My Life Lessons

Cheryl Steptoe is my name and I am the oldest of four children from New Orleans, Louisiana. At a very young age, I fell victim to peer pressure and started to smoke cigarettes in the 7th grade. Looking back, it was obvious that I was just following the “in crowd.” By the time I got into high school, I’d been influenced to also start smoking weed. In 1982, my drug use was taken to yet another notch as I started snorting cocaine. At this level, I’d pretty much stopped going to school and chose to just hang around the neighborhood with my friends. None of us were doing anything with our lives other than doing drugs day in and day out. When I did decide to go to school, I spent the majority of the day drinking alcohol. Eventually I grew tired of the way I was living, so I decided that I needed to go far away from my current environment.

I chose Oakland, California because in my mind moving here would help me with my change. In hindsight, I wasn’t truly being honest with myself, because I needed to change my mindset, not just my location. With my mind being the same, I continued using drugs and now I was in a bigger city with even more opportunities to get drugs.

Somehow in the midst of my habit, I managed to become a business owner and owned my own hair salon. I built up a hefty clientele base, but they were mostly drug dealers. Unfortunately, I was not charging my clients cash, instead I would trade my services for drugs. So, not making a ton of money, you would think my salon would close, but I had a boyfriend who I thought loved me dearly, but turns out he was an enabler and paid all of bills and allowed me to continue to get high. The whole ordeal lasted for 10 years and turned out to be a major downfall for me.

In 2012 I finally mustered the strength to make the decision to leave Oakland, but I stayed on the west coast and moved to Phoenix, Arizona. While here, I began to become very ill and was in and out of the hospital. With of all of the health complications I was dealing with, my parents found out and weren’t too happy with what was going on, so they convinced me to move with them to Stockbridge, GA.

Moving back with my parents didn’t help much at all, as I wasn’t trying to make anything positive happen in my life and continued to drink all day. It was my sister that

wanted to give my life purpose or at the very least give my day some purpose. It was her idea to bring me to the Paula Crane Center. From there, I was put into the “My Sister’s Keeper” Program and to be honest, it was the best decision I’ve agreed to.

At this junction in my life, I am now one year clean from substances. My treatment program has given me structure to my life and I love the employee's passion in helping us to reach our goals. I am receiving great education on substance abuse, life skills and boundaries that I need to have for myself. Most importantly, they provide so much support for me to get better.