From struggling with addiction to working in harm reduction today, Holly shares her story publicly for the first time.
Holly started using opioids when she was about 15 years old. “I had what would be a very typical nuclear family,” she explains. A sister, a mom and a dad. Everything was normal, until her mother began to suffer from Multiple Sclerosis. Her mother’s decline impacted her father, who turned to drinking.
With both her parents’ lives deeply disrupted, Holly was forced into early independence and a chaotic adolescence. As a young teen, she lived a ‘party lifestyle.’
“It started as drinking and using typical party drugs on the weekend,” she recalls. “My introduction to opioids was actually after getting my wisdom teeth removed. I remember taking a Percocet and just being like, oh, this is what I’ve been looking for.”
After her prescription ran out, she would buy others’ prescriptions or find opioids on the black market. For five years she was struggling with addiction.
“I hit rock bottom, and Googled ‘opioid help’ and found a clinic in St. Catherines,” Holly says. “The doctors that worked there were the first people in my life that I could finally open up to about how severe it was. They put me on a maintenance program, and I ended up on it for almost four years.”
Holly’s experience with the treatment clinic not only saved her life but inspired her current career trajectory as well. She now works in the harm reduction space at a local shelter.
I think it’s the stigma and the fear people face, admitting and talking to people about their addiction, that holds them back from being open and honest about what’s going on,” she says. “With opioid dependence, people can hold it together for years without anyone knowing. They can hold a job, they can hold a family together—it could be anyone, your neighbour, your family. And the street drug supply toxicity now is absolutely terrifying. There are weeks at the shelter where it’s just one overdose after another.
“That’s why I really wanted to finally share my personal experience with it and be open and honest about it,” says Holly. “If I’m going to be telling people that we need to do something about it, I have to as well.”