Erin Khar
Benefitting LA Community Health Project (formerly Clean Needles Now)
Erin Khar has relapsed so many times she can't even count. Her pill habit started at eight years old. Then at 13, a boyfriend introduced her to heroin. She hid her drug use from everyone while maintaining a full middle-class prep school lifestyle that included cheerleading, volleyball and horseback riding. By 21, she was using several hundred dollars a day worth of heroin and crack. Erin never imagined that 17 years later she would be clean and sober, a mom of two kids, an author and advice columnist. She talks about the reasons she started using as a child, the stigma around relapse, her road to recovery, and why it's so important to talk to kids about drugs from a young age.
Wise Words
“I went to a prep school. I horseback rode. I was a volleyball player, cheerleader. I had lots of friends, good grades, but I also had a drug problem.”
“I wanted drowsiness. I wanted sleepiness. I wanted to feel not here, not present.”
“I learned at a really early age that if I presented the way that people wanted me to on the outside, I could hide what was going on on the inside and then later I could get away with a lot if I presented myself the way that people wanted to see me. I think that’s what I felt the shame about, the shame about sort of this person who was there that they couldn’t see and I think this isn’t the crux for so many people when they feel shame about something, there’s this sort of formula that if anyone knew X, they wouldn’t love me.”
“That’s sort of that primal fear that we all have when we hide things from people, whether we’re hiding mental illness or addiction or any sort of insecurity that we have or something that we did that we feel ashamed about or some people have that about where they came from. So I think that that’s something that all of us can relate to, to varying degrees.”
“He had an older brother who was in college and he had been using heroin off and on, I guess, through his brother. I said, I hadn’t and then he asked me if I wanted to try it. I immediately said yes, there wasn’t even a hesitation on my part, and in telling the story over the years, I feel like there’s often, it’s sort of like an unsatisfactory answer for people that it was such a flippant decision. I think he probably could have asked me if I had wanted anything and I would have said yes, because again, it was sort of that heat and desperation that I felt in my body, like this need to just get out of my body. I would have taken anything that superseded sort of any thought of consequence of what that really meant. So that night, 10 days after my 13th birthday, I lost my virginity and shot heroin for the first time.”
“I think that for friends and family members of people in recovery, of course, it’s frustrating when there’s yet another relapse. I really get that. It can be difficult to sort of differentiate the human from the condition that they’re struggling with and I think that that’s the challenge when we have people with addiction disorders in our life is separating the person from addiction. When we’re able to do that, it allows us to be a lot less judgmental and allow them the sort of grace of relapsing and coming back again.”
“So when I gave birth to Atticus, they cleaned him up and the nurse handed him to me and I had just one of those sort of cliche sounding lightning bolt moments. She put him in my arms, I looked at him and the first thought I had was, oh, it’s you? I knew this soul. I know this person. There was like an immediate familiarity there and then the next thought I had was, I love you more than I hate myself and that was a very profound moment for me because I had lived with so much self-hatred for so long, I wasn’t very good at loving other people either. But I knew when I saw him that I wasn’t going to leave the legacy of who I had been with this kid.”
“Addiction is not a moral issue. It’s a public health issue and we need to look at it through a health lens not a moral lens.”
“This is going to sound very simple, but I do little things that trigger the reward center in our brain, like making very simple to do lists that include things like make the bed, shower, us a face mask, drink seven glasses of water, whatever it is. If I put these little things on the list and check them off, it just, it changes something in my brain.”
“Our greatest defense in all of this is a willingness to talk openly about it.”
Links
Erin’s website: erinkhar.com
Erin’s Twitter: @erinkhar
Erin’s charity: LA Community Health Project (formerly Clean Needles Now)