Feb. 24, 2023

Nadine Balmer: Parenting, Partying, Autism, Methadone, TikTok, Trauma & A 17 Year Heroin Addiction

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Matt is joined by Nadine and they candidly discuss the journey throughout her addiction to heroin and her lifestyle in recovery, including; becoming a new parent, understanding her autism and sharing her lived experiences with Methadone through TikTok

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WEBVTT

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Hello and welcome to the Believe in People podcast.

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My name is Matthew Butler and I'm your host or as I like to say your facilitator.

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Today I'm with Nadine and we talk about her addiction to heroin and the journey that led her to her recovery today.

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So first of all would you like to introduce yourself?

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Yeah so my name is Nadine Balmer and I'm originally from a town called Gould but I've been living in Hull now since I think it's about 2004-2005 that I moved here.

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So yeah that was a bit of a culture shock coming to a city like Hull from a small town.

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It's

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quite small isn't it?

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Then again like Hull isn't a massive city I don't think like even when I go to places like Manchester we've recently been to London and it was my first time in London and it was overwhelming like Hull's kind of this city with like a small town feel so it's not too bad so Nadine thank you for coming on today I want to really talk about your story because from what I've heard from colleagues it is an interesting story but I know nothing about you it's a name that I've I've heard pop up from time to time, especially working with you, you know, your key worker in the past, but I know nothing about your story.

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So give me a little bit of an overview of what has brought you to this chair today.

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Yeah, no problem.

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So basically I was in active addiction.

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I was addicted to heroin, crack cocaine, anything I could take really, you know, like I took all drugs basically.

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But my drug of choice was heroin and crack cocaine.

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They're the two that really sort of got a good grip of me.

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I was 17 years in active addiction.

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you know like absolutely in the depths of despair like could not get any lower you know when you ask people what's your rock bottom like hundreds i had hundreds of them and they still never stopped me funnily enough yeah yeah

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um what made you um how old was you when you first started taking very young hard drugs

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yeah i was about 17 that

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is that's

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young yeah so i'd lost my dad when i was 15 and my biological father it never really been in my life but um i'd been and left an amount of money through his will,£26,000.

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Yeah, and I was kind of vulnerable anyway.

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I struggled as a teenager.

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Do you know what I mean?

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I wasn't a happy teenager.

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Depression and things and, you know, sort of like suicide attempts and things as a young person, maybe 15.

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So I was never happy in myself.

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Do you know what I mean?

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I don't know.

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Now...

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Back then, I would have said it was because of my dad dying and because of other things.

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Do you know what I mean?

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But looking back now, it's because I was autistic.

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Okay.

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I am autistic.

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Yeah.

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And I was finding it really hard to navigate my way through it undiagnosed.

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So I was very good at masking.

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Yeah.

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So

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obviously you said 17 when you first started taking, do you know, hard drugs?

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Yeah.

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The death of your dad, again, you said it wasn't that close to him.

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It was having that money there.

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It was having that access to that money.

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A lot of people came in and took advantage.

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For me, at 17, if I came into£24,000, again, this is the difference in our lives and things, but the last thing I'd be thinking of doing is spending it all.

00:03:24.225 --> 00:03:32.312
on drugs I don't know if you spend it all on drugs but the last thing I'd be thinking about is I'm going to buy a load of drugs so I just want to kind of unpick like what made you think this is kind of where I'm going to go with this

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I was always into the party scene anyway so I started into the rave scene it was a really steady progression so I was really into like tidy events so I used to go raving we used to go all over the country me and my friends and like they were happy times I look back on those days and they were really good times yeah but our of my group of friends, I had this thing that the party was never over for me.

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I always wanted to continue and take it further.

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I was just a real bad seshed.

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when I was younger.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Well, that's what they call it in Hull, isn't

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it?

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So what was the first drug you ever took?

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I did the really stereotypical ladder of progression.

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So cannabis, amphetamine, ecstasy, then sort of like your purer forms, MDMA, that kind of thing.

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cocaine crack cocaine heroin yeah so it was a very stereotypical progression

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yeah well i think that's the i often found that um there was a worker that we used to have at renew and she'd always argued you know people say cannabis is a gateway drug it's not a gateway drug she said you know trauma is the gateway drug it's people often say it's because people often start on cannabis because normally it's the one that is the most accessible.

