TESTIMONY BLOG – DAY ONE

June 3rd – 3:00AM

Let’s get this started – I honestly just can’t wait to share. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
I’m just going to copy and paste a small portion of the writing each blog entry – and then make notes or additions where I feel I have a note to “chime in” to further explain. 

PARAGRAPH 1 & 2
ORIGINAL TEXT EST. 2012

“Hi my name is Victoria and I am 25 years old. It doesn’t seem like I’m old enough to be sharing my life testimony. But I once was lost, and now I’m found, so I think that story is worthy to be told if it may help anyone else discover the contentment, peace and joy that I have. There is no way I can possibly put you in my shoes, but I’m going to try.

I had a good childhood. My mom had me in the church every day the doors were opened. I learned everything I knew about Jesus from church. I learned that God made the world, and he made us to live in it, I knew all about how Adam & Eve sinned and cursed us all, that sin was bad, that we had to fear the Lord and respect Him, that the only way to be saved was to believe in Jesus Christ and that he died on the cross for our sins. I didn’t even know or think about any other way of life. I can’t necessarily remember praying and receiving Jesus into my heart. My mom said I had at a young age. That was all I knew. I never doubted Jesus’ existence I just was told he was real and I believed it. Simple as that! Kind of like how elementary school is, we are all young and naïve and whatever our teachers told us was what we believed. We read our text books to learn about George Washington and we believed he was real and everything our books told us about him was the truth. What other option did we really have?

NOTES:06/03/26 @ 3:30AM
Woah, just woah – all over again – haha. I am so grateful to be able to take a look back into the mind of 25 year old me. I’m really going to break this down.

NOTES: 6/3/26

– and it doesn’t! But in this moment – my story had inspired someone – and I had visibly lived. 25 years is a lot of time lived, and this testimony starts at my childhood memories/experiences.

I was asked to read this out loud in front of the NA meeting hosted at my church. The teacher of the class was the mother of my childhood friend, and also my previous youth leader and she asked me to write down my testimony and please read to her class. I had never attended this class, or knew what to expect, but I had been to other drug/alcohol classes, so I get the jist. It’s a lot of group talking and interaction and activities to educate the class and help with the pattern of the effects that drugs and alcohol have on our lives.

I by no means wanted to attend this class, but it was for a close elder that I respected, and those meetings were always so easy for me, I love to talk and share, I’m a social butterfly. 
Some of the stories that I heard and the emotions that I experienced in those meetings has certainly taught me so much and opened my very sheltered brain to real life stuff.

I wasn’t rich growing up – but I was always well taken care of and needed for nothing. We still had to go to Plato’s closet for back to school shopping, and we all wore hand-me-downs, but my mom built our house from the ground up. I always had a nice decorated bedroom, kid’s bathroom, computer movies and games, trampoline, no pool! Haha And at my dad’s house – same thing – not rich – but also my dad’s basketball team of children were always well fed, well clothed, and had their own bed to get tucked into every night. My dad always had some kind of pool, felt like we leveled up each year into the latest and greatest. Some of my best memories were setting up pools, carrying for them (my dad taught me everything from the temps to water testing, the power of shocking the water, keeping it clean ect), tearing them down to put away, care for the yard after – and how to protect it when we get the tornado warnings! My dad also was the out-to-eat parent which always felt like a “baller” special childhood moment. I still feel the same way today every time I have the luxury of dining out.

Point being – I lived a good childhood and was well taken care of.
Since I was sheltered my mom never let me go to other kids’ houses for sleepovers especially, but really I did not do much or go anywhere outside of the church family. I realize that because of that, I seldom would experience or even register the living situations of some of the people I associate with every day, the difference of each person’s struggles. I was really surprised when my best friend’s parents were even more strict than mine, I didn’t think that was possible! So my mom always let me go to her house to hang out. 

