I Was a Lifelong Medical Addiction – Here’s the Moment I Woke Up and Transformed: ‘It Was All Too Innocent’

A young hairdresser who was convinced she would smoke until she was 60 has revealed the moment she kicked her addiction.

Jodie Annabelle, 32, said she was going through a breakup when she was 23 and started hanging out with people who went to raves.

“It was all very innocent,” Annabelle, a new mother, told news.com.au.

One night she was hanging out with those friends.

They offered her a tube.

Being drunk, at a low point and “hanging out with the wrong people” saw her accept the offer.

It was the first time she had seen a drug.

Before that, it had been something she had only seen in movies.

She doesn’t even remember doing it.

“I thought it didn’t hurt me the first time, so I said yes the next time. That’s how it slowly crept into my life,” she said.

Then, she met a boy.

He had had problems with ice in the past and was trying to turn his life around.

Annabelle offered to help her with that.

The pair began dating.

The man still used occasionally and so did Annabelle.

After a few months, she started craving the drug every week.

The man began to “confess” to his drug use.

This went on for a year.

The hairdresser said that when she first started using, she was spending $150 a day on the drug.

“At the end of that relationship, I realized I was pushing clients to go and get drugs. I noticed it was bad. But even though I noticed it, I thought about doing it a few more times and then stop,” she said.

“You don’t really think about it too much. After that relationship ended, I fell into my addiction first.”

Besides meth, Annabelle started using heroin.

There were dark times.

Her home was invaded while her son was inside.

She clashed with the police.

She turned to selling drugs to finance her addiction.

“I got into that side of the world a lot,” she said.

Two years into her addiction, she returned home after taking her son to school.

The house was demolished by the police.

She was also told that she wasn’t far off – that she could turn her life around.

It was a warning she ignored.

She called her brushes with the law “luck” until 2020.

This is when she experienced a human invasion.

Another incident involved Annabelle giving a woman drugs in exchange for her driver’s license.

She didn’t have one and had to rent a car to pick up a dog she bought.

The moment she entered the city, she was withdrawn.

Annabelle handed over the fake driver’s license and the police officer prosecuted her like the other woman.

She was also accused of having drugs in the car.

“When I got back to the Gold Coast, I obviously told them it wasn’t her. So they hit me with perverting the course of justice,” she said.

For six months she was preparing to go to prison.

The police dropped the charges around the time Annabelle decided to get clean.

It wasn’t long after that that she had a life-changing moment.

She was shot in the arm, in an incident she did not want to elaborate on.

“It was after I was shot in the arm. I was in the hospital. I was still getting people to bring me drugs and go to the bathroom so I could smoke,” she said.

“It was in the hospital bathroom where I thought, ‘What’s going on?’

She said being shot was a “wake-up call”.

But at the same time, she knew she relied so heavily on drugs.

“I remember crying in the bathroom thinking I couldn’t stop even when I was in the hospital. I thought I was going to be 60 and I was going to smoke the stuff,” she said.

Annabelle decided she would just take it one day at a time.

So when she got out of the hospital, this is what she did.

She didn’t use a rehab facility or narcotics anonymous to get clean.

“I did it myself. Mainly because I was afraid that he would take my son. “My addiction was probably very visible, but I kept it to myself,” she said.

She bent over her son’s bed and told him that, after six years, she would be clean.

Annabelle had never admitted before she used drugs.

She took it one day at a time.

At three weeks, she saw a drug and alcohol counselor.

She couldn’t believe she had made it this far.

“I was in shock. I couldn’t believe I was getting up and cleaning my house. I couldn’t believe it was running flawlessly. “It had been so many years that I couldn’t get out of bed without it,” she said.

Because of her heroin use, Annabelle also pays $70 a month to get an injection in her abdomen that is designed to curb withdrawals.

It’s been two and a half years since Annabelle used drugs.

Now, she’s sharing her recovery journey online.

She said it is “madness” to have a normal job and life.

She just wants her story to help others who are in the midst of addiction.

“It’s horrible to look back on. Before you get high, you don’t think you’re going to get addicted. It’s the same when you get clean. You wonder how you became something you never thought you’d be.