Victor said he’s always gotten bored quickly and was often seeking excitement, thrill, and recklessness. So in school, when Victor started noticing drugs, he was intrigued. “Drugs were always everywhere if you were paying attention,” Victor said. “It’s more accessible than you think. Everyone was talking about it, and I was seeing a world I’d never experienced. It was curiosity and boredom.”

By 17, Victor was addicted to Xanax and went to a faith-based rehabilitation center. “That’s when I got introduced to God,” Victor said. “You’d think my life would be beautiful after that, but it got worse. I was introduced to God, but I just didn’t start walking with him.”

Victor was sober for a bit, but then tried methadone. “That’s when I started going down really bad,” he said. “At that point in my life, at that age, I hit my lowest. I would just get really high and wouldn’t remember days at a time. It would make me do crazy things. It had a strong hold on my life.”

Victor went through spurts of sobriety, once staying sober for a year during a program. “Right before I graduated, an opportunity came up for a lot of pills, really cheap. My co-worker told me I looked sad, and I was. I knew I was going back in and I hadn’t even gotten the pills yet. It was so easy to fall back in.”

Victor said that’s when manipulation took hold. “I went to my graduation ceremony high. I was saying, ‘I’m good; I see the light’ and I was high. I’m ashamed of that. I got really into the manipulation then. It was like a drug in itself. I was so lost.”

Then, a friend’s death triggered a new emotion: regret. “I was one of the last people she talked to. She trusted me to pick up her prescription, but I took it, all of it, and
I didn’t talk to her again. She ended up killing herself, and her son found her. I couldn’t believe it. I asked God, ‘Why did she have to die?’ She was a good person. A lot of regret came in. I got even worse because I didn’t want to think about it anymore.”
At one point, when Victor was detoxing, he said he cried every day. “I just wanted to die,” he said. “I’d pray to God with all my focus and energy, sincerely from my heart, to take me. Heaven or hell, I’d just rather be dead. I lived for it and I was ready to die for it.”

But Victor said God “breathed life into me. I have peace and joy.I never thought I’d have that without using.” Victor graduated earlier this summer. “When I’ve heard about God, and people saying they “got saved” or they “see the light,” it sounds good. And all my life, I believed it—I knew it was real. But when you experience it for yourself, it’s so much more fulfilling than you can imagine. I’ve been so humbled. God lives in me now.”