'I am here as living proof that broken crayons still color'
Published Oct. 6, 2025
Shannon is a peer coach and coach supervisor with Face It TOGETHER. You can read more about her in her bio.
For years I wore more labels than a suitcase at baggage claim: homeless, self-harmer, queer kid, Black kid, addict. Meth and morphine were my ear plugs against the noise of a life built on toxic good-byes.
When I was born, my mother started a revolving-door relationship with prison. Every prison sentence pulled our family further and further apart. While other children practiced cursive, I practiced forging her signature on charge slips at the local grocery store. I calmed my little brother while my stepfather’s priorities were double shifts, new romance and a case of beer.
Foster care swept us up in 2001, confirming that us six kids didn’t hide the despair as well as we thought. We were reunited later that year, but it never felt quite like home.
By my late teens, I’d gone from honor-roll-FBLA-drama-club kid to runaway dropout, carving lines into my own skin to feel something real. I bounced between girls and guys, trying to locate myself in somebody else’s heartbeat. I kept choosing partners who proved abandonment was the rule, not the exception.
I also discovered that bruises don’t always bloom on skin, sometimes they echo in the word “love.” And when the ache got too loud, drugs floated in like life jackets, so I grabbed on and let the current pull me anywhere but home.
March 1, 2013: two pink lines appeared on a pregnancy test. Every substance that had ever carried me suddenly felt small. I quit cold turkey not because I’m brave, but because another heartbeat was tapping from the inside saying, “There’s more.”
In movies, that’s where the credits roll. Troubled woman drops the drugs and lives happily ever after. Real life? That’s only the opening scene. When the chemicals left, the feelings arrived: raw, unedited, full volume. Shame hauling its luggage of regret, grief mourning years lost to parking lots and sketchy motels, fear redecorating my mind with neon anxiety.
After weeks of detoxing – sleepless nights, debilitating body aches, hot and cold sweats, and bodily fluids that reeked of death – I gained the courage to give life another try.
I called my old boss, cracked a self-deprecating joke, and he rehired me on the spot. I parked on my best friend’s recovery sofa and went to work. I waddled to the city bus, funneling every paycheck into fines and DMV fees. The day the clerk slid my license across the counter felt like a private standing ovation.
Next came a key, warm in my palm, to an apartment so empty my footsteps echoed, but it was mine. I moved in with a pillow, blanket, banged up plastic storage tote and a duffle bag. Months later, my purpose arrived.
Bald, seven pounds, eight ounces, 21 inches. My motivation, my reason, my everything. My daughter truly pushed me to love myself more and more each day. They say you have to want recovery for yourself. And though I believe that, I also believe that the right influences can encourage us to live long enough until we finally believe that we are worth it. My daughter did just that. She saved me.
My past self was not a villain. She was a version of me doing the best she could with the tools she had, however jagged those tools were. Drugs weren’t “wrong,” they were the only bridge she knew to get through another sunrise. When better bridges appeared, she stepped off the old one.
I thank her for surviving long enough to hand me the blueprint for something healthier. Quitting might feel impossible, yet somehow, it’s simpler than the sacred grind that follows. But that grind? It’s where the muscles of character grow, where gratitude stretches its legs, where you learn that you are capable of holding both the memory of darkness and the promise of dawn without dropping either. The light is not a destination but a direction.
Today, I'm a certified Peer Recovery Support Specialist. My past is a level of expertise that now instills hope in others who may too have been lost. And how lucky I am to get the absolute privilege of walking that journey alongside them. Asking for help is indeed one of the most vulnerable moments a person can have. I wonder how much different my journey could have been with someone like me.
Recovery, I discovered, is learning to sit with those unwelcome houseguests without evicting yourself. Recovery is a journey to wellness that is identified differently for everyone. There is no clear path and certainly no finish line; it’s a lifestyle.
Recovery changes shape. Twelve-step meetings for some, therapy couches for others, whispered prayers, weight-room benches, sketchbooks, gardening gloves or late-night calls to a friend who gets it.
I am not here as a success story wrapped in a bow. I am here as living proof that broken crayons still color, that discarded seeds still sprout, and that a woman once defined by syringes and sidewalks can now be defined by passports stamped, bills paid, and a little girl who calls her mom.
These days, the light looks like my daughter’s dance competitions: a blur of glitter and confidence I still borrow on bad days. It looks like wrong exits on road trip adventures where the GPS, like recovery, keeps chirping, “Re-routing, still possible.” It’s lake getaways, Netflix weekends and seeing the excitement of members celebrating their big wins.