getting into trouble.

Mind you though, at the time, I didn't see it as that and looked at it more as a war or battle that I had to win. I wanted to outsmart them and sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. This is around the time I started using synthetic weed (K2) so it wouldn’t show up in urine because by this time I was on probation for about a year and 9 months for weed possession charges.

My junior year of high school I was sent to a TC in Morris County for adolescents with drug and behavioral problems. I couldn’t stop smoking weed for the life of me and failed every urine test probation given to me, so this was the punishment for that. I can spend a lot of time telling stories about that place to you, like about the pot head wannabe gangbanger kids from Paterson and Newark, talking about fighting and robbing, or about the strung out kids coming off of heroin and pills, with their glorified stories of how awesome their drug of choice is.

Instead, I'll break it short and just say I spent five months living there and I came out a completely different person than I was when I walked in.

My mom and probation officer decided it was a good idea for me to start my senior year in my hometown high school. Within the first week, I was out of that place I was researching the effects of drugs like acid and heroin and coke. I’ll never forget the first time I found the bravery (or stupidity) to do heroin, and how I manipulated a good friend of mine to drive me to “go get something.”

I vividly remember being nervous as all hell shaking the yellow-brown powder onto a Lynyrd Skynyrd CD disk, heart beating fast as hell. I went down and snorted the line before I can think another thought of regret and it hit me within ten minutes. It wasn’t strong at all compared to smoking a joint or doing the K2 so I was somewhat confused. One thing it did do that those other drugs didn’t, was take away every thought I had in my head and leave me with a peaceful carefree quietness that I soon fell in absolute head over heels love with.

Just like every other good drug addict tells himself, I told myself I was only going to do it once. This actually remained true for awhile (mostly because my parents, the very first night I tried it, got a tip from a friend of mine that I tried it and they completely flipped my world, as you can imagine) but eventually I was back to my old battling ways with my parents, hiding things and always finding a way to get high. I would start off only snorting it and doing it spontaneously when I had extra money, but this eventually as most would have assumed turned into a full-time, everyday habit.

I'll never forget the first time I felt sick from a withdrawal. I knew I was in for it from that point on. I decided then that I wanted to live up on that cloud that the drug puts me on and never come down and feel as horrible and miserable as I felt at that moment withdrawing.

Throughout my senior year, I would go on month-long runs where I would do it every day and then get caught by my parents and be forced to quit until I gained back their trust. Basically, I had no real desire to quit.

Eventually, high school let out and I was finally a graduate. School always let out around my birthday which is June 23 and I was hanging out with the wrong group of people on the night of my eighteenth birthday. The reason this day has so much significance to my addiction is that this is the first day I used heroin intravenously.

I don’t know what gave me the courage to do that, but I specifically remember thinking in my sick drugged demented mind that “this is the day I become a man.” I don’t wanna glorify it because that’s just unnecessary and useless. But I will say that I personally never felt love for anything as much as I felt that rush.

Now that I passed the borderline of “snorting” to “slamming," things started to really go downhill for me. School was of very little importance to me because I constantly needed money. In order to do this, I put school aside and began to work full time. I needed the extra money to support my growing addiction. I went from using one or two bags a day to five or six and on top of it, gas, cigarettes and on occasions crack. Usually, my parents would have a problem with me dropping school, but at this point, they had given up and stayed out of my business and life. I guess you can say at that point “I won.”

During these runs of using I would wake up every morning sick until I shot my first bag of the day. Eventually, I would preload a needle at night and keep it on my bed stand so I could shoot it as soon as I’d wake, get out of bed, and start my day.

Of course living like this comes with a lot of dangers whether it’s getting mugged when you’re going to buy or of course, overdosing. My mom found me one time overdosed in my bedroom when she came home from my brother’s soccer game. She woke me and had my dad drive me to the hospital. Looking back I can’t believe what I put my parents through. To find you first born son that you once knew as a little child, who lined up action figures, loved superheroes, and now your finding him at 18 years old passed out on a couch.

I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for letting my mom see that.

Soon enough I was a full blown junkie (if I wasn’t already.) My gas light was almost always on, I never had a dime to spare, and I was up to thirty or more bags a day. At this point, life was a blur and I literally lived every second of every day to get high.

