Introducing Christy, 2020 Thistle Farms Residential Graduate

I lived in a refrigerator box under a bridge. I traded myself for drugs, and I spent many years in jail, treatment, and hospitals due to my drug use. That’s who I was.

As a child, I found out that the man I thought was my biological father was actually my step father. My biological father was an addict and my mother had left him when I was very young. My step father was a great father figure, but I felt like an outsider in my family as the step daughter in a traditional family. I was always searching for a place to belong. I got pregnant early, left school, and married an addict.

Addicted people were woven throughout my story and I became one of them.

I had been in pain for as long as I could remember. That’s why pain medication made me feel so good. It gave me the confidence to think I was liked, loved, and accepted. I met some amazing women in treatment and in jail. Women who filled a place in my life that had always been empty. Women who introduced me to Thistle Farms Residential.

Getting clean wasn’t as hard for me as it was for others. I could get clean, but I couldn’t get a job because of my criminal record and lack of an address. So without a job I always went back to the bridge and the drugs. Various women told me that Thistle Farms would give me a job, a free place to live for two years, even provide the physical, emotional, and dental help that I desperately needed. When I got into the program, I walked in and sitting there in the courtyard was one of those women. She did a huge double-take and said “you made it!” Soon, walking beside my sisters at Thistle Farms Residential, the pain that I had carried forever started to fade.

This is me today with a life full of more good things than I ever thought possible. The women who first told me about Thistle Farms are as awesome as they were when we first met, except now that goodness is accompanied by meaningful employment, drug free living, and freedom. I owe my life to this place of unconditional love and support and to the women who led me here. 

#LoveHeals