I was a reckless teen who will admit candidly now that I was sorely in need of reform school. I had fairly good parents and it’s not really their fault that I headed down a rough road. I grew up in a rural area of Kentucky where there was little to do and few people to do it with. Everybody drinks where I come from; it’s part of the lifestyle. The drink of preference at high school parties was beer, the cheaper, and the more alcoholic, the better.

Things were not too bad while I was just drinking beer, but when I was about sixteen, I found myself hitting the hard stuff. I was first exposed to whiskey at a party in October when a senior named Herbert handed me his flask. I got pretty plastered that night and woke up in a puddle of sick the next morning. I should have taken some time to re-evaluate my existence and my habits, but I didn’t.

I didn’t stick to whiskey, though, and I so moved on to tequila and whatever else I could find during a party. Then, I started drinking during the week, even showing up at school a few times drunk. I was decent, however, at keeping my habits from people, so no one really caught on, though my family suggested reform school.

Unhappily, alcohol wasn’t even the extent of the issue. At a different party about a year after I had started drinking hard liquor, someone, I don’t even remember who, brought some cocaine. I was drunk, stupid, and careless, so I tried it. My existence became a never ending cycle of drugs and drinking. Try as I might, I cannot remember much more from those days than a fuzzy blur.

Incredibly, I endured high school and got enrolled the state university. I fit right in with the hard partying crowd and was wasted nearly every night. Of course, my days in college were limited and I was expelled in November of my freshman year. I was abruptly at the lowest point that I have ever been at in my entire life. Eventually, I got help when my friends and family arranged an intervention. It wasn’t easy, but a couple years later, I’m clean. I look back with a lot of regrets and one of the biggest is that I didn’t take the opportunity to go to a therapeutic boarding school when it was suggested to me.

You can find more crucial information if you go along the link at reform school or maybe through schools for troubled girls.