Without the drug, I was absolutely nothing. It was also at this point I started stealing or selling my own belongings. This is where it gets ugly because you literally lose everything. I’ve sold everything from my guitar to drums, to televisions, to my mom’s gold jewelry. Once my mom caught me stealing my families belonging I was kicked out on the streets without a friend around because I was a horrible person to be around. All my friends knew how mean and nasty I'd be on that stuff and they never would let me stay over.

I can’t blame them. I wouldn’t trust a drug addict in my house either, especially to show in front of my family. Eventually, I found a buddy that would take me in for a week. I basically used this week to get as high as possible because I knew what was coming...rehab.

By the end of the week, I sold every valuable thing I owned and ran out of options. I went home and told my parents I was ready to go away. It was the first time I was throwing in the towel, which will bring me to my first rehab experience. This is where my mind begins to gradually change and evolve from a mindless zombie to a functioning human being.

My first rehab was beautiful and resembled more of a five-star hotel than a rehab. It was located in Lancaster, PA and was far away from home. I was only there for detox which is a ten day period where the nurses will give you medicine to help with the detox. I’m not going to act tough and lie and say I was a man about it because I wasn’t. I was petrified from the second I walked through the doors.

And if I thought I was scared then I wish I would have known how scared I was going to be when I woke up in the middle of that first night...with no drugs in me at all. I woke up drenched in sweat and shaking from being cold. I was crying but wasn’t even really aware that I was or why I was. I stumbled down the hall to the nurses’ station and begged them to give me something to help and again and again they denied me because I had to be checked by the doctor before the medicine can be administered. The first three days were absolute hell and I don’t really remember getting out of bed at all, except for one time to smoke a cigarette. I wound up passing out anyways on the floor outside and they brought me back to bed.

Once I finally restored my body, after the lack of nutrition for months and months, I started seeing the counselors there and going to all the required meetings.

At first, I was extremely nervous around everybody there. It was a big rehab and had many residents who came from all over the east coast. I immediately became friends with my roommate who was an older gentleman who played guitar and loved to read just like I did. Whenever I started to freak out and have anxiety attacks I'd talk to him and he’d always calm me down. Whether we would play pearl jam songs and jam out on our guitars, or whether he gave me words of wisdom and experience, he always seemed to help.

Even with the help of my new friend I still found my heart racing every day with all these new sober thoughts that never seemed to occur to me when I was using.

"Where am I going to go from here? What is everyone doing back home? How’d I even get this bad in the first place?"

Even my counseling sessions weren’t going well. They consisted of me just complaining about how badly I wanted to go home, and telling my counselor, “I’m good to go, Nick. All I had to do was get over the sickness.” Little did I know that overcoming a withdrawal is the easiest part in quitting heroin, it's everything that comes after, that is the hardest.

Every day I'd call my parents and try and manipulate my way back into the house or have them come pick me up, with the answer of course always being no. They knew I need more than seven days of treatment to recover from my addiction, and they weren’t budging. In my head, at the time, I was left with no other option. I had to just sign myself out and go on the run. I left the rehab on my tenth day there, on one of the coldest days in November. I had to walk from the rehab to the closest diner (only about 2 miles long) with a huge duffel bag in one hand and a trash bag filled with clothes in the other.

When I got there people immediately started to recognize my unfamiliar face and just by the way I carried myself, and all basically already knew I was probably a runaway from the rehab that resides in the small town they live in. I used everyone’s phone possible to call my friends and some family members (definitely not my parents.) Once again all my friends knew what was best for me, and wouldn’t have any part in coming to pick me up. One of my good friends I called wound up telling my parents which set them into a worrying outrage.

At around midnight an older couple wound up buying me a night at some small motel up the street ran by these Indian folks who would never wear shoes when they walked around, even outside in the freezing cold.

That whole night I was scared of mice or rats because it looked like the kind of place that had these creatures living in it. It was the first night I also didn’t have any of the Subutex, which is what I was being administered at the rehab. Because of this, I was up all night not able to catch any sleep at all. I kept sweating and then getting cold again. All I remember is going back and forth to the bathroom sink and wetting a rag with cold water to put on my body to cool off.

I woke in the morning to the TV, playing sympathy for the devil by the rolling stones. I remember getting dressed and blasting the song from the TV set and trying to find some significant meaning or resemblance in the song and my situation but I couldn’t. So I jammed out and left the room to head to the center of town. Here I met a Puerto Rican guy that gave me a ride (after I told him my circumstances.) He let me tag along with him while he went to the barber shop so I could use his phone to call my friends and beg again.

