Finalist Essay: Charlie Lockyer

Charlie Lockyer's entry for the My Life as 3D Scholarship Essay Contest was unique among the 10 finalists. Why is that? Because not only has she has been affected by her older brother's addiction and her mother's addiction, she has faced addiction herself.

Charlie is a brave young woman who is studying psychology at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I am thrilled to share her incredibly brave and honest essay with you.


Breaking the Circle

By Charlie Lockyer

Andrew has always been THAT guy. The one you want to be with. Good looking, funny and surrounded by friends. Pushing everything to the limit and rarely getting caught. He is six years older than me, and when I was growing up he was my hero. I wanted to be just like him. He was also my protector from life with an alcoholic mother. She was verbally, physically and mentally abusive and he was the buffer between real harm and the quiet of my family's own dysfunctional kind of normal.

In the final years of our Mom's drinking, Andrew began to steal her booze. I learned that he would sell the booze, and use that money to buy weed. In my eyes this impressed me even more. It was a cunning business venture and the adults had absolutely no idea. When our Mom finally entered recovery, our world began to change. My parents' eyes were opened to the three of us wild children, and a budding business died. Even though he was put out of business, Andrew continued to be wildly popular and continued to use a variety of drugs. I grew up to be almost exactly the opposite, even though I desperately wanted to be like him. My idolization of him eventually led me to my own downfall.

In every branch of my family tree, and perhaps even down into the roots, there is addiction. It is simply how our brains seem to be wired, so to speak. When the concept that my siblings and I might have a greater likelihood of having addiction issues, we all reacted in different ways to that knowledge. My younger brother completely accepted it, and has the foresight, even at 16, to want a life free from mind-altering substances. I was neutral, and while I had an intellectual understanding of what I was being told about my chances of developing a problem with substance misuse, it wasn't resonating emotionally. I was working on my anger and PTSD in therapy, but was still too confused to really listen or care, and the need to feel connected to my peers was so strong. Andrew, however, denied the possibility that addiction could be genetic flat out. In order to repair our familial connections, we all went to therapy as a family, but Andrew refused to participate, driving himself away from us rather than forgive and learn to move on from our broken pasts. He seemed to let it fester.

Andrew's thirst for adventure and need for excitement led to him join the military by the time I was in high school, and I was desperate to follow. There, too, he was still Mr. Popularity. I struggled in high school and was not so well liked. I was awkward because I was trying to be someone I wasn't. I was uncomfortable in my own skin. I had few friends, and I couldn't figure out why I just didn't fit anywhere. I looked at the differences between my older brother and I, and found a key. I didn't touch drugs. I didn't go out of my way to avoid them; I just never took up people's offers. Andrew would come home and tell us all about his adventures on and off base. More and more often, these adventures became centered on his bar crawls, his drunken antics and sneaking drugs that would be undetectable on drug screens. I feared for his job and his life. He flew planes, shot guns and was in uniform. I was also enchanted by it all. It became glamorous, death defying and he was always the center of it everything. The drugs and alcohol were main characters--a central theme. None of it would be possible without that fuel. It was the adventure and glamour I wanted--but also the way he fit in anywhere, with anyone. After Andrew left the service, he continued, this time on the rave and festival circuit, with X--sometimes real and sometimes synthetic. The raves look incredibly fun, and the different music festivals he posts about on Facebook and Instagram look like such a great time. He presents as happy, like he is living life however he wants it--as if he is in control of it all. I wanted that more than anything! But it’s an illusion, like all of those pictures. I only saw what I wanted to see.

My Mom received a phone call one day. My siblings and I had a very complicated relationship with my Mom--she was an active alcoholic during most of our childhood, and has now been in recovery and has been sober for more than eight years. It was Andrew, admitting that he had a drinking problem and that it was out of control. He was going to start going to meetings and getting help. I didn't really think too much about it, until a month later, when he was back to raving and bar hopping. I asked him about it, and he told me that he isn't an addict--it isn't possible for him to be an alcoholic. He told me that addiction is in no way genetic, he had overreacted, it was under control and he had taken a break and it was all good. No problem. Looking back on my own experiences, he is wrong.

