Never Too Late (17 page)

But the fact is, when you are that low, when you are that deep into addiction, you just don’t care. And that’s one of the most dangerous positions to be in in the world.

Sally disappeared for a little while when she had to go back to jail for some sanction. All of a sudden, I was really fucking tired. Maybe something had been shifting inside of me for a while, but at that time I found myself feeling miserable in a whole new way. I had just gotten surgery to have my gall-bladder taken out, and it left me feeling completely wrecked. Physically I felt weak, and mentally I felt weak. All at once it was like I could actually feel myself deteriorating.

When Sally got back out and came over to my house, it took me three minutes to get her to give me pills. She gave me a bunch of Suboxone, which was on a completely different level to anything I’d been doing. Over the next three days, I took thirty pills.

I shouldn’t be alive right now. Nobody knows how I made it. I remember taking a handful of pills, nodding out, waking up, and taking more. Every time I’d nod out and wake up and take more, over and over, for three days.

It sounds like I was trying to die. I wasn’t thinking about it explicitly, but I had definitely given up on myself. It was like, “If I wake up, cool. Maybe there’s a reason for it. If I don’t wake up, cool. It’s not gonna bother me.”

I did wake up, and I was as shocked as anyone else would have been. I was dazed. I didn’t even know how I’d survived it. I was so close to death. And I have been there before, more times than I wish, and probably more times than I know about. But this time, it flipped a switch somewhere inside of me that nothing and no one else had been able to reach. Suddenly, I had had enough.

I knew if I was going to change, something extreme needed to happen. At that point it didn’t even matter what that was. I barely had enough left in me to think straight, but I knew I couldn’t stand this situation anymore. It had gotten to the point where I could feel just enough of that deep fear I keep deep inside, the fear of looking back and regretting the choice I didn’t make.

I had to take control. I had to change my life. I had to make a decision.

That morning I had to go to court, and I called up Leah’s father and begged him to go with me. He didn’t understand why. Nobody had any idea what I was planning. It was almost weird that he agreed to go in with me, considering our relationship at the time. Maybe he sensed something was different.

My behavior wasn’t a secret anymore. I might have gotten away with the patches for awhile, but I don’t think anybody gets away with nodding out in the middle of an IOP class. They were ready for me, and when I walked into court, I heard the full report on how bad I was doing. I just listened. It wasn’t news to me.

And when it was my turn to speak, I told the judge I wanted to opt out of drug court. I said I wanted to take the alternative. I said I wanted to go to prison.

I remember the sound in the room was a big long gasp. But all I had to say was, “I can’t do this anymore.” The judge asked me if I knew I was sentenced to five years in prison if I opted out of treatment, and I said yes, I did. You’re not usually allowed to have attorneys in drug court, but the judge made an exception for me. My lawyer came in and tried to talk me out of it, but I had already made up my mind. I told him, “There’s not a program they can put me in that’s gonna do anything. Take me to prison.”

The decision shocked everyone, especially my friends and family. They were extremely upset. I remember seeing a photo of my ex-fiancé online from that day, and just being so caught off. I know that guy like the back of my hand, and I could see the devastation on his face. He was very worried and very sad. Later he told me that when MTV came by to talk to him about it, he got so depressed he went into his room, lay down, and slept all day.

At the time I wasn’t thinking about whether it was a selfish choice or not. My mind still wasn’t all there. It was almost like I was in shock that day. But to a lot of people it looked like I was turning my back on them and running away; from my family, from my daughter, from my responsibilities. They had a hard time understanding why I couldn’t just suck it up and deal with drug court and use the resources that were there to help me get sober. How could I explain it to them, though?

It’s hard to live with yourself thinking about how you’ve let people down, and how bad you’ve hurt them. Especially when you know you will never really be able to explain to them why you did it, or why it was the only choice. I understand how they felt. It’s hard to accept that somebody you love will be going to prison for years.