I wound up called my cousin, who then called my mom, who then called my new Puerto Rican friends phone. She begged me to go back to the rehab and calmed me down with loving and gentle words that were also very encouraging and intense at the same time. I remember hanging up the phone, still not sure what my final decision was going to be, and hearing the barber's voice trying to get my attention. With his very sharp Hispanic accent, he told me a story about his cousin back in Columbia that had a bad cocaine addiction. He said all I need to do is go back to that rehab and pray to God and eventually he'll make everything ok for me. So I took the barber's and my mom’s advice and called the rehab.

It was embarrassing having them pick me up on the side of the road. I got in the van and remember the driver saying welcome back. Not in a rude or snotty way, but in a warm and embracing way. He was once an addict and understood the struggles and impulses we as addicts go through to satisfy our immediate desires and needs. So once again I got an inspiring and head lifting speech, this time presented by the guy sent to drive me back to the rehab. When I got back I stayed another night or two and read the entire time, and thought about things to myself a lot.

My counselor called me to his office and announced to me that I was going to be sent to a recovery house in Trenton, NJ. Now, I didn’t have a clue about what a recovery house was until I came to this rehab. All I knew was that it was a place that addicts lived together and that it had fewer restrictions than a rehab. So I was very excited to be getting back to my home state, and even better having fewer restrictions. I left the rehab that night and was on my way to my first recovery house, bottling up the most mixed and confused feelings I ever felt. I didn’t know whether to be excited or nervous, scared or safe, happy or sad. It was an anxious car ride, to say the least.

When I arrived we pulled up to a bug Victorian house right off of West State Street in Trenton. It was surrounded by a set of apartment buildings, the main highway and a school. I walked out of the car and was immediately greeted by the owner of the house. His name was Allen and he was a tall man of big stature and did construction work. He owned two recovery houses at the time, a boys' home in Trenton (where I was about to live) and a girls' home in Levittown, PA. Right from the start, I could tell he was a loving and caring guy that was very serious about his sobriety and helping others maintain theirs. He wasn’t in it for the money or investments; he was simply running these houses for the sakes of saving others lives.

When I went inside I was shown around and met everyone in the house. I was about to be living with twenty men that I didn’t know at all and I’m not going to lie I was extremely nervous. Everyone seemed nice and no one seemed to be crazy or insane so that settled me at first. I was, of course, the youngest one in the house being eighteen and everyone else being between the ages of 27-55, except for Craig who was 20 at the time.

Craig approached me immediately after I was done signing in and doing all paperwork with the house manager, brain and of course the owner, Allen. I remember him asking me if I wanted a cup of coffee and making me a fresh cup in the kitchen. Once it was done brewing he asked me if I wanted to go in the smoking room downstairs and talk. I was a little thrown off at his niceness at first, but somewhat comforted by it at the same time.

When we got downstairs we started talking and he told me his story of how he was addicted to shooting dope and coke and how he came to this house from jail for drug charges. He was six months sober at the time and didn’t try and act like he knew all about recovery or changing, but it was clear in his stories and the way he talked that change and recovery were worth it to him. We talked for hours about everything you could imagine. We probably would have kept going on and on, until he got up and said it was time for us to hit up an alcoholics anonymous (AA) meeting which is a requirement for the recovery house rules. I put my 10th cigarette of the two hours we were down there out and walked up the stairs with not a clue what I was getting myself into going to one of these meetings. The only thing I knew was that Craig seemed like he was on the path of figuring himself out and becoming a normal human being. What I didn’t know was that this AA program was going to change my life forever, in better ways than I could have ever imagined.

I remember arriving at the first meeting and seeing all the addicts and alcoholics gather around and hug each other. I looked around and tried to picture all these people using drugs or being raging alcoholics and just couldn’t see it. They all just looked like regular people that you see every day in the world when you’re at work, or in school, or at the mall. Most of them even came dressed in suits and dresses coming straight from their jobs. It was weird to wrap my mind around. People that once lived a life like mine and becoming normal? I didn’t know why everyone was so happy and smiling and conversing and hugging each other then, but I soon came to figure out the answers to these questions I had once again running through my reckless but slowly recovering mind.

