Hi my name is Dusty and I am a grateful
believer in recovery for drugs and sexual addiction.
Adopted on my day of birth my parents
did their best to raise me. They put me
into Christian school and sports right away.
During that time I was introduced to marijuana by my father. I was really young but I can still remember
the silly game we would play when he would pull out his pot and I would
jokingly put seeds in it. At the time I
didn’t know what it was but by age 10 I knew.
My neighborhood was not a good
area. I grew up listening to my
neighbors constantly fight right outside my bedroom window. I found out that the fights were drug related
and that our neighbors were hardcore addicts.
We would often have to call the cops on them when the fights became
physical. Even though my neighborhood
was a bad area I wanted to start attending the local public school where all my
friends went, so in 6th grade my parents took me out of Christian
school and placed me in the school around the corner. At this point in time of my life I was not
only introduced to the gang life in the community but I began smoking pot with
my friends. During this time my father
received news that he had to have knee surgery.
Because of complications with the surgery, my father was permanently
handicapped, which sent him into a deep depression. He stopped being involved fully in my life
and was very hard to talk to. With my
drug use and my father’s lack of interest in my life, my grades began to suffer
and I started getting into more trouble running the streets. I began to look for acceptance in the kids of
the neighborhood and would commonly associate with gang members.
At age 14 my mom decided to move us out
to the country. I, being an only child,
hated the idea of leaving behind all of my friends and my way of life. We moved to an area where I could no longer
hang out with neighborhood friends because there weren’t any close to our
house. One had to drive to get anywhere
and I wasn’t old enough to drive yet.
Because of my unhappy circumstances I began to rebel against my
mom. My marijuana use increased to an
everyday habit. By age 15 I was not only
using marijuana, I was selling it. At
age 17 I was introduced to prescription drugs and even obtained a fake Id. I began abusing and selling prescription
drugs and drinking on a constant basis.
I continued to play sports but got into trouble for drinking, which
hindered my ability to play on the team.
I had the opportunity to have scouts out to watch my games, but I
decided it was more important to party so I squandered my opportunities. Each weekend my friends and I would get
together and drink. My parents would
allow us to party at my house. I began
to think partying and using was not that big of a deal because my parents
didn’t care and my dad used drugs himself.
Despite my constant drug and alcohol
abuse I managed to keep up fairly good grades and received an academic
scholarship to attend Cal State Northridge.
The college lifestyle only fueled my heavy addiction to drinking and
drugs. During this time I met a girl and
fell in love. Our relationship included
a lot of drinking and drug use. The
first couple years were okay but after a while we began to fight on a constant
basis and became mentally abusive toward one another. In the midst of all this I got a call one
day at school from my mom’s friend. She
explained how my mom had been thrown from one of her horses and she was going
to be airlifted to the hospital. My
father and I found out she had shattered one of the vertebrae in her spine and
would be confined to a hospital bed in our house for close to a year. She almost lost the ability to walk. My father was not good at facing any type of
crisis. He always just hid out in his
room in the face of any pandemonium in our family. I had always been the one
looked to to be the man of the house, so I had to take care of my mom a lot of
the time and also deal with her doctors.
With all of this going on, things had gotten so bad between my
girlfriend and I, she left me after 4 years when I needed her support the
most. I fell into a deep depression and
began using prescription pain pills on a daily basis. When I wasn’t at home
taking care of my mother I would go out on drinking binges for days on
end. I began experiencing black
outs on a constant basis with the
mixture of drugs and alcohol in my system.
Time past, and despite my addictions I
still managed to graduate college and attain my series 7 and 66 licenses. I started a career as a financial planner in
2008 straight out of school. I was still
heavily addicted to pain pills and I was also still selling. I graduated and started my career at age 24,
and by age 26 I had completely failed at my career. My business went under and I had to move back
in with my parents.
One week before my 26th
Birthday I got a call saying a friend of mine had overdosed on Oxy cotton. Three days later I got another call
explaining how another one of my friends had taken his own life. I lost all control and fell deeper into
addiction and depression. My attitude
had gotten out of control and I began to fight with my mother all the
time. She befriended one of my
ex-girlfriends and I told her it was eating me up inside but it didn’t matter
to her. With my feelings being cast aside by her, I felt unworthy and
abandoned. I decided there was no one
and nothing good left for me in California, so I called a friend I barely knew
who lived in Vegas. She told me I could
come out and live with her and her roommate. She also said she could line up a
job for me as an insurance agent for me with a company she worked for. I made the decision to take a chance. I would move to Vegas, but knew I needed to
quit using drugs before I did. I got
myself clean and had 2 weeks sober. I
packed up a car full of my stuff and drove out to Vegas.
When I arrived at her apartment, I found
out that my living situation hadn’t gotten any better, in fact it was much
worse. I entered the apartment for the
first time to find out that the water and power had been shut off that
day. Also, I found that both of my
roommates were addicts. Not only that, but the friend who told me I could move
in with her lost her job and was now hooking to pay for her habits. With her unemployment I no longer had a job
connection. She also began to steal from
me the little I did have. You know the
saying wherever you’re at there you are? Well there I was. Even though I had tried to quit drugs and
escape my problems I thought I left behind in California, I found that I had
just taken those problems along with me.
Soon I began to using drugs again. What a surprise. Soon after the girl who I was living with got
evicted. I was out in Vegas with no
friends or family. I was stuck with her half of the bills on the apartment, a
drug addict roommate, and my out of control addiction. I started selling drugs again to support my
habit while I looked for a job. The
destructive behavior that had been my life had come full circle and I was
trapped in insanity once again.
One night while I was using I found a
girl online and we started talking and hanging out every now and then. She would sometimes talk to me about Jesus
but I told her that the Jesus stuff was all good for her but just wasn’t my
thing. We started hanging out less and
less and soon didn’t hang out at all.