My ex-fiancé showed a lot of concern for me after I made that decision. When I talked to him afterward, he’d been calling up everyone he knew to find out what it all meant for me. He looked up all of these programs and ways to get my time cut. “Amber, you can do this, and you can do that, and you have to do this, and you can get out early, okay?”

I feel horrible when I think about it. It makes me think of how much I’ve hurt him and everyone around me. How low my life had gotten, where I felt I had to send myself to jail and be cut off from my daughter and my parents and everyone else because that was the only way I knew to get myself under control and away from death.

Since I’ve been out of prison, my whole family and Leah’s father all say that now they understand. They see how the experience changed me and my life, and they’re glad to see who I’ve become. But at the time, in the beginning, it was very painful and hurtful for them. I’m sure they still wish I could have accomplished what I accomplished in another way. It was extremely emotional all around, right up to the day I went back into county jail, where I waited to be transported to prison.

The first time the other inmates and I were set to move from county to prison, it was canceled at the last minute. My lawyer had slipped up and said something to the media about me leaving, and the prison called it a security threat and decided to change the schedule. The other girls were furious with me over that. In county, everyone’s anxious to get to prison. County jail sucks. It’s tiny, you wear these nasty uniforms, and you have to clean your clothes in the sink. Prison is bigger, and you can walk around and be outside. So the day the shuttle bus comes and takes you out of county, even though in one sense you’re just getting out of the frying pan and into the fire, in another sense you’re like, “God-damn, finally.”

When the coast was clear and the prison felt safe from the paparazzi, or whatever they thought the security threat was, it was finally our time to go. The guards came in the morning and shackled us up all together, packed us into the van like sardines, and drove us off.

Driving up toward those gates, I felt numb.

What had I gone and done this time?

I
wanted extreme, and I got it.

My
Teen Mom
reputation still caused me problems from the get-go. Almost as soon as I set foot on prison grounds, I heard they were thinking of putting me in solitary. For some reason, they still considered my whole situation some kind of security threat. Luckily, that didn’t happen. But I still had a lot of crazy, screaming bitches to deal with. I was getting yelled at across the yard. People were cussing and calling me names, telling me I wasn’t in kiddie camp anymore, telling me to put money on their books. They all knew who I was, and they’d all walk by mean-mugging and demanding to know what the fuck I was looking at. It was rough in there, and of course there’s nothing you can do about it when that happens. You can’t be a narc, or a snitch, or a pussy. You just have to put up with it and ride it out until you find some people you can deal with.

Fortunately, by the time we got out of intake and I made it to my dorm, I had met two girls, Lisa and Stephanie, who sort of ran their whole side of the place. They made it a point to hang out with me and watch my back. They were both gang members. Lisa had been in for ten years for shooting a girl. She wasn’t some huge, tough-looking woman. She was very, very pretty and very kind and warm to me. Lisa and Stephanie were the first of many girls I wound up meeting behind bars who became close friends of mine. We spent a lot of time talking to each other about our situation. Like, how did we get to prison? What are we doing here?

We had a lot to talk about. One of the most depressing things in prison is being taken away from your family. There are so many women in jail who are separated from their kids. Their kids are taken away when they go to prison, moved in with relatives, or put into foster homes. It’s a constant topic behind bars, these women missing their kids.

Now I was one of those women.

When the drugs wore off, I was finally alone with reality. It wasn’t like the first time, in county, when I spent weeks destroyed by withdrawal and the rest of my time counting the days until I could get out and pick up my addiction right where I left off. This time was serious in a way none of the consequences had ever been. I was locked up with myself, and I was going to stay that way for a long, long time. I was alone in a way I had never been in my entire life.

The first thing I learned, and I learned it pretty quick, was that you never really know yourself until you’re completely alone. My situation was miserable. There’s no getting around that. But at the same time, I was clearheaded for the first time I could remember. It was like finding a safe place in the middle of a long war. It was a shitty safe place, with concrete walls and locked doors and gates and a bunch of people watching my every move, but it was a safe place all the same. Prison was a shelter from my addiction, and I had locked myself inside of it for the long haul.