I lived in the house day after day, still wanting to be home, but slowly getting used to my new living situation. I began making more friends and creating new bonds with each individual I lived with. Craig always remained my closest friend throughout all of this. About a week in I met three more people that I soon became very close with. They came on the same day from the same rehab. Most people in the house considered that alone to be a sign of trouble, saying that they are going to isolate from the rest of the house. When John, Matt, and Drew arrived they did isolate themselves. They were young and I always hung out with them and was accepted. John was a musician like me and introduced me to many different kinds of music. Drew was my age and was small and funny as hell to be around. And Matt was a calm redheaded kid from New York that always slept. We all had a lot of fun nights in that house hitting up meetings and learning about the program. We also spent a lot of time playing card games like spades or watching movies all together at night. It started becoming a new kind of family to me. Each person had the same problem I had. None of us could touch drugs without going out of our minds crazy and falling into a deep hole of misery and most likely death.

I started getting really into the program and listening intently during every meaning. I noticed the change in my overall happiness within myself. I mean here I was living with 25 men in one house sharing two bathrooms. I had three roommates and I was completely happy and content in my life. As a matter of fact, it was the happiest I’ve been in years.

John and I started playing music together on a regular basis and soon had a very tight friendship. He was a little older than me at the age of 24 but always got me and what I was saying or going through. We had a lot of things in common with our families and our backgrounds. I could tell he was a troubled at the time and didn’t know exactly what he wanted with his life. It happens to every addict in the beginning stages of recovery. You don’t know whether you want to live this happy life, sober and a little boring, or the numbing life of being a junkie and not having a care in the world. As a drug addict, the most distinguishing characteristic is the relentless need for instant gratification. We want our lives to improve immediately when we get sober. We want to see the changes instantly and be satisfied with our efforts and we overcame struggles.

About three weeks into John's stay, he got a home pass so that he can go home and pick up his car. He took two people from the house with him. Drew and this guy Scott. When they came back the house manager took one look in their eyes and gave them drug screens. That day John went back and decided to pick up heroin as well as his car and took the two in the car with him. They all got kicked out that night. John and Drew followed each other and went to a different recovery house together in Hamilton, the town over from Trenton. It was easy to keep in touch, but I didn’t know if I wanted to at that point.

The next week or so I went to my meetings and stuck close to Craig, my biggest influence at this point in getting sober. I tried to keep my head in the program but found myself slipping into that “fuck-it” mindset and wanting to get high more and more. On my one month mark of sobriety, I relapsed for the first time by myself in the city of Trenton. I used for three days until I was caught and drug tested by the house manager. During those three days of using I didn’t know who I was or who I wanted to be. With my new found knowledge of the AA program, I felt ashamed the entire time. I found myself torn in pieces trying to make the decision to lead the righteous life I just discovered or use drugs and be homeless with nowhere to go. I don’t expect anyone that isn’t an addict that’s reading this to understand why I chose the second of the two paths to go down.

Luckily when I was kicked out I had my car with me in Trenton. I drove to the recovery house that Drew and John lived at and got high with them within an hour of getting kicked out. In case you didn’t know, this was after I was made to call my parents by the house manager and hear them express their disappointments and worries and sorrowful, but hopeful advice.

Drew and John snuck me in their recovery house so I had a place to sleep for the night. I called rehabs that night and I found myself an open bed in Princeton house rehab. The next morning I woke up. The three of us went to get more dope in Trenton and then I was off to rehab driving myself on an empty tank of gas. On the way there I wound up totaling my car in an accident around the block from the rehab at a red light while I was trying to follow my GPS on my phone. As if my luck couldn’t get any worse. Thank god everyone was ok and I was able to go into the rehab shortly after the accident.

I stayed at the rehab for two days and basically kept to myself the whole time. After the first two days my dad picked me up and I was transferred to a different rehab in Paterson called Turning Point. It was the day before Christmas Eve when I arrived and I already had a good plan of what I wanted at this point. My mind was shattered by the fact that I had to start back down from 0 days. I needed three months of being clean to get home and I couldn’t even get over a month. Looking back I find myself looking at how stupid it was, but I gave up almost all hope. My plan was to do my thirty days in here easy and quietly and read my books and keep to myself. I guess you can say I was in for a rude awakening.