Some of the girls I was sitting next to in these drug and alcohol classes, were my classmates, their parents, neighbors, church members (YES!) And this exact older church member was front row every Sunday and well known in my church family – and was the very voice that dropped the key to me finding God! The days of sitting through those classes, the stories that I heard; weekly reports on exactly what they had gone through that week, my eyes were opened to possibilities and situations that I could never think up myself. These types of stories whether true or not (I imagine I heard as many lies some across those circles) aren’t something you hear every day.

I am from small town Ohio, heroin, meth, bath salts, you name it – had taken over our town. I had six classmates in my highschool that died from drug overdose. Some of them way way way too close for comfort. Hang out with them one day, have no idea how close to death they are, and then they are gone the next. Another tragic story about how they relapsed after being clean for a long time, or how they overdosed in front of your other friends and they were too afraid to get in trouble that they hesitated or just simply did not ever call for help. Stories of how friends were responsible for administering that hit of drugs that killed their best friend, or how they stole  from their family and hurt the people that loved them.

I smoke weed – haha (illegal in Ohio at that time, automatic license suspension and probation of course) so I found myself sitting through these drug/alcohol classes. I didn’t really even drink at the time, I wasn’t drinking often or even getting very “drunk”. Don’t worry, that comes later ‘XDBut I loved to smoke weed. I have a touch of the ‘tism I’m sure, ADH with or without the D for certain, anxiety, overthinking, high strung, high energy, chaos going on in my head – haha – and I’m gonna smoke this blunt! I am a high functioning pot head. I smoke to help me get moving and get things done. ANY activity , even washing the dishes, is more enjoyable after a few tokes!! All of my friends and coworkers would attest that my performance only improves after a smoke sesh. I later realized that since I started smoking marijuana, that I had stopped experiencing the intense hereditary migraines that tortured me in my previous years.

Regardless, marijuana was still illegal where I lived, and the local police tend to follow you around after the first time they catch you.  I had multiple encounters with the police and myself being caught having weed in my posession. Hence my presence each week at these classes, held at the behavioral center along with all the other drug users from my small town. What an experience; I was never excited to go but I remember them being very crucial to many building blocks of my overall education.

This particular meeting that I would be attending was not the same counseling women’s group I was used to. This meeting was going to be held at the church that I regularly attended with my family, and the people at the meeting could be anyone in town, definitely including some of my youth leaders and fellow church members. I didn’t know this of course until I arrived at the meeting. It was also an “NA” meeting that followed a certain structure. I had been to a few of these NA meetings during the short time I spent in the county jail and attended as an excuse to get out of my cell.

I was very confident in reading my testimony all the way up until I walked in front of the crowd. It was hard, I was nervous, but I just had to read what I had already written down, so I did it! It was very emotional and I remember not wanting to read some of the parts out loud, I definitely cracked my voice a few times and shed some tears – but I made it through!

I don’t remember receiving any type of response minus the applause after the reading and the teacher commending me for sharing. I enjoyed the experience and apparently I put that writing away and forgot about it until recently, here we are.

NOTES:06/03/26

Here in this sentence you can see that I know that something has changed in my life that helped me to find a certain joy that other people could see in me. I state that I feel as if my story is worthy to be told, if it can possible help someone else just by sharing my experience – why would I not share it!? And this is exactly how I have been feeling lately about my writings, I want to share them. I want to talk to like-minded people about the thoughts that go through my head.

NOTES:06/03/26

 I still resonate with this statement so much. No matter what I say to anyone, there is simply no way to place you in my shoes so that you could fully experience what I’ve been through or the presence of God in my personal life. It’s impossible to give you what I’ve got. Your spiritual journey is your own, living through life and the choices you make at each fork in the road and how they lead you to where you are today, right in this exact moment. The information that I have, the lessons that I’ve learned are my own. But, I might have a missing piece to one of your puzzles somewhere in here. I have learned some of the most important pieces of my foundation from random encounters, movies, commercials, songs, Bible verses, gangster quotes, etc. Each piece was a lesson that required a pivot in how I made my life choices. I can’t put you in my exact shoes, but I’m going to give you the Sketchers version.