My life was great--I had gotten into a college I believe to be prestigious, and that was a perfect fit for me. The school was heaven, and I loved it. I was away from my family for the first time, and I wanted the kind of friends my brother had. Andrew's voice got louder than what I learned from my Mom's recovery. After years of being on the sidelines and winning dodge ball games in gym simply because nobody noticed me, I found somewhere I could start over and be just like him--be popular and cool. So when my friends partied, I partied too. I began drinking socially and smoking pot. For a month or so, my life was well balanced. My studies and my partying didn't impact each other. As the semester ground on, my drinking became uncontrollable. In a very short time, I was beginning to lose control over my life. Alcohol became my higher power--when I felt any negative emotion, my automatic thought was that I needed a drink. When I was happy, I wanted to celebrate by drinking. My older brother made it all seem normal, that I was just being a college student, that it wasn’t a problem at all. But the path that I was on led me into a dark place--I nearly lost my place in the freshman class, as well as the few friends I made. My grades slipped, and I was losing everything I loved. Within four months of me first raising a bottle to my mouth, I was drinking every day, smoking weed any time I could get my hands on it, and it was escalating fast and destroying my life. The smallest tension became a huge argument and lead to explosive confrontation. Who was I? Many members of our family struggle with addiction, but nothing impacted me like my brother's use. He continues to make that life look glamorous, but now I know better. Alcohol and drugs are not going to win me friends or fill up any empty spaces in my life. It took nearly ruining my own life to realize that Andrew isn't right about a family connection and substance abuse disorder, and I had to nearly destroy my life to see just how the four generations before me prove us both wrong.

I still love and adore my older brother. He is brilliant, funny and THAT guy--even clean. Especially when clean. He was my hero, my protector, and he was exactly who I wanted to be. I no longer idolize him, or want to follow in his footsteps. I am so afraid that he will use some combination of booze and synthetic drug and he will react badly to it and die. That is one of my worst fears. He still has not let go of his anger from our pasts, and refuses to seek treatment for his PTSD. He uses to mask his feelings with others but with his family he rages. He drinks to the point of blackout every time. He has driven wedges between himself and all of us, even though we love and accept him for who he is. He has separated himself from us, much like our Mom often tried to separate from the family in our younger years. This brings back awful memories for me, my own PTSD. He and I no longer have a relationship, because I cannot build a bridge without a foundation. I miss him, and love him dearly, but his addiction and his refusal to get help has created a chasm between us. He seems to walk down the path our Mom took, and that is the circle of addiction that I want to help people break free from.

Today, I have found myself again. I am in early recovery, and am working on bettering myself as well as my life. I am coming to terms with the consequences of my downward spiral, and accepting them with as much grace as I possibly can. I am still attending my dream college, however my major has changed, and my life plan has as well. I began to form a new plan with a new dream. I am now majoring in Psychology, with plans to work with addicts, and the families of addicts. I want to help families like mine, ravaged by addiction issues, because I understand them personally. I know what it is like to be the child of an addict, and to be the sibling of an addict. I want to work with people with substance use disorders because I know what it is like live with one. While in college I will be advocating for sober living environments. My dream is to help people who are affected by the disease of addiction, fight stigma and get on with the business of living. I want to be THAT woman but for all the right reasons. The first president of the school that I attend said in his final commencement speech, "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." I am not going to be ashamed. Not of who I am, of my addiction, of my family--as long as I am present in my life and do my best I will have won.

Finalist Essay: Kaitlyn Taylor

Kaitlyn Taylor of Orangeburg, New York, was one of the 10 finalists in the My Life as 3D Scholarship Essay Contest. Her essay talks about her big brother Colin's addiction, and how it impacted her. Katilyn attends Dominican College in Orangeburg. I'm happy to share her writing with you.

Overshadowed

By Kaitlyn Taylor

My big brother, Colin, has always been my hero and my protector. We had a lot to deal with growing up with a verbally abusive alcoholic father, but Colin was always there for me. When an issue would arise at home, he always wanted to shelter me from the fighting and yelling because I was his little sister. Even when I was at school, being a quiet, shy, and insecure girl, I felt a little safer knowing Colin was in the same building. As we got older, the issues at home escalated and Colin found himself needing his own escape from the chaos.

When we were in high school he began using marijuana. The abuse at home became more than Colin could handle and more often than not would escalate to physical altercations with my father in order protect my mom and myself. Colin began slipping further into his addiction. Marijuana was simply not enough anymore and he began searching for an even greater high, which he found in cocaine. In my eyes he was still my amazing big brother, but I hated when he was under the influence. When a fight would occur, I would beg him to stop fighting with my father and it was like a clearing of clouds after a terrible storm in his eyes. He had a weak spot for me in his heart like I had one for him.

