Let's Freaking Live! - Melissa's Story - Finding Addiction Recovery Before 20

About Me

I'm Mel, an addictions counselor, health and wellness coach, and a recovery coach with a profound personal and professional commitment to transformation. Sobriety has given me over 12 years of living a life I once couldn't imagine—a life filled with hope, happiness, and achievement. Once struggling with addiction, I have redefined my identity from addict and felon to a resilient, successful wife and mother. Today, I am passionate about empowering others to rewrite their stories, offering the tools and support needed to build fulfilling lives free from addiction. It doesn't matter how long it takes, new life can begin at sobriety.

My Story

Recovery means to me “building, maintaining and living a life that you no longer NEED to use drugs to make it through the day”. I have been sober for 12 and a half years and something I have learned is that getting sober is an opportunity to live a completely different life. A life you can look forward to living. The terms that I used to associate or describe myself were addict, felon, loser, thief, estranged from family and failure. The more recent terms I have thought to myself are sober AND happy about it, wife, determined, strong, resilient, successful and mom.

You can change the narrative, you can build a whole new you! I have built a life that the old me could never have dreamed of. Now I help others achieve the same, as an addictions counselor, health and wellness coach, and recovery coach I am ready to help you when you build your recovered life too.

I tend to think of my childhood in the sense of “the before” and then “the after”. The “before” childhood was happy. My father, mother, little brother and I went on family vacations, had dinner at the kitchen table every night, had rules and structure and was stable. We lived a typical suburban NJ family life.

This was before my mother passed away from a slow, sad death from cancer. The “after” childhood never looked the same again. My family crumbled. My father is from another country and the cultural barrier without my American mother to mitigate only propelled us further apart.

My father's previously low-key alcoholism spiraled out of control and my brother, and I were left to fend for ourselves. I easily fell into the comfort of the “wrong” crowd at school. Started experimenting with drugs like marijuana, ecstasy, prescription anxiety medications and cocaine.

It wasn't until I found and started taking my mother’s leftover pain medication that my habits soared to a new level of use and eventually addiction. I started to get in trouble and spent most of my high school years in and out of hospitals and rehabs. I was young so the options for treatment were limited.

Eventually the pills ran out and heroin was the next step. Heroin was my life, I didn't do anything else but wake up, use, find ways to use more, go to bed and repeat.

Once I started with heroin there was no stopping and eventually, I was expelled from school for refusing to complete anymore treatment. This only accelerated my use as I had nothing else to do, no adult supervision, and no other goals in life.

Then I started selling drugs to fuel my habit. During this time, my little brother eventually followed me into the drug life, who unfortunately until this day remains battling his demons. After I turned 18, I started to acquire criminal charges and a couple arrests which eventually led to a yearlong investigation and a raid.

This final arrest is where everything finally changed. I was finally given very serious consequences, jail time and a criminal record. I went to rehab for the last time and ended up being clean for my 20th birthday, and every birthday since.

Over the last 12.5 years I have achieved things I never thought possible for myself. Number one being not only sobriety but finding extreme happiness as a sober person. I'm married, my husband is also in recovery, and we have two beautiful children together. I went back to school and obtained my credentials in alcohol and drug counseling in the state of NJ. I am also a health and wellness coach. Currently I'm in the process of furthering education in both fields. My mission is to be able to provide a whole self-health approach from addictions to whole self-wellness. Getting sober reminds me there is no timeline on what you can achieve in life, life starts when you start living it.

Now let's freaking live!