My Journey From Rebellion to Reality

When I was sixteen, the world didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t fit in, and I didn’t care about anyone’s rules. Life felt like a prison, and I wanted out. So, I ran away. For a few weeks, I lived the way I thought freedom should be: reckless, rebellious, and dangerous. That’s when I got mixed up with the wrong crowd. It was a blur of bad decisions and even worse influences. Shooting up for the first time felt like a rebellion, but it became something I would regret forever.

"I thought I could beat the world, but instead, the world beat me down."

Two weeks. That’s all it took. Two weeks of sharing needles with people who I thought were clean. I was invincible—or so I thought. But reality hit hard. One day, I woke up feeling worse than I ever had in my life. My body felt like it was shutting down, and the pain in my gut was unbearable. When I finally dragged myself to the hospital, I found out I had contracted hepatitis C.

At first, I didn’t care. I thought it was some kind of sick joke. Hep C? At 17? I laughed it off, convinced that I could just run from this problem like I ran from everything else. But there’s one thing you can’t outrun—your own body.

I waited two more years before I did anything about it. By then, the damage was worse. I weighed 98 pounds, and every step I took felt like dragging a weight behind me. I met a doctor who treated me like garbage because of my sexuality. He refused to help me. Another slap in the face. But I found someone else, a doctor who told me I was worse off than most of her older patients. At 19, I was already a wreck.

"Ten months of hell saved my life, but it gave me a new battle to fight."

The treatment for hep C was brutal. I spent 10 months feeling like I was dying. But by the end of it, I was cured. I thought that was the end of my nightmare, but in reality, it was just the beginning of another. The weight piled on fast after treatment—nearly 100 pounds in less than a year. I went from being dangerously thin to feeling trapped in a body I didn’t recognize.

Now, at 220 pounds, I’m facing a new kind of monster: fatty liver disease. The same rebellious streak that led me to stick needles in my arm had also driven me to overeat, binge on junk food, and live with zero regard for my health. And now I’m paying for it, every single day.

"My liver is so swollen, you can see it just by looking at my stomach."

I’m sick all the time. Some days, I can barely eat, and when I do, the pain under my ribs is unbearable. My life has been reduced to managing my symptoms. One day, I have diarrhea; the next, I’m constipated. My body feels like it’s out of control, just like my life used to be. I’m depressed, exhausted, and constantly wondering if all the damage I did back then has come back to haunt me.

But what gets me the most is the weight. No matter how little I eat, I keep gaining. Even with a gym membership, I haven’t been able to shed a single pound. It’s like my body is punishing me for every bad decision I’ve ever made. And now, I wonder if I’ll ever have a normal life again.

"Am I the only one who feels trapped inside their own body?"

This disease has taken so much from me. I thought I had escaped the worst when I beat hep C, but fatty liver feels like another prison. I’m trying to keep fighting, but most days, it feels like I’m just surviving. I wonder if anyone else out there knows what this feels like—to have lived through so much, only to feel like your body is betraying you again.