How Red Became Straight Edge - By Red (Sarah)

misskittypunk@hotmail.com

I've been asked many times why I became Straightedge... So here it is... in a nutshell!

When I was about fourteen, I started rejecting all of the crap I'd been taught since I was young. I stopped eating meat, broke away from the church and became a Marxist. During this time, I also became to get sicker. I'd been very sick since I was about twelve.

Over the next two years, I became more and more ill.

As a result of my illness, I did a lot of stupid stuff. I experimented with alcohol and drugs, I fooled around... I did a lot of really stupid stuff, really, that I now regret.

More serious than all of this though was the illness itself.

When I was sixteen, I was admitted to a psychological hospital where I was treated for severe depression disorder. For a couple of years, I had been adicted to self-mutilation. Later that year, I was admitted to the same hospital for a suicide attempt. I was very ill.

While in the hospital, I was treated with Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, and Luvox. None of these helped, in fact, they made my problems worse.

Soon, we figured out that I was bi-polar.

The severe mood swings accompanied with panic attacks and painful shyness forced me to retreat into a life no one should ever live...

When all of this began, I met two guys from my school. They were dating two of my best friends. They introduced me to the sXe movement. Recently, I began thinking about sXe again and it really began to make sense to me. Drinking, smoking, drugging, fooling around with guys I hardly knew was only making all of my problems worse.

I cleaned it up. After my brother was arrested this winter for possession and trafficking of ecstacy, I really began to think. Though I am strongly opposed to the facist drug war and its draconian laws, I realized that now more than ever is a time to live by my rules.

I have rejected almost everything that I've been taught from youth and have begun my own way of thinking. Accompanying these new beliefs are sXe and veganism. Now I realize more than ever how precious and wonderful life is.

Some would wich that he/she had never made the mistakes I did, but when I look back and see how those experiences helped shape me and how I now think, I value those negative experiences as highly as any other.