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So when I was younger, I used to smoke cannabis, but it never really went any further for me.

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And that's because I never had any trauma.

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And when we talk about trauma, you've gone through, obviously, loss and bereavement at a young age as well.

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And

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struggling to sort of find my identity.

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I always say, like, it's been a big smack in the face sort of realising I'm autistic because at 36 years old, it's not something that you expect.

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to go through your whole life thinking that everyone else has the same mind as you and I always used to say that was my problem to people you know if other addicts like hurt me in any way or things because I was always very kind and generous and giving and like I used to say you know I just think everyone's like me I don't I didn't used to realize that everyone's mind wasn't the same as mine so it's quite a smack in the face really um at this age to find out that I feel kind of like a carrier bag floating through the wind.

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I know it's really cliche, but it's so true.

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It's like you're a transient person.

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You don't ever have any sort of like, you have interest, but the goal is quickly as it comes.

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So it's like, do you know what I mean?

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How old are you

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now then?

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36?

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36, yeah.

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So I think as well, there's a lot more awareness around autism than ever before.

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I think, especially in this day and age of social media, people are sharing in autism stories I mean I've got a 10 month old daughter myself and I think naturally you know things that have come up in my TikTok algorithms, Instagram algorithms have been around like children and learning disabilities you know weirdly enough has kind of come up as part of that but autism is often not diagnosed early but the signs of it are obvious early whereas I think when we talk to like some people of a generation they go oh when I was younger you never had any of this autism stuff do you know it's like well We did.

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It's always been there.

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It just wasn't diagnosed.

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So people have gone through a lot of struggles such as yourself without a diagnosis.

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I think it was a very set idea of what autism was.

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And they do say if you meet one autistic, you've met one autistic because we're all as different as what neurotypical people are.

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That's the spectrum that people talk about, isn't it?

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Yeah, of course.

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What were some of your...

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Well, when you look back at your child in a non-reflection, it's the things that you think, oh, well, that makes sense now because of my autism.

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So I mask a lot and I also do something called mirror behavior.

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Explain

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masking to me first.

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So masking is where you know you're a bit weird, but you cover your weird behaviors with neurotypical behaviors.

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So basically you put on a mask.

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to present as neurotypical to the outside world.

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To try and

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fit

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in, I guess, is that part of it.

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Yeah, it's all the anxiety and sort of like the judgment and you're quite...

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It's a weird thing is autism, especially when it comes hand in hand with ADHD because the autism, you're very much sort of like internal person, but the ADHD is kind of like the opposite.

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So it's always like two people inside of you trying to fight.

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One of them is...

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I can't think of the word.

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What's the word where you cry?

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quiet sort of internal...

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Introvert.

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Yes, one side's an introvert and the other side's an extrovert.

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That's another thing as well.

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I forget common words.

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It can be a word that I use daily.

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I

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just get that quite normally anyway.

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I've always gone back.

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But yeah, I can understand that then.

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The mirroring behaviour is really what I believe led me to addiction in a way because I always thought it was a bit of a strength before I realised it was a symptom.

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I still don't know if it could be a strength or not but I always used to like class myself as a chameleon so I could change my entire personality to whoever I was with I could be with the hardest roughest people and I would be one of them I could also be with quite well-off people who were quite sort of like at high end of society and I could also mix very well with those people also so I always thought that was a strength but now looking back now that I'm clean and of a clear mind I realize that really that's mirroring which is copying The people around you's behaviour, it's another form of masking.

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And now I truly believe that that was a lot of the issue surrounding the start of my addiction.

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I was in with the wrong crowd.

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At the time that I got addicted to heroin in Gull, Gull was the heroin capital of the north of England.

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And it had a population of 17,000 people.

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So it was bad.

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It was absolutely rife.

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Yeah.

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So, I mean, going to the mirror and stuff, I can see the advantages of it in some respect because it's a way of easily fitting in with people.

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But then I can also see the disadvantages of that internal struggle of the need to fit in with people as well.

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Has that been a common thing throughout your life, that need for acceptance, that need to fit in with people?

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Very much so.

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And where do you think that maybe comes from?

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Other than, like, obviously the autism and everything, diagnosis.

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Has there been things in your life that have...

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prompted you to be that way?

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I always felt different I always felt a bit outcast and And I was always a lot more liberal thinking than my peers at school.

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So I was always quite judged for that.

