When I was 35 years old, I just had the feeling
like I'd rather be dead than fat.
At 136 pounds, I thought that I was fat.
So I was dealing with this obsession,
doing different things.
You know, the bulimia, the diet pills.
And I just would do anything not to be fat.
I got a friend who was doing crystal meth,
and I asked for one little, small little Baggie.
"I don't want to do it to get high.
I just want to do it so that if I just take enough,
it would suppress my appetite.
And that's all I want--just to lose 10 pounds so I could be
in my 120s again."
I became very quickly addicted, within a matter of two weeks.
Ice addicts have a term, and they call it the chase.
It's every minute of your waking day, you're chasing the drug.
One night I think my husband was just kind of fed up
with everything.
He was going to leave me.
As the addiction progressed, I'd wake up
and I'd say, "Am I going to live or am I going to die today?"
So I took about 20 muscle relaxers,
and I drank a whole bottle of tequila
and ended up in the emergency room.
I knew I had to do something or I was going
to lose literally everything.
When the therapist said to me, "Any kind
of recovery or any recovery program
is based upon faith in a higher power or faith in God,"
I was very angry.
I was angry with God because of all the things
that had happened to me as a child and all the things
that I wanted Him to fix that He didn't fix.
Back in the day, it was called discipline.
So I was angry with Him.
So angry.
Any addict knows that there are other issues that
fuel your addiction.
Then I got a phone call from a relative,
and he said, "Auntie, I just wanted
to let you know that the Church has an addiction recovery
program."
Grudgingly, I told God, "OK, I'm going to do it Your way.
And if it doesn't work out, then You cannot blame me,
because this is my one last shot with You."
And so as we went through the steps, that number 3 came up.
And it was trust in God, turning your will over to God.
"OK, so now You're telling me the same old thing.
I've got to do things Your way."
I couldn't see it.
The real help came one day when I read an article
from the Ensign, a spiritual magazine
that I said I was never going to read.
And in this article, he talked about Lot's wife.
Lot and his family, of course, were asked to leave the city.
It was going to be destroyed.
And they were cautioned, "While you're leaving the city,
don't look back."
And we all know that Lot's wife looked back and was
turned into a pillar of salt.
Why did this happen to her?
Why was she turned into a pillar of salt just for looking back?
And he said it wasn't so much that she was looking back.
It was because she looked back with longing,
that she looked back yearning for the things
that she had left in Sodom and Gomorrah.
Her heart was still there.
When I read those words, I said, "I am Lot's wife."
You know?
"I'm her, looking back and longing for things that are not
there--looking back for a life that if I stayed in it,
I would be destroyed."
In my mind, step 3 is all about trusting God and realizing that
the Creator of this universe cannot only help you recover,
but He can literally provide a different life for you,
a new heart for you.
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