A Decade As An Alcoholic And Drug Addict
I spent over a decade addicted to alcohol, cocaine, and anything else I could find. I grew up poor, highly sensitive, and completely undiagnosed with ADHD. Without a formal diagnosis, I had no idea why my head was so loud. So at sixteen, I found my own dopamine. Weed. Then cocaine. Anything I could swallow or smoke to quiet my brain. 😶🌫️ I became a welder in the oil fields. I made decent money, but the partying consumed every dollar. My partner and I thought having babies would fix us. It didn't. We drank through the diaper changes and the bedtimes. Then the Ministry knocked on our door. They took our children. Four years without them. My career was gone. I had nothing left but the addiction. 🏚️ After over ten years of chaos, I had to choose. Die or get sober. I chose life. We are nine years clean now. We got our children back and had another daughter, Juniper. She was exactly what our family needed to heal. ❤️🩹 I've spent seven years working as an addictions counselor. But the real clarity didn't hit until I was 38 and finally got diagnosed with ADHD. Suddenly, my entire past made sense. Those destructive binges weren't just addiction. They were desperate, misdirected hyperfixations. I was trying to medicate a nervous system completely starved of baseline dopamine. I have been creating content on YouTube and Facebook for five years. But six months ago, two things happened. I found Skool, and I became completely hyper-focused on AI. 🤖 Learning to use AI as a responsible tool changed everything. It gave me immediate, low-friction workarounds for my executive dysfunction. I took the exact same obsessive hyperfocus that used to ruin my life, and pointed it at building systems and connecting with others. My past and learning how to manage my ADHD has made me a leader, today I'm doing well on social media, and I am the executive director of an addictions treatment centre. My belief is that you can achieve great things as well. 💪 You just need to figure out how to put your dopamine to work for you, instead of against you. 🧠