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Like I was the first person to start using drugs.

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I was probably the first person to have sex.

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And they were all following me maybe a year later.

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So I was very scrutinized for it at the time until a year later.

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My peers were doing it themselves.

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Then it was okay.

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So I felt like, yeah, I suffered with bullying at school.

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Yeah, I didn't really fit in.

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Was that part of the journey you talked about?

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experiencing depression as a young person was bullying a big part of that

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yeah definitely I didn't go to school for the last year it wasn't even so much bullying because looking now then I would have said yes definitely but looking back now I see that it was all also linked to autism I suffer with something called rejection dysmorphia

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tell me about that

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so basically um It's rejection and emotional dysmorphia, really.

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Any emotion that I feel, I feel it's so much stronger than anybody else.

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It's all-consuming.

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People will get waves of sadness or waves of violation.

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I get the full-blown maximum amount that you could possibly feel.

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And it can be hard to deal with at times.

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It's like most adult women that are diagnosed autistic, it's normally they've been misdiagnosed with BPD first.

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What's BPD?

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Bipolar disorder.

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Oh, okay.

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Borderline personality disorder.

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Yeah, of course.

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Yeah, that's what they call it now.

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It used to be bipolar.

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But yeah, because it's that sort of transient personality, never really having no sort of true sense of self.

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And I think that a lot of psychiatrists do so of misdiagnosed first and i was always misdiagnosed um i've seen child psychiatrists when being 15 onwards i used to go to a place in beverly and um have counseling and things there and nobody ever spotted it

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no i think to be fair it's interesting to talk to you know because again it just everything here from the from the mirroring the rejection dysmorphia everything that you talk

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about

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It comes down to that need for acceptance.

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Completely, yeah.

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So let's go...

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I'm going to come back to this, but let's go into more about the drug addiction and where it took

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you.

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So that's where it came, I think.

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It was the wanting of acceptance, the needing of acceptance.

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It's the human experience to want to be accepted and understood.

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We all want it.

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So basically, I think it was like...

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It's hard to explain.

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Just give me a minute.

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No, it's all right.

00:12:58.248 --> 00:12:59.509
I've got brain freeze.

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It was like the drug world, drug users, the very good...

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all banding together, they grew up together, that they all stand together.

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We are used together.

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It's our little, we're outcasts of society.

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Do you know what I mean?

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And you'll speak to a lot of people who say the same thing, that addiction and other addicts sort of became their

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family.

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It's a culture.

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I think that's one thing that a lot of people don't understand is how much of a culture...

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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your family, your friends, your entire, people who you consider your family, your friends, your entire social circle, just getting rid of it.

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Completely.

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To live a different lifestyle.

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And obviously there's different things that have motivated you to move on to that lifestyle.

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So I guess in a way it's kind of thinking, it comes back to that recovery capital thing.

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What do I gain from sobriety?

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What do I gain from getting clean?

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And what do I lose?

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And often if you create like a bit of a checklist of, you know, Benefits to losses.

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Sometimes the benefits might be less, but they can outweigh them.

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And obviously with yourself, we'll talk about it soon, having a son, that would have been a massive part

00:14:47.364 --> 00:14:47.904
of

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that as well.

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Yeah.

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We don't have to go into all of them.

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Homelessness.

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Yeah.

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I'd be keen to know, I suppose, what was the moment where you did think to yourself, okay, now here's, after 17 years, this is the time where I need to get clean.

00:15:06.657 --> 00:15:08.379
Yeah, so I was homeless.

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I was in, well, no, it was a bit of a more complicated story than that.

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Tell me in the most complex way you possibly can.

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I'm here for it.

00:15:17.208 --> 00:15:21.053
So a landlord that I'd met through...

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addiction and things.

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My flat was being sold and I'd lived there for 10 years.

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I was quite upset about it.

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And a landlord had gone and purchased my property almost as a favor to take it over for me.

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Basically, he was doing a documentary on Channel 5.

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He had a group of cameras following him about as a landlord, Britain's Benefit Tenants, it was called.

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And he wanted me to take part in this.

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And because I wouldn't, basically, he turned on me because he knew everything that was going on when he bought the property.

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Do you know what I mean?

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He was very aware of my situation.

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That's sad, that.

00:16:01.998 --> 00:16:03.058
Yeah, it is really sad.

