When I was 14 years old, I had just started school at a prestigious Catholic College Prep. I was actually sought after by their music department because of how gifted I am at saxophone. The summer before school started, I spent at fat camp instead of band camp. I went from 207 lbs down to 185 lbs and was feeling great about myself until I got to school. I wanted to play basketball but my self esteem had taken a turn for the worse with my new weightloss. I was too intimidated by the height of the other girls and their level of physical fitness so I stuck to the band and drama even though I loved sports more. The pressures to continue to lose weight were all around me. School, advertisements, the media, the trends and my family. I was doing everything I knew how to do but it was so slow.
At this point in my life, I was anti smoking and had only gotten a little tipsy off of whiskey, once. A girl whom I had become friends with confided in me one day, when I complained about always watching what I eat. She said that an upper classman introduced her to this stuff called Crystal and it made things a lot easier. She continued to tell me that in her 2 weeks of using it she could get all her school work done, had a ton of energy and was barely ever hungry. She had lost 12 pounds as well. There it was the solution to everything I had ever struggled with and in an instant, I wanted to try it. She linked me up with this chick who her friend got it from. We met in a secluded bathroom at school and I bought $20 worth. She cut up two lines and she went first. It was then my turn. I did it. I was hooked.
I'm not joking. I loved it. I had endless energy, was barely hungry, loosing weight like rabid fire. It was incredible. I spent five years doing it and had many a great adventure but also put myself in situations like eventually getting kicked out of my house because of it, living on the streets and nearly lost my life. I went to rehab at 19 after an incident at the motel I was living at shook me to my core. I went to a government funded rehab through the system and it worked . It worked because I wanted it to and I didn't take my chance for granted. My parents didn't make it easy for me and I had to go through social services and work very hard to fix every mess I made along the way. My councilor at rehab looked at me after our first meeting and said, "you don't have a drug problem my dear, you have an eating disorder" Throughout my rehab she wouldn't let me dance with my problems, she gave me the tools to solve them. She wouldn't let me become addicted to rehab and told me to look around any room I sat in at rehab and decide whose future looked good and the answer was, nobody. She said to ask myself if I wanted to spend my life fighting to get out of rehab or if I wanted to end the fight and move on with my life. 10 days after I graduated from rehab, at 19 years old, weighing 224lbs and full of life, I was hired to work in the mailroom at dick Clark productions and moved on with my life....
I worked my way up to be director of 2 department. Here's I am at 25 years old, 128 pounds, with Dick Clark on my last day before leaving for a position at Image Entertainment. And Oct 13, 1999 is the last day I ever touched it.
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