The Freedom Writers Diary - Erin Gruwell [108]
Since my dad was the only source of income before he got sick, I’ve had to become the man of the house. Being the man of the house means no more school for me and certainly more working hours. I also have to cheer up my mom and my younger brother. This is very hard for me because half the time I feel like crying, but I want them to think I’m strong. So most of the time, I hide behind a mask.
Since there is no money coming into our family, my mom had to give up the apartment we rented. She sold my dad’s car and most of our furniture to pay the bills my dad left behind when he went back to Mexico. Since he’s got a U.S. citizen, he had to go back to Mexico to get a kidney transplant.
Today, I look back and realize how amazing, precious, and powerful both time and life can be. In one second, you can be on top and have everything going your way. The next second, everything goes wrong and you find yourself at the bottom. Weeks before what is supposed to be the happiest time in my life, I find myself struggling just to pay for my graduation cap and gown. I’m not worried about being poor, though. After all, I’ve been there before. I come from a poor background, so it’s nothing new for me. (History does repeat itself, I guess.) I see it as going back to my roots. But, it was nice being on top for a bit.
At this point in my life, I feel like a dry leaf dropping from a branch of a tree, uncertain of its destiny. I’m just here waiting to see where the road of life takes me, and hopefully I’ll make the best out of it.
Diary 131
Dear Diary,
Wow! I’m an all-American! Me? I can’t believe it! I just got home from signing my letter of intent to play football at a PAC-10 school. A full-ride scholarship to college! Four years ago, I would have never pictured this. Football was just something I did along with drinking, smoking, and drugs. School was something I tried not to do. As I look at my life now, football is one of my top priorities, but just four years ago when I was a freshman, getting high was the only thing that mattered.
Since I was very young, maybe six or seven, I have wanted to be a football player. I played park league and Pop Warner football into junior high. But when new friends introduced me to drugs, I began to lose interest in football. I started drinking and smoking moderately in the summer after sixth grade. I was twelve years old.
My drug experimentation soon spun out of control. I started ditching school, stopped going to football practice, and dropped all my old friends. My new friends were all into drugs, too, so it made it easier to get high. This transformation took two years before full-on addiction. By the time I had reached my freshman year in high school, I was smoking pot three to five times a day. Besides smoking, I was drinking around the clock.
Soon drinking and smoking wasn’t good enough. I needed a bigger and better high. I tried everything that I could. I would try or do anything to get high. I had shroomed, tried many uppers and downers. I had tried acid (LSD) time and again.
The worst for me was nitrous. It was the most addictive drug I did. It was different than anything I had done. When I could not get it, it absolutely took control of me. Nothing else mattered. I had a nitrous oxide tank in my closet so I could get my daily high. I remembered one time when I had run out and it would take a day to get it filled up, but that was too long. I needed to get high right away, so I tried a whip cream bottle, but it did nothing for me. I remembered watching a news special that talked about how people get high with household cleaners. So that’s what I decided to do. I went into my closet and found some computer cleaner and it did the trick.
My mom and dad kept after me about my grades and stuff. They wouldn’t just let me go my own way. They