“Recovery is both a noun and a verb. I did not know who I was any more than I knew what to do next. I got into a fight with another inmate, about something. She lunged at me, thinking she would take advantage of my vulnerable state. At that moment, I was in need of an outlet and she was it. As she jumped on top of me, I reached for her neck, pulling her off me with all my nervous energy. As I brought my other arm back to beat the hell out of her I had a moment of clarity. I am done fighting. I am not doing this anymore. When I get out of this motherfucking kick tank, I thought, I am asking to go to a program. Fuck this life.

This was my eleventh time kicking heroin, and it would be my last.”

—Tracey Helton Mitchell, The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin

Tracey Helton Mitchell has gone from being an honor student to a street junkie to a PTA treasurer and Reddit’s “Heroine of Heroin”, saving the lives of strangers on the internet by sending naloxone to those with no access. Even in her darkest moments, she’s let the world in, first as one of the addicts featured in the 1999 documentary Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street, which went deep into San Francisco’s street-kid heroin underground, and then as an addiction blogger and a moderator of Reddit’s Opiates community.

Listen to her story on the Upvoted podcast:

Now, she opens her life up even more. In her new memoir The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin, Helton Mitchell documents how, through rehab to sober living to support groups, she escaped the prison that was her life, staying clean long enough to buy a house, meet a man who would become her husband, see the birth of her children and graduate from college.

Helton Mitchell writes in her blog that the main question she gets over and over is, “What is life like without drugs?” It’s a complicated as everyone’s “rock bottom” looks different, but here’s how she responds.

“What is life like without drugs? It is hard. It starts out. You stop using. You worry about shitting the bed. You jack off, you cry. You beg someone to kill you. You pray for death. You feel things for the first time.”

She adds that former addicts feel a deep sense of loss because drugs were their best friend for so long. But then, over time, there is a shift.

“You wake up one morning like, ‘Where have the past months/years gone?'” she writes. “You look at pictures and realize you were not there. You look in your phone and realized you haven’t spoke to that person. You want to eat something and realize you don’t even know what to eat anymore if it isn’t Sour Patch Kids or ice cream or something off the 99c menu. Oh fuck. You woke up one day and you are alive again.

“That, that is the brilliant part. I AM ALIVE AGAIN. You will feel this rush one day. There will be this overwhelming rush. After the sadness, after the remorse, will be an overwhelming rush. There will be this feeling life maybe life isn’t so bad.”

In a Reddit AMA, Helton Mitchell answered questions about her harrowing and inspiring journey

Some highlights:

On how it feels to be high on heroin

On the moment she decided to get clean

On whether she still thinks about using

On why so many people are overdosing these days

On whether it’s possible to be a “casual user” of heroin

On how lawmakers must better understand the problem before they can help solve it

On the success of the “War on Drugs”

On how to support someone you love who is abusing drugs

On her advice for addicts struggling to get clean

In her book, Helton Mitchell thanked her friends on Reddit:

See the full discussion with Helton Mitchell in the original AMA.