Dakota K. Success Story

It’s been a long strange journey from where I started to where I’m at now. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. I started off drinking and smoking marijuana in high school. I never really fit in anywhere very well so I hid behind drugs to mask my awkwardness.

I graduated quickly to cough syrup and acid to get a better high and eventually I was getting high before school. I started skipping classes to smoke more and just wasn’t paying attention to the direction my life was heading.

When I was in tenth grade my mother was diagnosed with appendix cancer, and y stepfather was on his way to prison. The only way I knew how to deal with all of this was getting high and it led to me dropping out of high school.

I was living with my father and stepmother at the time and they told me if I couldn’t follow their rules then I had to leave. I was eighteen at the time and so I left and this began my battle with homelessness.

I stayed on various people’s couches and at friend’s houses until my mother let me come live with her. I got a job to support her and my stepfather while he was fighting his case. I started going through my parent’s medicine cabinets, taking random pills or anything that I could find to get me high.

Eventually my stepfather went to prison and our house was foreclosed on. I moved in with my older sister who was battling a heroin addiction.

From there is where I really feel like I lost myself. I soon after started doing meth and heroin. I couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t pay rent, and the only thing I knew how to do was get high. My father saw what was happening and sent my sister to rehab.

My mother passed away, and this drove me to use more and more until I eventually ended up in jail for the first time. I was in jail for about two months and immediately started using when I got out.

After this, I moved to Florida with a girlfriend and before I knew it I was living in a community park with a crippling drug and alcohol addiction. I slowly destroyed every relationship that I ever managed to make. I embarrassed everyone that was around me time after time. While in Florida I ended up in jail yet again, this time for fighting a police officer. I spent almost four months behind bars before I was release to a rehab facility. I stayed there until my case was resolved and then went back to the streets.

Before the seven months of sobriety I now have, I hopped around rehabs in Florida for a while until I found myself on a plane headed for Los Angeles. I didn’t get sober as soon as I got to California; it took about another year and a half. This last time around I just completely gave up fighting and finally surrendered. I realized I wasn’t going to beat this, not on my own at least.

Thankfully I ended up at Design For Recovery Sober Living. It was exactly where I needed to be. Design taught me how to be a better person. They also helped me learn how to laugh at the little things and still take care of my responsibilities. I learned how to pull up my sober brothers when they are slipping and how to take in feedback when I was slipping. I’ve been at Design For Recovery for seven months now and I can’t begin to explain how grateful I am for the people I’m with and the relationships I have with the people at this program.