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Darkina describes how she felt when she was addicted to crack cocaine.
Darkina:
When I was struggling with crack cocaine I was suffering, across the board suffering. I was ashamed, very ashamed. I was always a beautiful girl. I got all the way down to like 93 pounds and I was so angry and I hated myself. I wouldn’t even look in the mirror. I was so ugly, and if someone came to me, you know, because I decided to put on some clothes or something and said, “Oh you look cute today,” I would immediately get angry. I would cuss them out. That’s how much pain was on the inside. That’s how much I hurt on the inside.
People sometimes, because I was a very popular person in the neighborhood, people would drive by and say, “Oh there she goes. Look at her,” and I would just get so angry because starting crack cocaine it was like them announcing the President of the United States of America is now smoking crack, and I thought to myself that, “I am just another individual using drugs, why are they making a big deal about it? Why is everybody talking about it?” That’s when I came to understand that hey, you know what, I am important in some people’s lives. I really mean something to these people.
Well it’s too late. It’s too late. They should have cared before I started smoking crack so I smoked more crack. I smoked more crack. Anything that was reality, that came my way – I smoked more crack. Anything that was real, I smoked more crack was how I dealt with that pain – shamely, shamely and even before using crack I judged crack heads. I couldn’t believe crack heads on the corner. I couldn’t believe a woman selling her body, leaving her children, losing everything and there I walked in those shoes as a prostitute; wouldn’t use the word ‘prostitute’.
I told the judge I was a hustler. I don’t sell my body; I am a hustler, because I couldn’t deal. I was so ashamed. I couldn’t deal with the fact that I was selling my body; that I was sleeping with three and four and five men at one time, unprotected. I couldn’t believe it. That’s the shamed life of crack cocaine and as I talk about it today, before treatment you couldn’t get me to talk about it. You couldn’t get me to use the word ‘prostitute’, but it is what it is and that’s what I went through, but that’s just not what I am today so it’s free for me to talk about.
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