During our relationship I made a friend in her older brother and soon
got a job with him. Because of my
relationship with him I later began talking to his sister again, but only
through text message and random phone calls.
My cycle of insanity had to a stop. My addiction was out of control. In the midst of my addiction, I finally
received a moment of clarity in the middle of the night while was coming down
off of drugs. I could see it all so clearly
that night when I looked at myself in the mirror. I hated the person I had become and I was
tired of the insanity. I picked up the
phone and called my parents. I told them
I was an addict and didn’t want to use anymore but there wasn’t much they could
do in California. I called a rehab
number I found online, but they told me they couldn’t do anything for me until
Monday and it was only Saturday. The
third number I called was my friends sister who told me about Jesus. It was 5 in the morning, but I knew she would
be awake because she was a casino dealer, and it was about the time she got off
work. I told her what was going on. She
told me if I was serious about getting clean, I should show up to church and
she would introduce me to some people who could help. She didn’t think I would show up because it
was already close to 6am, but to her surprise I did.
My first day at central, I didn’t know
what to expect. I was worried someone
would judge me right away but no one did.
I listened to Jud talk and it was as if he was speaking directly to
me. The topic he spoke on struck me
hard. I felt like I was at home that
first day in church. I immediately broke
down and began to cry. After church, she
took me back to the care department where she introduced me to a guy who was a
volunteer. He told me about Celebrate
Recovery on Fridays and asked if he could pray for me. I wasn’t a believer and I was hesitant, but
something inside me told me to go with it.
He prayed for me and I also agreed to show up that Friday. I did what I said and made it to a Friday
night at CR (Celebrate Recovery). Once
I was there, I found out the building was full of ex criminals, addicts, and people
with problems. I immediately felt at
home. I had no idea about what recovery
was but their motto was, “keep coming back,” so I did. The other motto I loved was, “it’s okay not
to be okay but you don’t have to stay that way.” At CR that night they talked about the step
studies they had and I decided to give it a shot.
Joining a step study was the best
decision I ever made. Through Friday
nights and my step study I made positive relationships with real friends who
didn’t use drugs, but once did and knew exactly what I was going through. I would listen to them talk and know that I
wasn’t alone in the pains I had suppressed from my past. I began the healing process by working the
steps. When I started the program I
wasn’t a believer but I had an open mind to the whole thing. Throughout the step study I surrendered my
life to my true higher power, Jesus Christ.
I was baptized at Central in October of 2010 and accepted Jesus as my
true Lord and Savior. He helped me
overcome my hurts, habits, and hang-ups.
Through my 4th step inventory, I was able to put down a lot
of the pains and baggage I had been carrying around with me all of those
years. I was finally able to set them
down by making my amends, offering forgiveness for those who have wronged me,
and by confessing my pains to God and others I could trust. I discovered I had been walking around with
the weight of the world on my shoulders but since Jesus made the ultimate
sacrifice and died for my sins he was willing to take that weight from me and
place it on his back. He carried me
through the healing process, blessing me with a new loving relationship with
friends and family. I reconciled with my
mother and father and now have a close relationship with them.
Not everything went smoothly through my
recovery process though. In December 2010, I was omitted to a psychiatric
hospital for 6 days through Christmas.
The damage I had done to my brain through those 15 years of drug use had
the doctors diagnose me as bipolar 2.
Those 6 days were the scariest days of my life, but through that time my
girlfriend Krystal and 10 friends from church and CR came to see me and pray
for me. I read my Bible every day and
prayed to God for help. I was released
and welcomed back to my home where I lived with my good friend Ken. I also jumped right back into the old swing
of things and continued with my step study.
I graduated my step study in July of 2011. I knew I wasn’t done serving in the recovery
program. I wanted to lead others
through the 12 step process, so I attended the CR summit at Saddleback Church
in CA. The CR summit would equip me with
knowledge I needed to become a leader in the program.
Today I am a CR Leader, leading Friday open
share groups and a Tuesday night step study group helping other men overcome
their hurts, habits, and hang-ups. I
also have my own hip hop music ministry whose songs are dedicated to giving
hope to the hopeless by portraying the message that God is bigger than our
problems and through his power we can overcome any problems we are facing. On September 25th I reached my one
year anniversary of complete sobriety. This
November, I will have also been working as a leader for the junior high school
ministries at Central for one year.
Through the junior high ministries I have discovered that I have a
strong love for children and an even stronger hunger to help them not make the
same mistakes I have in life. I have
also enrolled in Lincoln Christian University to get my Bachelor’s degree in
Theology and Masters in Psychology so I can help others come to Christ and
overcome the issues they are facing.
One thing I can say to the new comers is
this program works. I was a non-believer
with no hope. I thought I had no one to
look to except for my addiction and look what God and this program have done
for me. You get out of this program what
you put into it. For those of you who
aren’t believers and don’t think everything is part of God’s plan, well I can
tell you this, the girl I called that night who told me to come to church is
now my fiancé and best friend Krystal, and the guy who first prayed for me at
central is Matt Kowalski, my good friend and sponsor. There are no coincidences and there is a
reason all of you are here tonight. To
those of you who are feeling stagnant in your recovery or toying with the idea
of relapse I can say, jump in and serve.
God rewards those who serve others.
You have to replace all of those negative behaviors with positive
ones.
One of my favorite verses is Romans 5
verse 3-5. “We may also rejoice in our
sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance
character, and character hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God has
poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given
us.” God has used all my sufferings to
create hope not only in my life but also so I can talk to others about the hope
I have experienced even though I have had to experience pain. I can see the other side of suffering now
which gives me hope. Through the grief
I’ve experienced I can also reach out to others and tell them they’re not alone
in their pains.
Thank you for letting me share.