When I arrived on the top floor (the men's floor) of the rehab I was introduced to all these new faces. There were the white skinheads from all over the state and gangbangers from all over the state, mostly sent in from parole or probation for drug court. At the least, I was a little uncomfortable with this new living arrangement I had gotten into.

The next day I went into a nervous breakdown and wanted out. It was Christmas Eve and I remember seeing all the Christmas songs playing on TV and then looking around and seeing these people and wondering what the hell am I doing here? I couldn’t stand being there on Christmas Eve and thinking about my family being at my house celebrating and having fun without me.

By the time I signed myself out of this rehab it was about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. The rehab gave me twenty dollars cash to buy a train ticket and dropped me off at the station in Elmwood, the town over. I had an immediate impulse to spend the twenty dollars on drugs and blow every chance I had of getting home at the moment. I was successful in my drug conquest due to the location I was in.

Eventually, I was stuck looking for a ride home and sat in a fast food joint for the length of my time there. I tried to get a ride home from everyone and anyone, but was again denied by all. Like I said before I can’t blame them. Who wants to go pick up a junkie on Christmas Eve while you’re spending time with your family? I wouldn’t.

Eventually, my friend agreed to pick me up and came to get me at 1:00 am. I was high on the drugs the whole way home and just remember not knowing where I was going to sleep yet. I couldn’t sleep at his house because his parents knew of my problem.

I wound up telling him to pull up to my driveway and then getting out to call my mom. She answered the phone at 2:30 am and I asked if I could come home and that I was in the driveway. I remember hearing the difficulty in her voice and the struggle her mind was going through. She wound up saying yes, and I was let home to stay with a few conditions and rules set in place. One was that I had to get a Vivitrol shot every month. Vivitrol is an opiate blocker that is administered in a person's gluteus maximums once a month. It blocks any and all effects of opiates. Meaning if you do heroin, Oxycontin, Percocet or any other opiate you would not feel them at all. In order to get the shot, you had to remain clean from all opiates for 10 days because it would send you into precipitated withdrawal if you still had opiates in your system.

Now I had the luckiest situation in the world. And maybe this will give someone a rough example of how strong this addiction is. I threw it all away for ten-second rushes and two-hour highs. I found my old dealers and quickly consumed myself with heroin as much as I could once again selling even more stuff, and losing my family's trust and respect even more. After a month of my mom not seeing any changes and me not being able to get the Vivitrol shot she was left with no choice yet again, but to kick me out.

I spent a night at my friend's house in South River and got as high as I could because I made plans to go to Summit Oaks Rehab the next day and do a “walk in” to get a bed. When I woke up the next morning I did the last of my stuff and was driven home so that my mother can drive me to Summit for my fourth different rehab.

The car ride was silent going there for the most part. I remember my mom being very disappointed and she kept saying “Now you got to start all over again” because I had to give her 90 days sober to go home.

When I got there I didn’t have a reservation. Like I said, I planned on doing a “walk in.” So I went in there and told the people at the rehab/ hospital that I wanted to kill myself, and that I was coming off of 2 pints of vodka a day (alcohol has a fatal withdrawal) and of course, coming off of heroin. Of course, this was a lie (except the heroin part), but I needed a bed and a place to stay, and this was the only way to get it.

They sent me to the mental ward. I was completely freaked out and a little scared to be honest until my roommate came two hours after I did. He overdosed and they brought him to the mental ward to make sure it wasn’t suicidal, which it wasn’t. In the five days, I spent there I saw a woman get restrained to the floor by guards and get a needle to put her to sleep because she was screaming how it was her time to die. I saw a male resident punch a female resident in the face, and I’ve woken up in the middle of the nights with one resident standing in the center of my room because she thought my roommate was her husband (something to do with her medications).

Eventually, I was sent to the rehab section of the hospital. I stayed there for 5 more days and read my book for most of the time. At this point, I started reading the Bible for some reason. I wanted to really strengthen my beliefs in God and start getting in touch with my religion. After five days, I was released from there and went directly back to my recovery house in Trenton. I was extremely happy to see Craig and everyone from the house again and I was extremely grateful to be let back in. During this time, Allen, the house owner was opening a new men’s house in Lambertville and I was supposed to go there as soon as it opened.

