Life’s a struggle, and dealing with the obstacles being thrown in front of you can often lead to habits that are not the correct solution. Drug abuse has taken over many families, leaving nothing behind but broken hope and broken ties.

About nine months ago, my family lost the final battle to drugs. My mother chose to throw everything away and give her life to hard drugs, leaving me and my three year-old sister to live with my grandparents. The mental and physical struggle hasn’t been easy, and all I can look to to blame is drug abuse.

Doing drugs can and will create a domino effect on the people that surround you. Before you choose that lifestyle, take a look around at everything you could be losing. My mother lost everything she worked for just to get that high “one more time.”

On the greater spectrum, fun times with friends are NOT worth the health risk or emotional burden that drugs create. Losing a parent is always hard, but my mother was my best friend. We only had each other for many years, because my father wasn’t in the picture. Having to watch her go through struggles and turn to chemical releases to find peace was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. There wasn’t much I could do, because once you start to rely on drugs, it’s a hard habit to break. My mother had always struggled with addiction and was a pushover, and these factors did not make it any easier for her to regain her old self, the girl before the drugs.

Because of the genetic factors my mother gave to me, I have to be very careful about what I do and who I become. When a parent has an addiction to alcohol or drugs, it is often genetically passed down to their offspring. This means that even if a child were to drink only once or twice, they have a greater chance of becoming addicted than a child whose parents did not struggle with addiction in the past.

Drug abuse can take so much from you, and not just physically. I recently celebrated my 16th birthday, which was an event I had been planning with my mother since I was four years old. It was a hard day for me, because how was I supposed to celebrate being alive when both of the people who helped create me don’t even care? What my mother doesn’t understand is that these drugs are keeping her from experiencing life and being a part of mine.

Often, when a person turns to drugs it’s because of a persistent problem with depression or other mental health struggles. There are multiple excuses my mother has given for her disappearance, saying things like she “doesn’t matter” and that she “wasn’t needed.” But what my mother doesn’t understand is that she’s wrong. She was and is very much needed, and drugs are not truth serum–they’re the exact opposite. When people isolate themselves from the people that love them, it makes sense to feel alone and helpless. Having no hope can and will take a huge toll on anyone’s mental health, and I now have first-hand experience.

When she left, she left me here to fix everything. I had to completely start over on a lot of things, for she had lost everything, including almost all of my legal documents like my birth certificate and social security card. She left us here to deal with her problems simply because she didn’t want to.

Drugs, like suicide, affect everyone that surrounds the victim. It’s crazy how I have never even touched these substances, yet my entire life has been thrown for a loop because someone else in my life did.