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One thing me and my producer talk a lot about is Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Humiliate people.

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Humiliate people.

00:16:21.716 --> 00:16:36.211
Yeah, I think they picked off certain people as characters as well because I know quite a few people who film these shows in Hull and they always said that they sort of had people lined up as like the mental crazy one and the quiet sort of like more sort of like socially norm.

00:16:36.491 --> 00:16:37.253
Do you know what I mean?

00:16:37.293 --> 00:16:41.057
So they already sort of characterised people before they interviewed them.

00:16:41.076 --> 00:16:41.937
It's exploitation, isn't it?

00:16:41.957 --> 00:16:44.059
It is, yeah, in the deepest form.

00:16:44.100 --> 00:16:46.383
So the landlord took it over.

00:16:46.722 --> 00:16:48.345
Yeah, and he...

00:16:49.601 --> 00:16:52.706
Just basically, my life was made a misery for two years.

00:16:52.787 --> 00:16:56.611
I was evicted in like the most horrible way.

00:16:56.631 --> 00:16:57.472
Do you know what I mean?

00:16:57.874 --> 00:17:03.962
So then I came to Hull originally because I didn't want to use drugs around my family.

00:17:03.982 --> 00:17:08.189
I didn't want to bring that stigma to my family.

00:17:08.209 --> 00:17:11.153
My mum has a job in gold, you know, that she loves.

00:17:11.272 --> 00:17:14.258
And everyone knows now, but back then...

00:17:14.849 --> 00:17:19.798
I felt like I was, it was almost like I did it to save them the embarrassment of me.

00:17:19.817 --> 00:17:30.496
So when I moved here, basically I moved here with another addict who had been living here for quite a long time.

00:17:30.536 --> 00:17:36.701
And when I came, I don't even know where I'm going with this now.

00:17:36.721 --> 00:17:36.840
We're

00:17:36.881 --> 00:17:38.763
just talking about living circumstances here.

00:17:38.824 --> 00:17:41.287
So, obviously, you've been in Hull for 17 years.

00:17:41.326 --> 00:17:42.409
This is autism.

00:17:42.469 --> 00:17:44.311
This is autism in a nutshell.

00:17:44.451 --> 00:17:44.791
It is.

00:17:45.673 --> 00:17:47.115
You're mid-flown.

00:17:47.135 --> 00:17:48.617
You really know what you're talking about.

00:17:48.657 --> 00:17:49.819
And then, boom, it's gone.

00:17:49.960 --> 00:17:50.540
Don't worry about it.

00:17:50.580 --> 00:17:52.403
So, you get kicked out.

00:17:52.423 --> 00:17:53.284
How long have you lived there?

00:17:53.305 --> 00:17:53.924
10 years, then?

00:17:54.465 --> 00:17:55.968
I lived there 10 years, yeah, in the

00:17:55.988 --> 00:17:56.067
flat.

00:17:56.128 --> 00:17:57.470
How long ago was this that you got kicked out, then?

00:17:57.570 --> 00:17:58.332
Three years ago.

00:17:58.612 --> 00:18:00.295
No, it was about four and a half, five years ago.

00:18:00.315 --> 00:18:00.755
Four and a

00:18:00.795 --> 00:18:01.296
half years ago.

00:18:01.336 --> 00:18:02.718
Yeah.

00:18:03.266 --> 00:18:05.711
So I went to go live in Gaul with my mum again.

00:18:05.751 --> 00:18:05.791
Oh,

00:18:05.912 --> 00:18:06.212
okay.

00:18:07.035 --> 00:18:08.178
That's where it was going.

00:18:09.740 --> 00:18:14.973
And I was clean while I was living at my mum's, but I had a relapse one day.

00:18:15.713 --> 00:18:22.307
So I basically left used needles in the bathroom by accident, completely by accident.

00:18:22.867 --> 00:18:25.071
Obviously, she was absolutely mortified.

00:18:25.112 --> 00:18:29.299
And so we was kicked out of the house immediately.

00:18:29.421 --> 00:18:33.028
So then we came through back to Hull and ended up in William Booth.

00:18:35.092 --> 00:18:36.253
When you're that low...

00:18:37.185 --> 00:18:40.170
Addiction, it's like darkness.

00:18:40.250 --> 00:18:41.570
It just overwhelms you.

