Love Letter To A Freelance Writer #2: My Grandma Was A Drug Dealer
This is one of a select batch of emails I sent to a group of writers I was coaching. I intend to publish the entirety of them as a collection, but I’ve released several “selections” in a three-part series, which you can view on my website here: https://www.michaeldelaguerra.com/loveletters
Dear reader,
I bought my first gram of cocaine from my grandmother when I was 14. This sounds absurd when I write it down now, but yes, it’s true. Like many American millennials I fell victim to opioid addiction and — not surprisingly, given the opening sentence of this email — I ended up strung out on heroin at 19. But that wasn’t where my journey started.
I grew up surrounded by chaos, and while I’ll save you the gory details (I have memories of DEA agents storming my house looking for “Grandma Cookie” when I was only 11), what I will say is that drug addiction, and the inter-generational trauma that usually accompanies it, has plagued my family for years. That same trauma led me down a brutal path of self-destruction, and I inevitably dropped out of college to go to rehab. And I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to break the chains of a disease that has taken so many of my own family members.
We’ll continue this story at a later date, but… spoiler alert: I’ve been clean and sober since 2009. And whenever things get tough, I try to take myself back to the moments right before I checked into rehab, and remind myself how much I’ve overcome. When I have to dance with fear, sadness, and loneliness… I can’t imagine it being worse than what I’ve already gone through. Now your story may not look like mine, but I do know one thing: You have pain like I do. But you’re still here, too. If things are uncomfortable, be it in your career or your personal life, take yourself back to a trying time when you felt like you couldn’t breathe; take yourself back to the hopelessness you felt, then… remember that you pushed through. When I first started out as a freelance writer, I was rejected over and over again. It was part of the journey. But it was never as scary as waking up in the shower, with a needle in my arm, and a screaming girlfriend overhead, as I thought, “Wow, you know I’d really hate for my dad to find me dead.”
To think I went from dropping out of college (something I want to share about in the next email), to being featured as a case study in the Harvard Business Review, and making more than the average writer while working only 20 hours a week, is beyond crazy. I have to pinch myself sometimes. Wherever you are now, don’t worry. Soon enough, you’ll get to where you want to go. As long as you keep writing.
- M
This is one of a select batch of emails I sent to a group of writers I was coaching. I intend to publish the entirety of them as a collection, but I’ve released several “selections” in a three-part series over on my website at: https://www.michaeldelaguerra.com/loveletters
