Life! By Design_ 6 Steps to an Extraordinary You - Laura Morton [4]
On the last day, the counselors explained we would make our final one-mile run to an area where all the parents would be waiting for us. It was supposed to be a joyous and momentous occasion of celebration and renewal. Everyone took off running, but my legs felt unexpectedly heavy. I could barely muster the energy for a slow walk. I remember thinking, I don’t care if I see my parents. In that three-week period, it was as if I had stepped out of being a child and had become a man. As I edged closer to the finish line, I saw only my mother standing there. Dad was nowhere in sight. When I came up to her, I felt numb and completely unemotional. I realized nothing had changed. I wasn’t less angry, and I knew things were going to be worse than ever when I got home.
I found it challenging to get back into my daily life. I became totally detached from everyone and everything around me. I began questioning everything. My life wasn’t any better than before I left for Idaho, but I knew I had the inner strength to survive whatever came my way because I had made it through those three hellacious weeks of camp.
When I started ninth grade that fall, it was in a progressive and expensive private school that my mother hoped would challenge me because none of my previous schools had. My new school had small classes and bright kids. On my first day I befriended a guy named Jeff, who was a senior. Like me, he was a crazy punk, so I thought he seemed cool.
“Do you drink beer?” he asked.
“Hell, yeah,” I said with just a little too much enthusiasm.
“Meet me in the quad and we’ll get hammered.”
I was stoked. I loved this school already! By fifth period I was completely wasted. Unfortunately, my mom received that all-too-familiar call. When she came to get me, she said she was spending an enormous amount of money to send me to this school and I was doing worse than ever. Yet despite my adolescent behavior, this was the first school I really liked. I did everything I could to convince her to let me stay. I promised to do better, not party as much, and become responsible. Somehow, even though I had never given her any reason to believe me, she bought my story. I spent the next couple of years pulling A’s and B’s, but I was still going down the wrong path by using drugs and alcohol.
I was totally out of control. I was stealing and lying, and I didn’t care about anyone except my girlfriend and her father’s cool car—my dream car—a 1965 Mustang. One night she and I decided to take it out for a spin, and we crashed it. Her parents didn’t want me around after that, saying I was a bad influence on their daughter. My mom was reaching her breaking point too.
One day I came home from school to discover that my bedroom door had been taken off its hinges. That was the final straw for me to pack up my things and leave home. I lived with my buddy Kurt for a while, until Kurt’s parents asked me to leave. I ended up sleeping in a friend’s van, and I woke up in some pretty strange places more times than I should have. I remember an especially low moment when I awoke hungover and miserable and unable to remember a single thing about the night before. Everything had turned from bad to worse.
Around this time a good friend died from an overdose of heroin. I realized that maybe this whole drug lifestyle wasn’t for me. That was one of my first aha moments—a revelation comes during times of pain or adversity, a moment of knowing that enough is enough.
I was now in the eleventh grade and had nowhere to go. I was tired of hanging out with fifty-year-old bikers who were dealing drugs as though they were still young thugs. I knew my father had no patience or tolerance for that lifestyle. One trait I inherited from him was to do everything big in life. If I was doing drugs, I was really doing drugs. If I was getting into trouble, it