Miracle Story #16 (Part 1 of 5)

“My name is Matt. And I’m an addict.

I was born in 1975 in Denver, Colorado. We moved around a lot when I was a youngster. We lived in Kansas, Ft. Lauderdale, Denver, New Mexico and D.C. And then we came back and we ended up in Hutchinson.

And it was actually just a few blocks from where we’re sitting right now, where my dad passed away.

He died on Christmas Eve in 1979, when I was four years old. I think that was really what started my progression toward trying not to feel. At that age, I don’t know really how you process that kind of stuff.

I didn’t.

My mom immediately delved into her work. She worked for a non-profit, she worked for Green Peace. That was her way of dealing with it, was to get as involved as she could to try to help people. She still does to this day.

So she wasn’t around a lot.

We actually moved back to Denver and I started Kindergarten there. I was pretty destructive. I broke stuff a lot and was just kind of a mess. I think our whole family was at that point, our little family.

I have a sister, Sam, and we share the same dad and mom. And an older brother, Donnie, who has a different dad. He wasn’t really in the picture. He was in trouble a lot because he got involved with drugs really early. And so did I.

I think I was six years old when my older brother introduced me to marijuana.

I smoked marijuana for the very first time, at that age.

I don’t really remember much about it. He told me I was really hyperactive. I had ADHD really bad, so it affected me like that.

After Denver, we moved to Albuquerque and then to Taos, New Mexico. My mom was lobbying in government to try to save Native American land. She had a really close connection with them and the elders in the Native American communities.

Then we moved from Taos to D.C., and we were there for a while. It was weird because in all of the schools I went to, me and my sister were the minorities. On the reservations there weren’t a lot of white kids. When we got to D.C., me and my sister were the only white kids in the entire school.

So I was fighting a lot. Or running.

And even though it wasn’t my choice to move from place to place, it was perfect because I’ve been a runner my whole life.

My mom finally put me into a school with a friend of hers that lived in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. But then she decided to move us back to Taos. So she put me and my sister Sam on a plane to my grandparents here in Hutchinson while she was finishing up in D.C.

She was just supposed to stop in, pick us up, and move us back to Taos. But while she was here, she ran into her high school sweetheart and so we ended up staying here.

I was going in to seventh grade.

A lot happened.

And then that summer, my uncle committed suicide.

It was such a surprise to us because he was a church-going, God-believing, God-fearing individual. But there was a dark side that the family never talked about.

He was an addict.

I didn’t find out until later on that he had been into drugs and alcohol really bad. He had locked himself in his garage and put a tube from the exhaust pipe on his truck, into the cab. He meant to do it, and he did it. You know what I mean?

A lot of people do that stuff and it’s a cry for help basically. They want recognition. Because in my experience, if a person really wants to kill themselves, they do it.

My mom had met a guy in Denver and he was abusive, real abusive. He and my mom had a child together, my sister Gabby. We had moved from Albuquerque to Taos, before we moved to D.C., to get away from him. He put hands on me a lot. He didn’t touch my sister Sam, and he didn’t touch my mom, but he put them on me for some reason.

And beyond that, there really weren’t any other men in my life besides my uncle. My older brother Donnie, I just remember him coming home with black eyes, being in and out of the house, never really staying. I remember waking up one day and his feet were sticking outside of the dog house when we were in Albuquerque, because that’s where he had slept for the night. He was a hot mess too. His dad was not in the picture, at all.

He had his own difficulties.

Donnie and my uncle Jim, who passed away, were real close. They were tight. In fact, my uncle Jim was the one who had originally started my brother on drugs and alcohol. And every time we’d seen Jim as kids, like at Christmas, we got to go hang out with him. He had an apartment with a swimming pool and I remember that was real fun. He had this huge smile all the time. And he played with us a lot.

So we got pretty close to him, me and my sister Sam. He was a good guy. I was shocked when it happened. I didn’t understand it.

I remember being at the wake at my grandparent’s house and my grandma kept saying, “I just keep thinking he’s going to come walking in that door.”

I remember her saying that, and I remember looking at the door waiting for him to walk in the door. So I was having a hard time.

And with my dad having passed away already, death was a real issue for me. The processing of it, all of that stuff. It always came out sideways, in anger and fighting a lot.

So when my mom met her high school sweetheart again, they decided to move in together here in Hutchinson. So she had me, my sister Sam, my brother Donnie, and Gabby. That’s four. And he had four boys. So we had eight kids come together.

And it was like an extremely dysfunctional Brady Bunch.

I became best friends with the boys, but at the same time was fighting with them on a regular basis, almost to the point where they broke up. He was a good guy but I just had resentments against her for being in a relationship. And I had resentments with him because he wasn’t my real dad. You know, that whole deal.

But he was a good guy. He still is. And they’re still together.

So it was rough in that area. And my stepbrothers, they all smoked weed, so it was pretty regular from that point on. I started smoking cigarettes at that age. That was about seventh grade. I think I was twelve maybe, because I was young for my grade.

I went through middle school fighting. I was an outcast. I had a mohawk and was a skater.

And in high school I got picked on. Right away.

When I started high school I was flunking out of every single class because I was taking acid in school. I was smoking weed in school. I was drinking on the weekends. I was just out of control. And I wasn’t the only child under that roof that was out of control, so…

Nowadays I feel super horrible for our parents and what they had to go through with us. And everything that they had to experience themselves, because I get it now. I have a fifteen year old daughter.

There was just a natural progression.

I have the disease of addiction. And it started young.

A lot of people think the disease of addiction is purely about drugs and alcohol, but it’s not. If you believe in the light and the dark, I know you probably have your own beliefs and they might be centered around particular religions.

Mine is pretty simple.

I believe in a Creator of all. And I believe that there’s good and there’s bad. And there’s dark and there’s light. And darkness played a big part in my life at that age.

And I believe that’s what addiction is.

It’s the manifestation of that darkness through the form of a disease that tells us that we need to look outside of ourselves to find something to make us feel better about how we feel on the inside. There’s that hole that needs to be filled and we have this constant need to fill it.

And to run from anything that doesn’t feel good.

And it’s very, very deceptive and tricky because at the first, drugs and alcohol were fun and made me feel good. I could socialize, and it became my best friend because I didn’t know how to function without it. And I didn’t have to run anymore.

But I was running.

And eventually that stuff started to take over.

And my best friend became my worst enemy.

And it started taking everything I cared about in my life.”

Part 1 of 5. To be continued....January 25th, 2017.

© 2017 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.

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My name is Matt, and I live in Hutchinson, Kansas.

In the midst of addiction, death, and recovery, I AM Miracle Story #16.