Resurrection

July 3, 2009

Dan B writes: My name is Daniele, I’m 39 years old and have been at Caritas for twenty three months. I was born in Toronto and brought up in a good Italian family. The first time I ever touched drugs was when I was fourteen and it started as a joke with friends, you know, smoking a joint here and there. I finally found out that the joke was on me.

A few years went by and I started to experiment with cocaine and crack, what a big mistake. By sixteen I started to destroy everything around me, family, friends, relatives and the funny part is that I didn’t have any care in the world as long as I was getting high. At this point you could say that I was a low life junkie who stole money from my poor family, held up stores, robbed people on the street, slept in alleyways and stairwells; as long as I was getting high, nothing else mattered.

By the age of twenty, my family had enough and bought me a ticket to Italy to spend some time with my older sister who lived there. Something happened when I saw those beautiful mountains and the landscape, I ended up staying seven years. The first year was the hardest to detox and get my brain in good thinking order. I started working the land for a while till I got my visa, then I went to work, making statues in a factory. My life was full of joy; I met my wife there and thought I had overcome all the problems I had left here in Toronto.

My wife and I decided to come back to Toronto and work for the family business and everything was good for a while, until all those problems I thought I had overcome hit me like a Mac truck. At 32 my life again started going downhill again and all those problem behaviours I had as a teenager came back ten times worse. I lost my wife, my business, my friends and most important, I lost total self-respect for myself again. But this time I was addicted to any pill, heroin, and crack, anything that made me forget.

At 37 I found Caritas and it took me three months to come in, but when I did, change started to happen almost immediately. Here at Caritas it’s been really hard, but the pain has been worth it. I learned how to be a responsible person, how to respect other people’s opinions, humility, respect for self, how to understand my behaviours and how they affect me in my days duties, to control anger, how to express myself in a healthy manner, how important it is to confront what bothers you, how to respect the boundaries of others. Most important of all for myself, is that I learned that you must always tell the truth no matter what because I‘ve seen how the truth can really set you free. I’m so grateful that I gave Caritas a chance because I know for a fact that otherwise I would be brain-dead, a walking zombie, or just six feet under. All in all, Caritas gave me my life back, a new chance at life and many tools in my pouch to be used every day to stay alive and live the life of a normal human.
Thank you Caritas.