Knowing where I was, knowing how long I’d be there, I was able—forced, really—to settle down and listen to my thoughts. For years, I’d been killing them with opiates, throwing handfuls of pills at my emotions to keep them away from me. Now I could feel everything, and I had to learn how to handle it all over again. I had to get to know myself almost from scratch.

I can’t tell you how many nights I spent sitting on my bunk, looking around and seeing everyone else asleep. I was always the one who was awake until four in the morning. I’ve always been the most nocturnal person I know, so that by itself wasn’t a big difference. But when you’re alone at night in prison, you’re alone with yourself. There’s no TV to distract you. There are no phones in there to play with while you lie in bed. No computers. All you have is a pair of headphones and a radio.

But you find yourself when you’re alone in thought, and that’s what happened to me. Every night I was lying in bed, looking out the window, just turning everything over in my mind. It was a scary, humbling, terrifying experience. But after a few weeks, or a few months, I found myself thinking, “You know, I’m all right. I feel better today than I did a year ago, when I was free. So I’m okay.”

It’s a very powerful thing, having that time alone to think. I can’t say enough about it. I sometimes wonder if I ever would have had that experience and that chance to learn and grow the way I did if I hadn’t gone to prison. Even if there were no drugs and I was acting the way I was supposed to, I might have still kept jumping from relationship to relationship, never comfortable enough with myself to take that time to really think. And even if I had been comfortable enough, I never would have been in a situation where I had to examine my life and myself in such an intense way, with none of the distractions we have in our normal lives. Lying in that bunk, I couldn’t even see the night sky because the lights in the yard were so bright. I literally had nothing to focus on but the thoughts in my mind.

You start to have these “Aha” moments. I can’t give you the exact date or time that it happened, but one day, I just knew I was going to turn things around.

Since I was a kid, I’ve never found joy in living. I’ve always struggled just to feel okay. Everything was a fight against darkness. I spent years full of anger and hate over the things that were wrong with my life. I hated my childhood, the constant fighting, the drinking, the years with my father that I lost to his addiction and his sickness. All my life, my stomach turned when I thought of that terrible night when we lost my baby sister. It was so wrong, so horrible, and so unfair. I was angry at the way my family fell apart in the years afterward, the blame and bad feelings that tore everything up.

I grew up hating my life, hating my body, hating the darkness and loneliness I couldn’t get out of my head. I spent a lot of time and energy turning that hatred on myself, from the first time I made myself throw up in grade school, to my first attempt at suicide at eleven, to the pills I abused without any concern for what I was doing to my mind and body. And when I couldn’t keep that anger and hatred to myself anymore, it spilled over into the rest of my life and started to destroy everything.

I wonder how much my father can relate to my experience. When you look at the two of us, the similarities are undeniable. Until the day I went to prison, I was going down almost the exact same road he’d gotten stuck on in his life. What if I had kept going? What if Leah had gotten older and I had gotten worse? What if her happy memories of me and our special bond turned into the bitterness and anger of a child who loses her parent to addiction? Would the pills have turned her mom into a monster the way alcohol turned my dad into one?

I know now that my dad was fighting his own demons when I was growing up. Losing my baby sister, Candace, and then being blamed for her death, being blamed for the horrible death of his own daughter, is worse than anything real I’ve ever gone through. And who knows what else was inside his mind that made it hard for him to fight his alcoholism?

I understand his situation now more than ever. It doesn’t give me back the years I lost with him, and that still breaks my heart. But I can learn from what my father and I have in common.

When my dad got sick and I spent those painful weeks with him, listening to him moaning in pain and praying not to die, I saw a man whose addiction had dragged him down to rock bottom. But in all that suffering, I also saw something truly amazing. After all that had happened, all the things he’d done to hurt me, he was able to look me in the eye with honest love and tell me that he was sorry. And even after all the damage he had done, all the hatred I thought I felt for him, I was able to forgive him. It wasn’t too late. It’s never too late.