Page 14 - Silver Linings Issue3

CONNOR’S
Stealing money from his family, going through other people’s medicine cabinets, taking Xanax by the handful and hanging out all night with his “user friends.” This was Connor D’s current life. And he could not control it.
When his mother forbade him to go out late
at night, he jumped out of his second-story bedroom window. He aimed for a trampoline below, but missed the target and broke his tailbone. Despite the injury, he still met up with his friends that night and went to the ER the next day.
“I was so desperate to get high I jumped out of a window,” he recalls.
After Connor tried to break into a safe where his family kept its medications, his mother had had enough and started researching mental health facilities. In Connor’s words, he “freaked out,” took her laptop and threw it in the pool.
“I was acting like a monster and just being a bad person,” he says, reflecting on his late teens and early 20s. “I feel so badly about some of the things I’ve done. I mean, I threw my mother’s laptop in the pool. That’s a terrible thing to do. My mother is my favorite person in the entire world. She didn’t deserve that.”
Shortly after the pool incident, Connor realized how dangerous and destructive his behavior was. Looking back, he wonders how much longer he would have survived had his mother not pushed him to get help.
They turned to Silver Hill Hospital.
“I felt safe at Silver Hill,” he recalls. “Safety
is a big issue for a lot of people, and you’re taken care of every day there. You get valuable
lessons and open up in therapy. Silver Hill has the best staff; they are unbelievable. They go above and beyond. Everyone wants the best for us.”
Fast forward nine years. Connor is now 29,
has a serious girlfriend, a job as an assistant teacher and is taking courses to get his teaching degree. He also volunteers at a substance abuse prevention organization in New York.
He has been sober for eight years and still uses strategies he learned at Silver Hill Hospital when things get tough.
Following Silver Hill, Connor moved to California. He produced music and played in a band. All of his band members were sober as well, otherwise “it would have been almost impossible to be sober in that scene.”
Then his father was diagnosed with cancer and Connor came back to New York to help care for him. His father is in remission and doing well now, but news like that is a potential pitfall for recovering addicts.
“Stuff like that is triggering, to be honest, but
I was able to handle it, thanks to the tools I was given at Silver Hill,” he says. “I was able to handle that and that’s pretty big.”
The COVID pandemic and associated quarantines, lockdowns and other restrictions also posed a serious threat to Connor’s sobriety. The pandemic broke down structure in
people’s lives and support groups stopped meeting in person. Connor rarely attended the Zoom meetings because, to him, they were impersonal and lacked the camaraderie of in- person meetings.
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