Today is Will’s seven-year anniversary of being clean. He still smokes weed, but for the last seven years, he hasn’t used alcohol, cocaine, LSD, methamphetamine, or any other drug of choice, and he is, and should be, extremely proud of that. We went out for tea not far from where he lives in Longmont, (a blended iced chai for him, and a hot chai for me), and I asked him to tell me his story. He talked to me for over two hours, and we easily could have kept talking into the evening. This is the beginning of Will getting his story on paper; it is most definitely not the end of this project for him. It is a story he has told in NA more than once, but Will remains no less vulnerable in the re-telling. It is still raw, and he is still wounded, and he will be healing for a very long time, maybe even until the end of his life. But it is a story with parts many of us who have experienced trauma of our own will be able to relate to. It includes being the child of an alcoholic, to grieving the loss of a mother far too young, to not knowing a father until far too late, to self-medicating emotional pain with street drugs, to becoming a full-blown alcoholic and drug addict, to jail, and finally to what Will calls just “surrendering”: “I have to surrender every single day or I won’t make it through.”

On the drive to the coffeeshop, Will talked about his metta meditation practice, sometimes five minutes, sometimes thirty, sometimes more. Sometimes at home in the housing he got with a voucher, and sometimes on the bus from Longmont to Boulder, where every Tuesday afternoon he goes to provide peer support to others suffering from addiction, alcoholism, or just the plight of being homeless and sober, as he himself was for over 18 months before he got an apartment of his own. His work at Feet Forward is selfless in one way; he certainly doesn’t need to re-insert himself back into a world filled with dangers he has managed to evade for the last seven years, but it also does something valuable for him: it provides him with purpose, with meaning, with the possibility of giving back. He went to NA for quite a few years, and was a sponsor, but stopped when he felt uncomfortable mentoring in a sobriety program that does not allow people to continue to smoke marijuana. It is a question of integrity for him, and that integrity may be what allowed him to survive as he has.

Will was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1972. He doesn’t remember much of his early childhood, but said he grew up poor in a majority Black neighborhood, and got beat up a lot in elementary school. His parents separated when he was quite young, and his mom moved with him and his sister (a year older than he) to Colorado. They moved around quite a bit between Longmont and Boulder, and Will changed schools often (Douglas, Crestview, Platt, Casey). By the time he was in Middle School, he started rebelling. He began hanging out with a group of older kids, and started smoking weed, drinking, and shoplifting. His sister, on the other hand, was “straight-edge” and did well in school. His mother was an alcoholic, and he said she tried, but felt totally helpless. He got kicked out of Platt for smoking pot in the bathroom, and then got kicked out of Casey for dropping a pipe in front of the Superintendent of Schools. He was then sent to Halcyon School in Boulder. (Will wasn’t sure it was still in existence, but it is). Its website says that it is a “unique educational and therapeutic program for Boulder Valley School District students’ grades 1st through 12th.  Halcyon is supported through a partnership with BVSD and Mental Health Partners of Boulder, Inc.”

Will grew a foot taller, and was very skinny. Assuming he was malnourished, in addition to whatever else was going on with him, Child Protective Services got involved. He avoided being put in foster care, but his situation at home became more difficult. He eventually graduated from Halcyon and entered Boulder High School.

At this point, I interrupted to ask him if there was a group of kids who hung out behind the school when he went there in the late 80’s. Yup, he said, and that was the group I hung out with. (When my kids went to BHS, in the 2000s, I heard about a similar group of kids, and believe the nickname for them then, and now, is the “creek kids.”) Will said there were no homeless adults hanging out behind the high school then, and no encampments. He said he and his friends just hid from the police, and no one came back there looking for them. By this point, Will had tried cocaine, LSD, and psychedelics. No heroin. Drugs were very accessible from their older friends who had connections in the community. He said none of his friends bought drugs from the homeless. When Will was 17, he got into a bad motorcycle accident. He was on the back of the bike, and he ended up breaking his femur and was put in traction. He was put on a lot of pain killers (Percocet), which led to an addiction to opioids. Will also started selling acid, and at 18, still in 10thgrade because he’d been held back, he got caught selling in the BHS lunchroom. This was just the beginning of a long criminal history in Boulder. On his 18th birthday, Will got his third DUI, which meant he was now listed as a felon. To avoid going to jail, he did the alternative sentencing program.

Will then dropped out of high school, and decided to move with a friend to Arizona. Just a few days before they left, he tried meth for the first time. I asked him what the draw had been, and he said it was way cheaper than coke – for $ 20, he could stay high for three full days. Looking back, now knowing that he had ADHD, he talked about how so much of his drug use at that time was self-medicating. Will thinks he was addicted to meth within days. He wouldn’t sleep for days at a time, and would get delusional. He said the come-down was horrible, that he would “turn into a zombie.” The decision to go to Arizona was partly because meth was more readily available there, in addition to it being warmer. In Colorado, Will said he used what he called crank; in Arizona, he used ice, and also became involved with cooking it. (See here for more information on methamphetamine). He and his friend had a meth lab in their van. Will put it this way: “I was Walter White.” Will’s problems with meth were sufficiently greater than those of his friend, and he was eventually told that he needed to leave because he was doing it too much. Will then hitched a ride back to Colorado.

In 1999, when he was 27, his mother died. She didn’t make it to age 50, the age Will is now. Much later in his life, Will would bring her ashes back to Michigan. He proudly showed me a photo of the brass marker commemorating her. It was clear that it is still painful for him to talk about his mother, that he is still grieving over her. Partly, I think, it is because he blames himself for drinking with her. He is the one who took her to the hospital, and he was with her when she died. He got very depressed after that, and started using more. As he put it, he had no reason to live, but he didn’t want to die.

