I come from a long line of addicts in my family, and I have followed that way of life as I grew up. I became addicted to meth by the age of 28 and was on the needle by 29. Drugs have destroyed my life in many ways and have made it a real struggle to pick back up on life from my experience with it. It has made me look at people differently now because when I drive down the road and see a homeless person who is strung out. My heart goes out to them because I know the struggle that they are going through. See, how can you do it if you never know anything different? There are so many people out there who do not know how to do life. Why is that? Because their parents were too busy running the streets searching for that next high. Never once worrying about the child they left behind. I was that child that they left behind. It hurts my heart to know that I was not ever important enough to someone to even care for in life. I had no one in my life to even teach me the basics of living. One thing affected most by being raised by an addict is never being loved right when you grow up not feeling loved. You do not know how to give love to another person. Never feeling love can be harmful when you go to have kids because kids need love. So drugs affected my parents, then myself, and now it affects my children. It ends up having a ripple effect that, like in water, takes a long time before it smoothes out. A second effect it has is my ability to be a good husband. When you grow up most of your life without a dad, you grow up without a good role model to show you how to treat women or be the leader you should be in your home. I have struggled to make the hard decisions or be disciplined, so my family gets what they need. It has crippled me to know how to be a man and, most importantly, a husband. I only faced this issue because my father chose drugs over me. Lastly, it has affected me the most by hindering me from being a good citizen. My mother, an addict, taught me early on how to only take from others. When only learn how to take from others and never give back. It can only cripple a society. I have spent most of my life doing things wrong because that was all I knew. Now I have been drug-free and needle-free for almost three years. I want to learn how to be a productive citizen and give back to my community, and I need help to further my education.