Conquering Chaos by Catelynn Lowell, Tyler Baltierra

these fourteen-year-old
     kids were in this house, and she’d offer it like cookies. “Who wants to try crack?”
     “I do, I do!”
    I never smoked crack, though, even while my friends were doing it, because my dad
     was a crackhead, and I wasn’t about that. But one day she asked if I wanted to try
     “cocaine.” I thought, sure, why not? I snort Ritalin and Adderall, what the hell?
     So I stayed up all night snorting coke with this old woman, coloring crazy shit in
     coloring books. And I remember waking up that morning and my first thought being,
     “I want more.” There was this crazy moment where I would have done anything to get
     it. But luckily, a lightbulb came on, and I got up and left.
    After that I told myself I’d never do cocaine again. I was freaked out by how bad
     I wanted it, and I was like, I’ll never touch that again. I was even scared to tell
     Catelynn I’d done it in the first place, because Catelynn was totally against it.
     So I wasn’t going to tell her, but my sister ratted me out.
    Catelynn freaked. She told me she’d break up with me if I ever did it again. She told
     me, “My life got destroyed by this stuff. My mom’s life was destroyed. I won’t date
     somebody who does this stuff.” And then suddenly I realized crack and cocaine are
     basically the same thing, and that stuff had destroyed my dad’s life and my life,
     too. That flicked the switch. I wasn’t gonna mess around with it anymore. So that
     was the last time I ever did it.
    Catelynn:
    Mom and Mike got me, too. One time I was at that house and she offered me some kind
     of anti-psychotic medication. I took it without thinking much of it, because I was
     doing dumb things at that time, and I’d taken tons of pills. So I swallowed this pill,
     and then sat around with all these forty-something-year-old people. I remember we
     smoked two blunts. And then all of a sudden I woke up on the floor, shaking, and my
     head hurt really, really bad. All of them were standing around me going, “Oh my god,
     are you okay? Are you okay?” Apparently I was standing there in the living room and
     I just lost consciousness and fell over backwards, smacked the back of my head right
     on the floor. I wandered out of there, but I couldn’t even go home, I was so messed
     up. I had to stay at my friend Sam’s and sleep it off on his couch.
    Tyler:
    All the neighborhood kids stopped going over there after awhile. It got old. They
     always felt like since they were providing all these drugs, they could treat the kids
     however they wanted. They ended up moving away after awhile. It was very strange.
    Catelynn:
    Over the years I think I’ve seen drugs and addiction cause so much damage. I’ve seen
     people acting crazy and forgetting what’s even normal. After everything went down
     with that crackhead boyfriend of my mom’s, she ended up getting back together with
     him when he came around saying he was dying. He came up with some fake hospital papers
     to prove he had some disease and he only had two years to live. He was my little brother’s
     dad, after all, and she was thinking, “Well my son needs to know who he is, he only
     has two years to live.” But it was a total lie. He was a con artist and a schemer
     and a pathological liar.
    Growing up with all of that, seeing all that bad stuff as a kid, is the reason I’ve
     never even touched hard drugs. I smoked weed, I dabbled in a little alcohol, and I’ve
     done all the typical teenager drugs. That’s not supposed to downplay them, but you
     know. The pot, the air duster, the ecstasy, those were all things people pretty typically
     dibbled and dabbled in back then. They were little phases for me. But I never touched
     the hard stuff, because I’d seen what it could do.
Closing Thoughts
    Alcoholism and drug addiction have destroyed people in both our families for generations.
     We talk a lot about breaking the cycle, and that means understanding the cycle itself.