Will then moved in with his drug dealer, who also became his girlfriend. She was older than him, and had three kids who had been staying with her mother in California. When her mother had a heart attack, he and his girlfriend went out to California to bring the kids back to Colorado. At the time, they were pre-teens, and Will was involved with raising them for about six years. They lived in Westminster, and their home life was tumultuous. Both he and his girlfriend were using regularly. At one point, Will ended up getting beaten up by the cops, and that incident spurred him to call his father and try to re-connect. His Dad sent him a plane ticket to Michigan, and Will left his girlfriend and the kids behind. He stayed with his dad in Michigan for about a year, primarily just drinking during this time. By then, he said he’d become a full-blown alcoholic, with one addiction replacing another. His father finally kicked him out, and Will once again returned to Colorado.

Women figure largely in Will’s story. There are multiple girlfriends, multiple break-ups, and all the drama that goes along with that -- perhaps its own kind of addiction. Will moved in with a new girlfriend, a Native American woman, and he helped her with raising her two kids, both pre-teens. Both Will and his girlfriend, who he still calls “the love of his life,” were drinking and smoking crack, but Will also started shooting up cocaine during this time, although his girlfriend didn’t know it. Will described their relationship as “super violent and super toxic,” but he attributes all of that to the drugs they were taking. Will got a 4th DUI, and this time, since he was charged with both a DUI and Domestic Violence, he was sent to Boulder County Jail, and then went through the Integrated Treatment Court (ITC). He was required to do a year in a half-way house, and then non-residential with daily reporting, and then was put on felony probation. He was also required to go to NA meetings, and ended up clean for 25 months. To Will’s great sadness, his girlfriend died from a brain aneurism a year after they broke up. She’d been clean for a year at the time of her death. Her medicine bag hangs on his wall today.

After her death, Will relapsed and started doing meth again. Will doesn’t deny that he was given multiple chances. His probation officer revoked and reinstated him three times on “hot” UAs (urine drug testing). Will was not lacking in self-awareness. He said he knew he was “running from himself,” and he eventually decided he just wanted to go to jail. He detoxed there, and said the experience was terrifying. I asked him if anyone supervised him during the time he was in detox, and he said no. I asked Will to elaborate more on the experience of detox. He said the first three days he was in holding he couldn’t sleep at all, and he could barely eat. He had night terrors, sweats, and was incredibly tense, but he says he was determined. After the first three days, he had zero energy, and slept and force fed himself for two weeks. His ADHD also kicked in. Will said he wanted to approach jail as an opportunity to get clean because he assumed he wouldn’t have access to any drugs for the seven months he would have to be there. But, lo and behold, Will was put into maximum security, 23-hour lock down, with a cellmate who snorted meth and sold it. (I asked Will how the man had gotten it into the jail, and he said he’d stored it in his rectum). Somehow – and to me, it is nearly miraculous – Will did not use drugs during this time, even though so many around him were, and it was readily available. Instead, he just started eating as much as he could. For Will, this was when he fully “surrendered.” He said his surrender began when they put the handcuffs on him, and he continues to surrender every day since.

Will took advantage of the programs offered at the Boulder County Jail, because he knew the only way to get out of maximum security if you were designated a violent felon, was to do the Transition Program (“Transitions”). He became close to the Program Director there, and participated in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Focus Re-entry. After seven months at the jail, he was sentenced to four years of community corrections (half-way house). He stayed there for 1 year, and then was sent to non-residential for another year. He was so successful in both programs, that they dropped the last two years of his sentence.

But there were further hardships coming, like the loss of his job, COVID, and ending up homeless again. He’d been homeless on one of his trips to Arizona where someone stole the van he lived in, and he’d been homeless in Longmont when a girlfriend stole his rent check. In fact, Will calculates that he has spent over six years of his life unhoused. But this was the first time he was homeless andsober. He felt it was a test. Living with his sister was not an option, so he often slept outside on Main Street in Longmont, or under a bridge in Boulder. He didn’t want to use the shelter, because he did not think it was a place where he would be able to maintain his sobriety. He also avoided encampments, and said he got jumped in the park, so he didn’t stay there either. He met Jennifer Livovich when she was handing out socks, and she got him involved with Coordinated Entry, and he finally did go to the shelter. He stayed in the sober dorm there for 377 days until he got his own housing in Longmont about 18 months ago. Will says it is his sanctuary.

Will now works as part of Feet Forward’s peer support team. He thinks that Central Park in Boulder is ten times worse since COVID began, and worries that it has become acceptable. He believes the camping ban can only be enforced if there is a plan to offer housing and services. His vision of a solution includes grouping unhoused people by their differing circumstances, with focused attention to their states of mental health and addiction. Will also believes in a sanctioned campsite, and a safe-use drug site. As we were wrapping up our interview, I showed him a picture I’d just been sent of the Boulder Bandshell. It had been fenced off, and people moved out of Central Park. We wondered where they would end up, or if this will be enforced as COVID-19 emergency declarations come to an end.

I wonder how much of Will’s vision for a solution to homelessness will actually happen in Boulder. I wonder how many people possess his strength and determination to change their life. He credits the people who helped him: from the program director at the Boulder County Jail, to the people he met at NA who remain in his life, to his peers at Feet Forward. He also has maintained strong relationships with all the children he helped raise, and with his sister who lives in Boulder. “It’s easier now, seven years later,” he said, on this anniversary of turning his life around. “But I have to keep surrendering.”