“It takes a lot of courage to step out there. But that courage will be rewarded…life becomes so big.”
“Addiction can look lots of ways,” Jenny says. “I had a preconceived notion that as long as I didn’t look like my dad, I wasn’t an addict.”
Jenny grew up surrounded by addiction and dysfunction. “I learned very young that when you’re uncomfortable, or when you have a feeling, you mask it with something,” she says. “And generally speaking, that something was drugs or alcohol. It was the first time in my whole life that I could remember feeling what comfortable felt like. I just got to exhale.”
But over time, her addiction began to change her. “It shows up most glaringly in the delusion and the denial,” she says. “And after a while, you start to believe it yourself.”
She lived with constant fear, especially as a mother. “I was really scared that my kids were going to get taken away from me,” she says. “Because if you take my kids, I’ve got nothing.”
Then one night became a turning point in her journey.
“There was one night in particular that I, I was done,” she says. “And I honestly don’t know, to this day, why I reached out. But I did. And what I said was basically, ‘I’m really screwed up. I don’t know what to do. I feel completely helpless.’ Whether it ended at my own hand or because something profound changed…this life couldn’t continue the way it was.”
And someone stepped in for her.
Through support, Jenny began to see what she couldn’t see before. “I learned that you can’t do this alone,” she says. “I had been alone forever. My perspective on the world was: you do things on your own. Nobody really takes care of you. It wasn’t until I found a community that I was able to make any kind of lasting change, or even believe that change was possible.”
Today, her life looks very different.
“It takes a lot of courage to step out there,” Jenny says. “But that courage will be rewarded in ways you have no idea. No idea. Life becomes so big.”
And the biggest gift of all is her family. “I get to have my kids,” she says. “They’re safe and healthy and warm, in a home that they know is stable and loving. What a gift. I get to give that to my children.”