My Life in the Women’s Halfway House, Part IV: My Awakening

My first two weeks in the halfway house were spent in a miserable state of shock. Every morning, as soon as I opened my eyes and realized where I was, I was overcome by feelings of dread and disgust. “Nope, you’re not in Colorado anymore – you’re living in that San Francisco halfway house with your felony-convicted drug addict roommates, Julie. Oh, and it’s time to fill out your daily paperwork letting the director know where you will be going, who you will be with, and what you will be doing so that she can keep tabs on you because God knows you can’t even be trusted to take a shit by yourself anymore.” Ugh. I loathed the circumstances I found myself in.

Even more than my circumstances, though, I loathed myself. And this self-loathing manifested in feelings of extreme and intense shame – the two-ton elephant splayed out across your chest making it impossible to breathe kind of shame. As an initial matter, I was ashamed of myself for living in this weird and dirty place. I mean, who ends up in a place like this?! I was certain that no one remotely normal would find herself living in a halfway house, so, obviously, I was a hopeless freak. I was also ashamed to be associating with these weird and dirty people, my roommates. Our neighbors didn’t help this situation, either. The halfway house was located on a nice block in a residential area. I saw how our neighbors always eyed us suspiciously whenever we’d walk by. I saw them rush to usher their little kids inside to protect them from the big, bad halfway house girls. And, worst of all, I got why they did it. “I would be doing the same thing, too, lady! Look, I’m not like everyone else here! You don’t have to hide your children from me!” I wanted to scream out.

I judged my roommates for being low class, criminally minded, dirty drug addicts. I felt incredibly uncomfortable associating with them because, to me, we were obviously fundamentally different people. First of all, I did not need this insanely controlling program, where I have to report into the director every time I take a piss, in order to abstain from drinking or using drugs. My roommates, on the other hand, did appear to require this degree of supervision. So, obviously, my roommates were hard-core drug addicts. And only sketchy, dangerous, dirty people become hard-core addicts – not nice, good people like me. I was just a big drinker. Alcohol is one thing. Crystal meth is another. And I did not do dirty drugs. In fact, I had never even seen hard drugs. I merely drank a little too much at college house parties and ended up humiliating myself one too many times is all. Plus, I had never been to prison! There is an inherent difference between someone who has been to prison and someone who has not been to prison. And, to me, the fact that I had not spent time behind bars meant that my roommates and I shared little to no common ground.

I also hated the house’s therapy and AA program. The meetings and sessions were nowhere near what someone with more nuanced and complex problems like me would require. Furthermore, I did not need to attend AA meetings where the girls bitched about their bad experience with their parole officers that day or how they had ran into someone they knew when they were locked up and this made them crave their drug of choice. I needed meetings where we discussed our deep feelings and emotions and focused on becoming more spiritual and connected to the universe. The whole experience just felt completely uncomfortable. I knew I was better than this house and everyone in it.

After two weeks of living in the house, the certainty surrounding my superiority was seemingly impenetrable. I had decided that the only way I would survive this experience would be if I just sucked it up, stuck to myself, and inquired into whether I could get away with staying only 90 days, as opposed to the minimum of six months commitment I had made earlier. But then, one day while I was heading out to my mandatory AA meeting, something happened that was even weirder than living in a halfway house with ex-con crack addicts.

The day started out like any other day in the halfway house. I woke up hating my life as usual. I submitted my sheet to the director detailing where I was going that day and what I would be doing. And I found another resident to chaperone me as I left the house, signed out, and headed to an AA meeting. By this time, I had become a bit better at navigating the public transit system, so I knew right where we were going – to the “Dry Dock” noon AA meeting in the Marina District. Jill, who was always around due to her mysterious mental disability that prevented her from working, was with me and we sat next to each other on the bus on our way to the meeting.

Jill was uncharacteristically quiet this day and so rather than listen to her jabber on about doing speed in Humboldt county, I was able to look out the window of the bus and daydream in peace about my beautiful and glorious life back home. I wished more than anything that I was back at Colorado College – studying feminism, playing tennis, and singing in the all women’s a cappella group of which I was a member.

See, I was a very talented and accomplished girl back in Colorado. I went to a really good college and always earned very high grades. In addition to academics, I played a sport. I was captain of the women’s tennis team at CC and the number one singles and doubles player. And, if that wasn’t enough, I rehearsed with my singing group multiple times a week and performed regularly for other students around campus. Obviously, I had my shit together and my life was an amazing success.

But suddenly my daydream about my idyllic life at Colorado College was aborted – the bus had hit a huge bump in the road and the previously chatty passengers became eerily quiet. No longer daydreaming, my mind was uncharacteristically blank and, in the quiet of the bus, I became oddly hyper-aware of my body and my surroundings. Then, out of nowhere, it felt like my brain basically exploded. And I think that the heat from the explosion must have started to melt the thick glacier of denial that had been safeguarding my heart up until that moment. A thousand light bulbs went off, angels sang, the skies opened up, and the truth, for the first time, was revealed to me.

