When I first started this film, I thought it would be for kids, like myself, that have been torn away from their parents from drug addiction. Without knowing how I would tell the story, or even what the story would be about, I just started shooting and asking questions. I guess I thought if I could understand my mom's addiction, I could find the answers to my own pain. Skip to 15 years later, I'm still learning and healing, even after she is gone. I don't know if you will ever find all the answers, but maybe life isn’t always about that. Maybe it truly is about the journey, and hopefully, it will lead to a place of more love for oneself and others.
Human pain is all the same, as my mom told me, “ no one’s pain is better or worse than the others.” Through this journey with this film, I learned how to heal my wounds through understanding, compassion, and ultimately forgiveness. I learned that the pain I held inside from my mom’s choices, were choices she made from her own place of pain. It wasn’t about me. It also didn’t mean I had to deny my own feelings in order to understand her why’s, because it still happened to me, and that was real. I’ve learned you can hold compassion for both aspects of pain, and it is necessary to fully heal.
I see the results of addiction on families and it tears my heart apart. I see people living without a soul to call on, alone and feeling unloved. And I’ve seen family members destroyed when their loved ones pass away and they feel like they let them down. So, how can we end these vicious cycles of pain and regret? The only way I know how is to keep the love alive and to keep healing ourselves, so we can be there for those who lost their way to their own self-love.
This journey became not only about making a film but as a tool for my own healing and ultimately becoming a voice for those that have lost theirs. It has transitioned from being only for kids to becoming something for us all. I hope that by sharing our journey there will be lessons along the way that will help others on a similar path. Because all we did was clumsily, determinedly, kept trying to find a way through all the misunderstandings and pain, and we got there in the end. We got to the source of what really mattered and that was love.
Addiction may take lives, but it doesn’t have to take love.
Access my healing tools here