In a few short years his abusive relationship with drugs escalated very quickly. He began to steal from our family to support his habit. He could no longer maintain a job and would often go missing for days at a time. We would not hear from him during those missing days and always expected the worst. My mom vented to me, her only escape, and I felt the pressure of not only wanting and needing to fix my brother, but also to be there for my mother. It soon became apparent that I was better at handling these situations than my mother was, so I felt I had to be strong for both of us. I did not understand why when I begged Colin to stop I no longer saw clarity in his eyes but rather a frightening emptiness. I remember going to a wake for a friend’s brother who had passed away from an overdose and seeing my brother in the casket. My friend said to me, "We knew this was how he was going to die, we just didn’t know when it would be." Those words still haunt me to this day. Nobody should have to feel that way, yet I understood what she meant all too well.

Colin began getting more physical with my father as his habits continued to get worse. He started adding pills to the mix and it was not long before he was snorting and injecting heroin. He had moments when I thought he hit rock bottom and was willing to go to detox and rehab, but this became a cycle when he felt he had no other options. He always used again and I began to feel helpless. There were many nights with minimal sleep because I had to drive him to hospitals to detox, and I began missing work because I had to drive him to rehab each time he decided to go back after leaving.  If I wasn’t driving him, my mom wanted me to come because she needed the support.

I realized his rock bottom was a lot lower than most other people's when he began to steal from my grandmother. Around this time I was away getting my undergraduate degree. When I came home for breaks he would ask me if I wanted to go visit our grandma, who had severe Alzheimer's at the time. I was thrilled with this idea and hoped seeing her would give him some reason to stop using. Once we arrived at her house he would always need to use the bathroom, and it was not long before I caught him with our grandmother's jewelry to sell to support his ongoing habit. When I returned home for the summer, my mother told me my grandma was dying and plans were being made to bring her home on hospice. My mother also told me that Colin had continued stealing checks from our dying grandmother’s checkbook and that he had also stolen $7,000 from me. I wanted nothing more than to break down, but I had to stay strong for mom who was losing her mother and had to deal with her drug addicted son and alcoholic husband. The day my grandmother died, I watched Colin sneak into the refrigerator to steal the morphine provided to my grandmother. I could not tell my mother and add more to her plate, so I took it upon myself to watch him.

For years I was conflicted with feelings of anger and resentment toward my brother but ultimately I loved him.  I went through periods of not talking to him and then forgiving him as he went through his cycle of using and getting clean. I knew it upset my mother when I would ignore him, so I would suck it up and forgive him.  I told him as long as he was clean he was forgiven for stealing all of my savings. When Colin started using heavily, I felt added pressure to be the stable child. I matured much sooner than most people my age. I could not understand when I would beg my mom to take action against my brother for stealing from all of us and she would simply reply with, "I can't he's my son." I could not comprehend this; was I not also her daughter? Could she not see what this was doing to me? My feelings and needs were pushed to the side and that hurt the most.

I don't know if it's part of his addiction or that he’s just a terrible person, but he picks on my mother's insecurities. He tells her if she kicks him out he will end up dead in a ditch. He calls her fat, and miserable, then tells her that she is a horrible mother. I have stopped asking her to force responsibility on him because of how he yells at her and treats her. I only asked her to because I know how much she does for him and that she does not deserve to be treated this way.  My mother says she is a prisoner in her own home and I feel the same way. I am stuck at home because I can barely afford school so I definitely cannot afford my own place. My entire family, including my father who has been sober for 2 years, has to walk on eggshells around my brother. I do my best to cheer my mother up when Colin treats her so poorly, but she feels such immense guilt and responsibility for the person he has become that anything I do or say hardly makes a difference. Through my attempt to understand addiction, I have read that a person stops maturing at the age they start using, therefore, my 26-year-old brother is still mentally 19. All he has to do is yell, throw a fit, and break some things in the house and nobody wants to deal with him. He knows that we will always love him no matter what, and he takes advantage of that.

I recently was accepted into a graduate program for Occupational Therapy and will begin in the fall. For the first time in my life I feel like I belong and I am doing the right thing. My mother has no money to help me pay for school and so that burden is on me. I am still trying so hard to be the responsible one and at this point I work three jobs, go to school, and pay for my own financial expenses. I am taking everything on as loans. I would be incredibly appreciative of the scholarship money. I thank you tremendously for the opportunity to participate but also for the chance to get some of my frustrations out about my current situation. Siblings of addicts are often overshadowed and for the first time in a long time I felt that my feelings mattered. I am very excited to take my first step toward a career where I can help people, people who truly want and need the help. I have pushed myself harder than ever to be accepted into this program. I know it will be difficult, but more importantly I know it will be worth it. 

Kaitlyn Taylor