There once was a girl. She didn’t know much but that changed. She was confused about what was happening. She thought and thought and just had a gut feeling, and later found out that all of her thoughts and feelings were right, her dad was doing drugs. She just didn’t know how bad it was. She was very close with her dad, but finding out the truth made her more distant from him, she didn’t want to get even more hurt than she already was. The girl started to notice that her dad was getting worse so she asked her mom what was going on. Her mom told her that her dad was doing heroin instead of pain pills now. The girl knew that was one of the worst drugs. Her mom couldn’t handle it anymore and wanted to get a divorce. Her dad found out and went crazy. He started doing meth. He stole everything from the family to get money for drugs because he obviously didn’t have a job anymore. The family kicked him out of their house. He had nowhere to go because nobody wants a drug addict living in their house so he had to live in his car. After a while of not seeing him the family decided to meet him for lunch because their grandpa just died. The girl has never seen her dad that bad. At that point he was mixing heroin and meth together. He had all of his stuff locked up in chains because he thought somebody was out to get him. Everybody kept telling him he needed to go get help, he didn’t actually want help but he went and got it anyways to make everyone happy except for himself. Right as he got out of rehab he went right back to doing drugs, it wasn’t even two days! The girl was hurt, all she wanted was for this to be over, it was hurting her so bad. She thought the best way to make her feel better was to be mean to her dad whenever he talked to her or not even talk to him at all, but she didn’t know that it was hurting her even more. One day something really bad happened, the girls dad was so high that he threatened somebody, he thought that guy was out to get him when really he wasn’t. He got a felony for that. He would never do that when he was clean so after that the girls dad decided himself that he wanted to get better. Nobody forced him too. The girl saw her dad clean and realized she didn’t want to be mean to him anymore. She knew she would be happier if she had memories with her dad when he was gone rather than not having any memories with him at all. She also knew that in order for her dad to get better she needed to support him and be there for him. He has been clean for over 7 months now and the girl is more forgiving for his choices and not as angry with him. She still isn’t as close with him as she used to be and probably never will be but she is still working on being close with him and she will now have good memories with him, and if he chooses to go back to drugs she’s going to be more forgiving and be there for him when he needs it. She now knows that addiction takes over your whole life and what he does while he is high he can’t control it.

-Anonymous (14 years old)