00:18:41.590 --> 00:18:48.519
And you start taking that drug because you're in pain, emotional pain, trauma, whatever.

00:18:50.803 --> 00:18:58.751
But no pain that that drug can take away is going to be in comparison to the pain that it is going to cause.

00:18:59.292 --> 00:19:00.173
Do you know what I mean?

00:19:00.574 --> 00:19:03.218
It is a miserable, miserable life.

00:19:03.650 --> 00:19:05.051
You used heroin, obviously.

00:19:05.653 --> 00:19:08.896
We spoke a little bit about smoking it, as opposed to injecting.

00:19:10.419 --> 00:19:12.701
I was working at a company.

00:19:12.761 --> 00:19:16.547
It was an internet business directory, and I had a really good job there.

00:19:16.606 --> 00:19:19.810
I got into quality control working there, so I was QC.

00:19:20.251 --> 00:19:30.224
If people were making false sales or saying things over the telephone, they shouldn't be, because it was sort of like really high sales patter, basically, of the telephone.

00:19:31.874 --> 00:19:39.430
So that was my job to sort of pull them and say, you know, you shouldn't have really said this or you could say it in this way, you know, sort of like going over all the legal things of it.

00:19:40.070 --> 00:19:45.803
And a woman who worked there was an ex-addict and I did sort of know she was an ex-addict, but I thought that she'd moved on.

00:19:46.183 --> 00:19:55.532
And I've always been one of those people that if someone's changed their lives, you've got to accept them for the person that they come and present themselves as today.

00:19:55.593 --> 00:19:57.095
You can't judge people off the past.

00:19:57.375 --> 00:19:58.217
Do you know what I mean?

00:19:58.277 --> 00:20:01.041
So I allowed her to present to me as who she was.

00:20:01.603 --> 00:20:05.489
So we got really good friends, you know, and we used to go on nights out together.

00:20:05.529 --> 00:20:09.415
And then I think she must have sort of drifted back into relapse.

00:20:09.536 --> 00:20:13.824
And after a night out, we'd gone back to her house and she'd had some crack there ready to smoke.

00:20:14.845 --> 00:20:16.167
So that week I smoked crack.

00:20:16.647 --> 00:20:17.450
The next week...

00:20:17.761 --> 00:20:20.945
She had some heroin and said, oh, just have a bit of that in between.

00:20:20.986 --> 00:20:22.367
It'll make it last longer.

00:20:22.769 --> 00:20:29.898
I was absolutely sick as a dog, but anyone who takes heroin will tell you, as sick as it makes you, it's the nice kind of sick.

00:20:30.759 --> 00:20:36.807
Let's go into that and explain to me, the first time you used heroin, what did it feel like?

00:20:38.971 --> 00:20:43.678
The first time you start to use it, the first few times, it does affect you.

00:20:43.970 --> 00:20:44.471
In what

00:20:44.490 --> 00:20:44.730
way?

00:20:45.010 --> 00:20:49.096
So it's the stereotypical big warm blanket.

00:20:50.218 --> 00:20:51.279
Do you know Gaber May?

00:20:51.299 --> 00:20:52.020
Have you heard of Dr.

00:20:52.060 --> 00:20:52.761
Gaber May?

00:20:52.922 --> 00:20:59.570
So he's a specialist in trauma and addiction and recovery and things.

00:20:59.691 --> 00:21:04.037
He's a Canadian and he's sort of like getting up there with Jordan Peterson.

00:21:04.076 --> 00:21:08.321
He does a lot of talks and things about different sort of things in life.

00:21:08.502 --> 00:21:11.006
And he always says that...

00:21:12.097 --> 00:21:17.828
You don't ask why the addiction, why the trauma that caused the addiction.

00:21:17.909 --> 00:21:18.911
Do you know what I mean?

00:21:18.932 --> 00:21:29.813
And I think even though I've been through what I would consider valid traumas in my life, I'm always one of those people that I look at others and I think, well, I've not had it half as bad as that person.

00:21:30.134 --> 00:21:31.656
So I kind of get a bit of like...

00:21:33.185 --> 00:21:39.252
imposter syndrome in a way and i don't feel like sort of like my story is as valid as what other people's is

00:21:39.553 --> 00:22:05.304
yeah i get that i think we all do that as well you know i think it's one of the things where when we talk about things like depression and feelings of sadness you know it's like oh well i don't have the right to feel this way because i've you know i've got i've got a job i've got a home there's people out there with so much less than me we're probably a lot happier so i think it brings up a lot of feelings of guilt doesn't it i suppose but it's not to it shouldn't diminish how you feel or what you've gone through by any means, really.

