The bruises, scabs and track marks on her arms were a shocking reality.
She had become an addict.
That’s when Nikki Le, sitting on the curb in front of her drug dealer’s Indianapolis home, asked for help.
For nearly three years since, Le has worked everyday to remain sober. The scars on her arms — some she has had covered with tattoos — remind her of where she had been.
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Click here to purchase photos from this galleryShe regrets the way she treated others, especially her family. But if she had the choice, she isn’t sure she would change a thing.
“Being a drug addict has made me who I am today,” she said.
“I’m different now from when I was younger. My outlook on life, it’s more like a second chance.”
For Le, her path toward addiction started as a student at Center Grove High School, experimenting with prescription drugs, such as Adderal and Xanax, and drinking cough syrup. She tried bath salts, a synthetic drug, and at age 21, she tried methamphetamine, she said.
The feeling of being high is indescribable, Le said.
“You’re just on top of the world. It’s the reason why so many people relapse. It’s always a part of it. You always feel it, and you just want to chase it. You never find it again, but you never forget it,” Le said.
Le had never pictured herself doing methamphetamine. Those people were addicts, she told herself. And she wouldn’t be like that.
At the time, she was still working at her family’s nail salon near Bluff and Southport roads, but she was showing up later and later, and then stopped showing up. Then she started selling her own stuff, and then pawned her parents’ jewelry.
When that wasn’t enough, she started stealing perfume from department stores. Eventually, she got greedy and was stealing everyday, and then she got caught. She was charged with multiple counts of theft in both Marion and Johnson counties and was sentenced to three years probation.
She told herself then that she was done. She felt like she had to be.
For five months, she was sober, but it wasn’t what she wanted and deep down, she knew she would relapse.
This time, she added heroin and used it with meth. The high was even better, she said.
But the damage was also significantly more, and Le spiraled quickly.
She had always hated needles and told herself she would never shoot up, but that all changed. She became the person sitting in the bathroom with a needle, desperately searching for a vein.
During the next four months, Le attempted suicide and began cutting herself. She truly hated herself.
“Either I was going to kill myself or get clean,” she said.
She didn’t even feel high anymore when she used. She only felt miserable.
That day in May 2015, she sat on the curb looking at her arms, and decided she needed to do something else. She went home to her parents and told them everything.
She thought about everything she had done to them. Not showing up for work at the family business. Repeatedly begging for money — even from her mom on Mother’s Day. And then stealing from them when they wouldn’t give her more.
They welcomed her in, and told her they would work on a solution as a family.
And that’s when her new life began. She went through withdrawal, which luckily wasn’t as bad as some have it since she hadn’t been using as long, and refused to use any medication-assisted treatment. In Le’s mind, she wanted to be completely sober, she said.
But that wasn’t the worst part. Once she was clean, she had to remember everything she had done when she was desperate for a fix.
“Withdrawal is temporary. Everything else, you have to deal with mentally,” Le said.
“I can’t forgive myself for who I was and the things I’ve done. That feeling is there for a reason, to remind me never to go back.”
For Le, she had to change her way of thinking. She had to always strive to do the right thing, and she had to remain positive.
“I think of the person I was, and I don’t want to be that again,” she said.
She remembers being spoiled, hating to work and hated her life. She had to change her mentality, and being an addict led her to those changes, she said.
Le goes to work six days a week, showing her parents how she has changed as a thank you for all they have done for her. She doesn’t lie, she doesn’t make excuses. And she knows relapse is always a possibility, she said.
A big part of her recovery has been sharing her story.
She wants people to know that addiction can affect anyone, including a girl from Center Grove, she said.
“It could happen to anybody. Everybody has an addictive personality in some way,” she said.
People need to understand it could happen to them. People make mistakes. You don’t know you’re going to be addicted, and usually when you realize it, it’s too late.”
Le still has bad days. She has dreams where she has the feelings of being high. It’s a craving that never truly goes away, she said.
As part of her recovery, she tells her story to everyone she can, including all her clients at her family’s business and her public Facebook page. She talks about her struggles, her cravings and her guilt over her past. But she also knows that being honest helps her stay sober, she said.
She wants people to know that recovery is possible, since so often, those aren’t the stories people hear.
She knows the odds against getting sober all too well. In the period of two years, six of her friends overdosed. And she has several friends still using drugs that just aren’t ready to quit, she said.
But she also knows what life looks like on the other side, after the thoughts of sobriety being impossible, the pain of withdrawal and rebuilding relationships, she said.
“It does get better. Don’t give up,” she said. “I want to show people we do recover.”
For Le, her reminder is written on her arms, with a sleeve tattoo that covers her scars, her sobriety date, May 27, 2015, with the words “My story isn’t over yet,” and characters in Chinese that say, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”
