As a young high school student, Eric’s future seemed bright. He was an athlete, class president and popular among his peers.
“From the outside, it appeared that everything was going my way,” he said.
But inside, Eric was dealing with some serious emotional issues regarding his own self-worth. He said everything he was doing was an attempt to prove to himself — as well as to his parents, teachers and others — that he was a person of value.
“I was good at everything I did, but I was also scared a lot of how people would think of me,” Eric said. “All of those accomplishments were an attempt to overcome that fear, but the fear was always still there.”
So he found a solution, a way to cope with his fear and perform to the standards he thought everyone expected.
Eric started the way many teenagers do. He got involved with a crowd that looked down on school and experimented with drugs. Then he began experimenting with alcohol and cigarettes and later marijuana. The drugs seemed to give him a mental edge he hadn’t had before.
Numbing the problems
“When I was high, I could talk to people more openly. I felt good about myself,” Eric said. “The drugs would carry me to a stage where I thought I could overcome any problems. In my mind, I wasn’t an evil person; I just wanted to feel better about myself.”
Looking back, Eric said he realizes the drugs were really just numbing the problems he had. It was “a vicious trap the devil sets,” he said.
“In hindsight, drugs did everything for me that God wants to do for you,” Eric said. “When I was scared, confused, angry or lonely, I turned to drugs instead of to God. It was me and the drugs against the world rather than me and God.”
His drug use was also a downhill slope. The drugs he thought were innocent soon weren’t enough to provide the comfort and confidence he had grown to expect. And though he thought he could say no to the “hard” stuff, he soon realized he could not.
“Once you step into that culture, it is all around you,” Eric said. “You make promises to yourself that you won’t do this or do that but then you do.”
Twenty years after he first started using drugs, “I was a needle junkie who would do anything — cocaine, crystal meth, pretty much whatever was available,” he said.
During his years of drug addiction, Eric was a “hopeless and helpless case,” he said. He was a career criminal and proud of it. His catchphrase, “There’s no shame in my game,” showed his disregard for all forms of authority.
But now Eric realizes that he was in denial, blaming his drug and emotional problems on everything and everyone but himself. And finally he said God put someone in his life who revealed the destructive path he was on.
“I fell in love and I could see in her the things I couldn’t see in myself,” Eric said. “Her rap sheet was adding up a lot quicker than mine, and I recognized that she was going to die or go to prison [as a result of her addiction]. I also realized that there wasn’t anything I could do to help her [while I was part of the drug world myself].”
He believes God sent the woman into his life because for the first time, he cared more about someone else than he did about himself.
At that point, God showed Eric that he had to take responsibility for himself and his actions, and he took the first steps toward getting clean.
“I tried to provide for her in the drug world, but it was always a dead end,” he said. “Eventually I decided to try it sober.”
Today Eric is drug free. He is involved in a 12-step recovery program and relies on his faith in God, including daily prayer and Bible study, to help him stay that way. Though he still bears the scars from his past, he said life is so much better now because he has hope for the future.
In addition to rededicating his life to God, Eric has re-established relationships with his family and his long-time church home, Pleasant View Baptist, Holly Pond, in Blount Baptist Association.
That support system has made all the difference, he said, and he believes part of his purpose now is to help others dealing with addiction, especially those who don’t have the support of family and church.
One way he is doing that is through a support group at his church, in which he encourages others facing addiction.
“I feel that my calling is to support those who need to know there is hope,” Eric said.
“The good news is that we do recover,” he said. “That in itself is a miracle. The one thing that works is God and a life focused around Him.”
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