Everything was going great my first couple days. I was very happy to be back in my old sober routine at my recovery house with my “new family”. Until one of the kids there who was going through girlfriend problems offered the idea of getting high to me. He didn’t know where to find it and since I copped in Trenton before and was a weak link in the house with only 12 or so days clean, he saw it best to ask me. We went out and got high and didn’t get caught at first. This is where I started doing crack/cocaine intravenously. I would go on quick one or two day runs and stop. This didn’t last long and they soon found out and I was once again kicked out to the streets.

This time my uncle came to the rescue and picked me up and bought me a night at and Econo Lodge in Bordentown. I stayed there the whole first-night getting high shooting crack and heroin to come down. The next day I woke up and walked to Trenton to pawn my cell phone and the rest of my belongings. I literally walked to Trenton from Bordentown in a blizzard in the middle of February, just to get drugs. When I got there I got my stuff, and remember being the only white person around on the street corner literally selling the clothes off my body for another crack rock or dope bag. I sold my jacket, my hat, my headphones and my other hat I brought with me in case it came down to this. By the end of the day, I shot my last bag of heroin and called someone from my recovery house in Trenton, that I no longer lived in, to drive me back to my Econo Lodge room.

The next day I woke to my phone ringing in the hotel room because, like I said, I sold my phone. It was my dad hysterically crying. This kid, Nick Rhodes, I lived within my Trenton recovery house died the night before. He was shooting crack and dope in his room when he went to sleep at home. His mom found him the next morning dead between the bed and his dresser. I don’t think my dad was crying because he knew the kid nick or anything, but because he was so scared for me, and he knew that could have been me.

We made an agreement on the phone to send me down to our last resort. It was a place called U-turn for Christ located in the far-away hills of Greenville, Tennessee. The rehab was explained to be a “Bible boot camp” or in other words a Christian based rehab. We were allowed no books but the Bible, no secular music besides Christian music, no movies, nothing.

I stayed a week in a local rehab to gain back strength and next thing I know I’m being sent on a bus with two other individuals to go down to this “ranch” in Tennessee. One of the kids was a 27-year-old guy that looked like he was 15 and the other was a 19-year-old prostitute from Philadelphia. She was going to the female’s camp and us the males.

I remember the bus ride down being beautiful. As a group, we had 100 dollars on us and I was scheming at every bus stop we stopped at to get drugs, which I eventually found. In Richmond, Virginia I asked some random guy that resembled Snoop Dog if he had coke and he wound up sharing some for free in the bathroom with me. It wound up being very potent and kept me up the rest of the bus ride to Tennessee, which I didn’t mind because I read my book, the stand, and watched the beautiful sunrise over the mountains and hills of Virginia and Tennessee.

When I arrived I was stripped of all my belongings that weren’t secular. (It wasn’t a good impression when they found my Helter Skelter book and Mein Kampf book in my bag.) When everything was all searched and the rules explained we were introduced to everyone...

Almost everyone down there was from New Jersey because we were all sent by the same organization, City of Angels, located in Trenton. There were actually only two people from Tennessee there. I already had an advantage in a way because two people that I lived with in Trenton had gone to the exact same rehab I was at.

We learned the rules, like no smoking cigarettes, no cursing at all, wake up at 530 every morning, you work and build barns and kindle wood during the day and do charity. Basically, you would do chores and build barns around the ranch, which was this huge piece of land with a little house up on a hill attached to a small church. I remember spending one week there and actually really liking everyone that lived there. It was only about 15 guys. It was basically a recovery house that revolved around reading the bible and going to church. We had to memorize verses from the Bible and do psalms at 530 every morning when we woke up.

But besides the religion we held in common, we were also all addicts. Everyone was there using faith and God to get past their troubled lives and it was somewhat beautiful for that reason. There was a kid there from the age of 18 to the age of 60 and everyone was cool with each other because we looked at each other as what they called, brothers.

I still started to slowly lose my mind without the whole books and music part. Reading and music is what gets me by, whether sober or not, and I couldn’t stand being without it. I was also very freaked out about the fact that I was so far from home for such a long time. The rehab was a 3-month stay at a minimum. I would sing songs to myself that I remembered every word to, and I'd get by like that… until one day, singing to myself just couldn't keep my mind from resorting to their old ways under these stressful circumstances and I began to develop my next escape plan….

This concludes part one of this tale of mine stay tuned to hear the second half of it if you'd like. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed my story so far or at least found part one interesting. I can only assure you the second part of this journey only gets more interesting, and I'm grateful to say more positive.