00:22:05.365 --> 00:22:11.263
Well, Gabe and me explained it beautifully, and I hope I can do his explanation justice when I tell you.

00:22:11.304 --> 00:22:14.334
Now, basically, dopamine...

00:22:14.529 --> 00:23:03.990
is what heroin releases in the brain that's the chemical now the whole reason why we have dopamine in our brains is because when we're born as babies and we're so it's it's a connection to the mother and you that dopamine is released through a mother's hug so when you hear people say heroin it felt like you was wrapped in a big warm blanket it was almost like the most gorgeous hook that you get from your mum when you're really poorly as a kid and it makes everything feel so much better that is what heroin did for me and when you think of it like that how he explained it that it goes back to sort of like being an infant and that connect that dopamine creates that connection between mother and father and child it sort of starts to make a little bit of sense then.

00:23:04.030 --> 00:23:06.653
Did you enjoy using drugs when you did?

00:23:06.786 --> 00:23:10.273
At the end, I took drugs to feel normal.

00:23:10.473 --> 00:23:11.256
What about in the beginning?

00:23:12.618 --> 00:23:14.261
In the beginning, I took them to forget.

00:23:14.542 --> 00:23:14.983
Okay.

00:23:15.104 --> 00:23:17.169
Yeah, but that doesn't last long.

00:23:18.070 --> 00:23:19.894
Especially me knowing now...

00:23:21.826 --> 00:23:56.231
that's probably not the experience for everybody but it's quite a normal thing within an autistic or ADHD brain you have low dopamine anyway so you do something called dopamine seeking behaviours eating junk food taking risks sort of like sexually with drugs anything sort of on the edge the ADHD brain is kind of a little bit more sort of you seek it out in a way And I think really going back now and looking, it was all seeking out behaviours.

00:23:56.952 --> 00:23:59.915
It was a long time to be a drug addict, 17 years.

00:24:01.257 --> 00:24:08.845
I've had people say, I suppose one of the boundaries or the barriers to getting clean is worried that life is going to be boring.

00:24:09.246 --> 00:24:13.329
And I find that when you really get down to it, some people enjoy the chaos.

00:24:14.151 --> 00:24:16.133
Did you ever enjoy being an addict?

00:24:16.153 --> 00:24:16.753
Did you ever enjoy...

00:24:17.153 --> 00:24:21.519
the chaos of the lifestyle, the unpredictability of it, not knowing kind of what's happening from one day to the next.

00:24:21.961 --> 00:24:22.701
Did you enjoy that?

00:24:22.741 --> 00:24:23.923
Yeah, yeah, I did.

00:24:23.942 --> 00:24:24.104
What did

00:24:24.144 --> 00:24:24.845
you enjoy about it?

00:24:25.445 --> 00:24:31.374
I think, again, I put it down to ADHD, that dopamine-seeking behaviour, living life on the edge.

00:24:32.075 --> 00:24:34.858
Yeah, that's what I put it down to myself.

00:24:34.959 --> 00:24:35.159
No, it

00:24:35.179 --> 00:24:35.819
makes sense, yeah.

00:24:36.019 --> 00:24:42.869
Yeah, I think a lot of times as well, what it is is you've been an addict for so long, you don't see...

00:24:43.746 --> 00:24:49.174
You think you've done so much damage to yourself and your life that it's not possible to recover from.

00:24:49.214 --> 00:24:53.602
You really are under such a veil of darkness.

00:24:53.642 --> 00:24:55.965
It is like a black cloud constantly over you.

00:24:56.467 --> 00:24:58.289
You know, every day is pointless.

00:24:59.372 --> 00:25:06.403
So what was the moment where, we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but what happened in your life where it was like, okay, right, now I have to get clean?

00:25:06.844 --> 00:25:14.934
So I was in William Booth and when I got to William Booth, any fight that I had left in me to survive this addiction was gone.

00:25:14.974 --> 00:25:19.961
The only person I ever thought I was hurting throughout my addiction was myself, really.

00:25:20.241 --> 00:25:21.723
I didn't think about other people.