I suddenly realized, “holy shit. What the fuck am I talking about?! I was not this perfect, ideal, super star college student back at home. Who was I kidding? I was actually a total shit show!” In that one moment, it occurred to me that, in reality, my life was completely falling apart before I came to San Francisco.

For starters, I was not some academic superstar back at college like I had been deluding myself into thinking I was. The reality was that I had stopped attending all of my classes because I couldn’t handle being out in public. I was terrified of running into classmates who had seen me engaged in humiliating drunken behavior the weekend prior. I bought prescription glasses and, whenever I did manage to leave the house to attend class, I wore them. Mind you, I had perfect vision. I wore the glasses because, somehow in my mind, I tricked myself into believing that if I couldn’t see you, then you couldn’t see me. And I desperately did not want to be seen. In that moment on the bus, it finally registered with me that wearing prescription glasses to hide from other people was somewhat strange.

My grand tennis accolades were no different than my crumbling ability to participate in my academics. A few weeks before to my 28-day stay in rehab, despite the fact that I was slated to go to nationals that season, I walked into tennis practice and quit the team on a whim. Literally, I did it on a whim – just didn’t feel like doing tennis anymore, even though it had always been a huge part of my life and even though my team was depending on me. Tennis had become too overwhelming. Even more problematic was the fact that tennis was cutting into my ability to have fun and party more frequently.

In fact, everything felt like it was cutting into my ability to have fun and party more frequently – classes, tennis, singing, and even my friends, who had all become sick of me and of the drama I caused when I was drinking. And there was always lots of drama. Oh, and lots of shame, too. Over the years, since I was 16, I had amassed enough shame to last a lifetime. And as a result of this shame, I was increasingly incapable of participating in my life, meeting my responsibilities, and just being a normal person. In short, I wasn’t little miss perfectly normal. I was a total fucking mess.

To make matters worse, I didn’t know who I was. But I did know that I hated myself with a passion. I had tragically low self-esteem and failed to realize that things I did made an impact on others’ lives. Before I left for rehab I had a pathetic and failed suicide attempt. I tried to burn my wrist with my car’s lighter. It hurt quite a bit, so I aborted the plan. Instead, I just prayed every night that I would not wake up in the morning.

And, as if my self-hatred and disintegrating life weren’t bad enough, I realized that my number one coping mechanism, alcohol, that had always so successfully silenced the voices of self-hate and insecurity in my head, was no longer working. Instead, alcohol had become a necessity and I could not control my behavior when I was drinking. I never knew exactly what I was going to do when I would drink. I would make promises to myself that I wouldn’t engage in self-destructive humiliating behavior, and I would break these promises on a regular basis.

The truth was that my life was a mess, I was lost, and I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t go back to Colorado College yet because I had made a bad reputation for myself due to the poor choices I had made when I was drinking and because of all the drama that I had created before I left for rehab. I couldn’t go home, either, as there was nothing for me to really do back there. It was San Francisco or nothing. And I could choose to embrace this bizarre, fucked up, insane experience and everyone who was a part of it or I could choose to hate my life for the next six months. I had to go with option one.

But there was more. Sitting in that bus, I realized that San Francisco was actually exactly what I had been wishing for over the course of my last year at college. In the months leading up to rehab, I routinely fantasized about having the opportunity to start over. I badly needed a do over, a second chance at life and a second chance to become a decent human being. There were so many things I had fucked up. And I needed a time-out place where I could just find myself. I hated that my identity was defined by my ability to play a sport, my intelligence, and my singing. I hid behind these things and I hid because without them, I was a ghost of a girl and you would see right through me.

This, this weird and fucking insane experience with the halfway house, this was my do over – this was exactly what I had been wishing for over the months leading up to San Francisco. This was my opportunity to just be myself – whatever that might look like. I had no idea who I was, but I would never know if I kept hiding behind the masks I used to define me in the past. And it was critical that I find myself and I knew needed a do over to do it. This was my once in a lifetime opportunity – a chance to hit the reset button – and, in that moment, I vowed not to waste it.

The realizations I had on the bus that day opened the door for a flood of additional realizations that would follow. As it turns out, for an entitled, privileged, clueless girl like me, there could have been absolutely no better place to have a do-over than at a halfway house in San Francisco surrounded by a bunch of women who were just getting out of prison. And, in the end, by far the weirdest things about San Francisco were not my roommates, my living situation, the house, the certified alcohol counselor who stole our cookies, or the farting house dog. The weirdest thing about San Francisco was the fact that, as soon as I woke up, I changed in profound and crazy ways. And my criminal roommates who made me so uncomfortable? These women saved me from becoming the asshole who I was well on my way to becoming and, ultimately, it would be with them that I finally, for maybe the first time in my whole life, felt like I was home.