And I couldn’t handle that. The pain was just too great.
I’d dabbled in drugs recreationally since I was 16. So I knew about drugs, and by the time my wife passed, I’d started dabbling with harder drugs. I knew for sure that they could take everything away.
They take your feelings away. They take the pain away.
The more drugs I did the less I felt the pain, but then the drugs would wear off. I’d start feeling the pain, and I’d do more drugs, and it was a vicious cycle. And after a while, I didn’t care about my job, I didn’t care about anything.
I ended up on the streets, but it was really, really bad. Life on the streets, especially in winter in Calgary, is very, very hard.
You’re just surviving from one minute to the next. There’s no safety, there’s no nothing. And it’s just the same thing tomorrow. You just have to wander around and try to stay warm, which is impossible. If you get really hungry, you go dumpster diving for food. It’s cold and a lot of people are hungry, so what do you do? You turn to drugs. It’s really hard to survive on the streets without drugs. It’s just so hard.
But my friends were dying from the drugs, and a lot of times I ended up having to save my friends.
The only way I saw out was recovery. I had no idea where I was going to go, but I just knew I didn’t want to go back to the streets.
So I ended up in Calgary Dream Centre.
It was the scariest moment of my life because I didn’t know what was going to happen. But I didn’t care because there was only one thought in my mind: to get clean.
When I came to Calgary Dream Centre, I had hope. I didn’t know how, I just knew this was my hope.
When you wake up at the Dream Centre, you don’t think, ‘How am I going to get food?’ That’s taken care of. So you can instead start your day off right like normal people do.
Then, once you’ve eaten, your health gets better. You put on more weight. And you have time to think about life. You’ll have the people to help you figure out what you’re gonna do for the rest of your life, where you’ve gone wrong, and how you can prevent that from happening again. You have a safe environment to do that, because they’ve been in the same place as you’ve been.
The Dream Centre is the best place I could have ended up. And I’ve now come to believe that God had a lot to do with that. I went from being sad and hopeless and didn’t know what I wanted to do, to gaining hope and with help I got past the sadness. I’m happy these days.
I spent 40 years doing drugs and yet I’ve changed that around. I’ve started a new life. I have no idea where I’d be or where my friends would be if it wasn’t for the Dream Centre.
Together we can remind the people of Calgary that no one is beyond hope.