00:25:21.743 --> 00:25:23.787
I was always told I couldn't have children.

00:25:23.807 --> 00:25:26.951
I was always told that I wouldn't be able to conceive.

00:25:27.050 --> 00:25:33.278
So I was never living my life thinking, oh, what if I have a family and I've got to answer to somebody about this behavior?

00:25:33.398 --> 00:25:36.703
The only person I ever thought I was hurting was myself.

00:25:37.545 --> 00:25:38.066
So...

00:25:39.362 --> 00:25:43.648
Christmas 2019, my life was just as bad as what it could be.

00:25:43.749 --> 00:25:49.679
I was snowballing, so I was injecting heroin and crack cocaine at the same time, mainlining it as well.

00:25:49.699 --> 00:25:51.642
I had blood clots.

00:25:52.202 --> 00:25:56.250
I'd done a lot of damage to myself throughout addiction.

00:25:56.309 --> 00:26:02.881
I'd fallen asleep with a tourniquet on my arm and paralyzed my arm for seven months and didn't get any medical help from it.

00:26:02.901 --> 00:26:05.586
It came back as quick as it went, this arm.

00:26:05.922 --> 00:26:10.467
A lot of people will think they're rock bottoms.

00:26:10.647 --> 00:26:11.709
I had a blood clot in my leg.

00:26:11.729 --> 00:26:21.660
My leg was like five times the size of the other one, and it still didn't stop me because you've got no motivation, nothing.

00:26:22.300 --> 00:26:23.903
Everything's just dark.

00:26:24.123 --> 00:26:24.903
Do you know what I mean?

00:26:26.145 --> 00:26:33.153
People who've been in depression will have some understanding of it, but imagine that really bad depressive episode.

00:26:33.569 --> 00:26:37.096
then times it by 100, and that is active addiction.

00:26:37.516 --> 00:26:41.903
Because that sounds madness to say that you was going through that and it wasn't enough to stop you.

00:26:41.942 --> 00:26:48.794
To someone who is not an addict, to someone listening to this with no drug addiction experience whatsoever, that'd be like, that's mind-blowing.

00:26:48.814 --> 00:26:50.076
You think it's gone too far.

00:26:50.115 --> 00:26:52.980
You think that you can never recover.

00:26:53.000 --> 00:26:56.987
Your soul, it's disease of the soul is addiction.

00:26:57.007 --> 00:26:58.269
I like that.

00:26:58.288 --> 00:26:59.009
It really is.

00:26:59.090 --> 00:26:59.852
That's what it is.

00:26:59.872 --> 00:27:00.553
It...

00:27:01.569 --> 00:27:07.358
It takes away every part of you that made you you, and it hardens you.

00:27:08.240 --> 00:27:14.309
I think there's nothing more beautiful than seeing the light turn back on behind somebody's eyes when they get clean.

00:27:14.611 --> 00:27:18.737
There is nothing that gets me more excited than seeing that in somebody else.

00:27:18.836 --> 00:27:20.539
What turned your light on?

00:27:20.700 --> 00:27:21.882
What was it that put your light

00:27:21.902 --> 00:27:22.002
on?

00:27:22.022 --> 00:27:26.028
I found out I was pregnant after all those years of thinking that I couldn't have children.

00:27:26.609 --> 00:27:28.993
I found myself pregnant, 34 years old.

00:27:29.473 --> 00:28:02.673
homeless living in William Booth but that was scary very scary so I'd seen a lot within social services through friends and things to know what was coming and I think it doesn't work for everyone sometimes that isn't even enough but for me I think in a way my autism saved me because of this emotional and rejection dysphoria what I have and I knew that I could not lose my child.

00:28:03.153 --> 00:28:07.267
I knew that if I was not raising my own son, it would be the end of me.

00:28:07.647 --> 00:28:09.212
I had nothing to live for anyway.

00:28:09.232 --> 00:28:16.063
It's almost like I was presented a gift And the circumstances, all the stars just aligned.

00:28:16.083 --> 00:28:17.807
The circumstances were right.

00:28:18.268 --> 00:28:23.682
Obviously, you talked a little bit then about being told you couldn't conceive, that you couldn't have children.

00:28:23.721 --> 00:28:25.886

Nadine Balmer: Parenting, Partying, Autism, Methadone, TikTok, Trauma & A 17 Year Heroin Addiction

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