Arnavaz Fatemi / Roundup
If you were to tell someone you have trust issues, fears of abandonment and the feeling that no matter what you do it isn’t good enough, people would usually think you’ve had your heart broken by a significant other.
For me this isn’t the case.
For most of my childhood and adolescence I grew up with a drug addict, who happened to be my sister.
Because of her “disease” there was constantly yelling and fighting at my house. If my parents weren’t yelling at my sister or at each other, they usually took their frustrations out on me.
The tension in my home caused me to be hostile at a young age, making it hard to grow close to people in social environments such as school.
Not only did her addiction isolate me from the world, it caused me to mature at a faster rate than I ever would have wanted.
From the age of 7 I had to learn how to lie to my parents about how late my sister would get home or whether or not I found drugs in her room.
While most kids my age were just learning what drugs were via the DARE program, I was the girl in the back giggling because everything was too sugar-coated for me.
As I got older, my sister’s addiction grew larger. She went from “party” drugs like ecstasy and acid to meth, her drug of choice.
When her love for meth started to seem like it was much more than the love of her family, let alone herself, everything around us seemed to hit rock bottom.
My parents were focusing all of their time on her, making me feel like I had no part in the family.
My sister started becoming the “typical” drug addict. She was stealing money from me and my parents, pawning off our stuff and doing everything else to get her drug.
At this point, I would come up with every excuse to not go home. I used to spend five nights out of the week sleeping over my friend’s house.
She made my home environment feel unsafe.
I was 16 years old when my sister finally moved out. For some reason my entire family thought I was hurt over her moving out, when in reality, it was the opposite of that.
With her moving out, I thought, “Good, now she can do her own thing and not affect any of us while doing it.”
For the first time in years, I felt safe at home.
However, I did not understand the seriousness of her disease until I went to visit her at her apartment one day.
It was almost like a scene from a movie. There were pipes to smoke meth out of everywhere and little baggies with white residue inside of them were all around the house. And for some reason, she had a cat when she’s allergic to cats.
I left her apartment that day knowing I needed to get her help, but never wanting to be around her again.
A couple weeks later, we found out she was squatting in the apartment she was at and all of her belongings were taken away from her, forcing her to move back home.
My parents set the ground rules: If she wanted to move back home, she had to go to rehab. So, she went to rehab.
Now, three years late, she’s clean. But this isn’t that happy of an ending. Having spent a majority of her life battling addiction, her life has almost passed her by.
She is 27 years old now and doesn’t have much to show for it except a lot of stories about her past. Recently she has applied to go to college and get a degree, when most people at the age of 27 are finishing school.
I do not resent her at all for everything she put me through. Although sometimes I wish I could have lived a normal childhood without knowing as much as I did at a young age, I’m almost happy I grew up so fast.
Without that, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I know what I want to do with my life and I look at her as an example of what I don’t want to be.
I don’t want to be 27 years-old looking back at my high-school years thinking, “Those were the days. I wish I could go back.