February 23 - The Choice

I knew whatever choice I made would be the difference between life and death.

Write about a choice you made that changed your life.

After I bottomed out at the end of my heroin addiction and what should have been my freshman year in college, I found myself sitting in a halfway house after three days in a psych ward and a week in a rehab in a hospital in St. Paul. At the end of those 10 days, my insurance basically said, “Okay you can go home.”

There was no fucking way I’d stay sober if I went home—home being a huge part of the problem. So I took a bus to a pretty sketchy part of Minneapolis where I could sign myself up for General Assistance (welfare) in order to get into a state-funded halfway house. The minute I got off the bus, some dude offered me crack.