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My dad was an officer in the navy. He split up with my mum and she married again and they had a daughter. I don’t think my mum did anything wrong and I think she may have loved me, though I can’t be sure. My step-dad was a good bloke and he looked after us well. Nevertheless by the time I was in my teens I knew I was unhappy and I didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it. I thought I was ugly and that no one cared about me. I ran away from home, not because I was being ill-treated but because I didn’t feel right and I thought I might feel better somewhere else.
I had my first child when I was sixteen. I came home for a while and I should have stayed but I got a house of my own. I was too young to be on my own in a house with a baby. I started using amphetamines - they helped me cope with being a parent - and then crack and heroin, and by the time I was twenty one I was an addict and there didn’t seem to be any going back. I needed help, but I wasn’t in the right state to ask for it.
I ended up serving a four year sentence in Low Newton Prison for supplying crack. I was given ten mil of methadone on the first day, which they then increased to twenty mil and and then thirty before reducing it by five mil each day. That sounds sensible but reducing the methadone had a traumatic effect on me. I think I suffered more because I didn’t have any motivation, which seemed to make the pain of withdrawing worse. I felt I was being dragged off the drug and it didn’t feel as though the process had anything to do with me. All I thought about was how long it would be before I could get back on the stuff, and so when I was released the first thing I did was to use again. Now I’m on sixty mil of methadone a day and sometimes I use heroin as well.
I was thirty one when I went into Low Newton, but in there I felt I was a small child again. Even though I’ve never got on well with my mother I wanted her to come and look after me and take me home. I’ve thought about that feeling and wondered what it was that happened to me which still leaves me needing her so much.
