Our Stories
Share the power of long-term recovery. If you are in recovery, a family member, friend or ally of someone in recovery, we want to hear your recovery story!
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Voice of the Recovery Community Award
Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery (CCAR) is the recipient of The Joel Hernandez Voice of the Recovery Community Award!
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Our Stories
Leslie Miller
Newport, RI
I wasn’t done yet! I was having a great time in my cocktail dresses and business suits, drinking to excesses at cocktail parties and thinking I had arrived! I had my first taste of coke with a coworker after work to celebrate a successful business deal…then I spent a few months chasing that first high and being disappointed over and over again! Then I tried ecstasy and loved it until the next day when my body was in shock from whatever I did that was beyond its normal abilities! Then there was smoking pot with my musician friends. I didn’t really like it, since it over relaxed my muscles and my back would go out the next day…I just did it to fit in and be “cool.” Oh, did I mention that I have Multiple Sclerosis? I really think that’s what saved me from going where I really wanted to go, since that disease kept stopping me dead in my tracks every time I had fun with the new high I had found! So if I couldn’t find a substance to entertain me, I had to find a person, place or thing. No matter what new relationship, hobby, or geographical “paradise” I became obsessed with, I never was satisfied and too much in denial to admit it. Yes, I just kept trying to fill that hole inside and avoided knowing the real me and feeling my true feelings at all costs! I didn’t know I was hurting my children, my friends, my lovers, and most of all, myself. I thank God that he saw fit to use my daughter and a man I was dating to bring me into the rooms of my fellowship a little over two years ago, to hear the words I needed to hear to bring me to my knees and snap me out of my denial! Today, my life isn’t a lie…I am truly having fun, married to someone who’s been in recovery for 14 years, along with a renewed relationship with my 24 year old daughter and my 18 year old son who still lives with us and is finally learning what having his mother being fully present in his life means! They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here I am with my husband just before we were married having real fun. This is the genuine “high” of recovery, and I wouldn’t want to trade it for that dazed, zoned-out “high” of using drugs to run away from me!
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