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Viral Pictures of a Drug Addict Before and After Share a Message of Hope
Meet Dejah Hall, a 26-year-old from Glendale, Arizona proving you can turn your life around.
Hall posted a few before and after pictures on social media this week showing her life before and after she was on drugs. The viral post shows a tired and absent woman in the before photos, and a vibrant and happy person in the after photo.
“I was a monster,” Hall told Arizona television station KNXV. “I was a monster in every sense of the word.”
Hall posted the pictures on social media to mark her four-year anniversary sober from drugs.
“Today marks 4 years clean from heroin and meth,” she wrote on Facebook. “The top left is me in full blown addiction, I was a terrible IV user and like most, progressively got worse. The bottom left is me the day I was arrested 12-6-12 and coincidentally the day I finally surrendered to God!”
The inspirational post quickly went viral and received over 79,000 likes.
The former addict is now finishing her degree in Christian Studies and is a mother to an 18-month-old girl.
Hall’s addiction began when she was 17 years old, when she started taking pills.
“I was partying with a friend and I took a pill for the first time and due to stress and issues at home it just went downhill from there,” she told Daily Mail. “I was taking up to six prescription pills at a time every single day before I reached a point at 20 years old where I wanted to get off them.”
Hall tried to get clean, but got thrown off track when her friend’s mother passed away.
“I was very close to her and was struggling with that so I missed three days in a row – something you can’t do. I was kicked out of the clinic so I ended up deciding to quit cold turkey and thought it would be okay,” she told Daily Mail.
However, trying to stop cold turkey took a dark turn after a friend suggested she smoke heroin to help with the withdrawal symptoms.
“I was throwing up and I remember he was smoking heroin. I told him it was disgusting and to stop but he was telling me to take just one hit to stop the withdrawals,” she told Daily Mail. “I was a monster in every way. I didn’t care who I hurt – I didn’t care about anything anymore. I didn’t have anyone else or family to look to at that point.”
Luckily, Hall’s grandfather was able to shed a little light on her situation.
“My grandfather was sitting in his wheelchair and he looked at me he said, ‘You’re hurting me, Dejah,’” Hall told Arizona television station KNXV. “I went to the bathroom and I looked at myself and I really looked at who I had become — this disgusting person who needed to continue to stick these drugs in their veins because I couldn’t function.”
Just a few hours after this conversation with her grandfather, Hall was arrested on a felony warrant. She knew she wanted to prove to her grandfather that she could stay clean and turn around her life.
While she was in prison, Hall chose to stay away from the drugs and embraced religion instead. However, Hall never got to prove this to her grandfather, as he died two weeks after she was arrested.
“More than anything, I wish I could tell him that I made it,” she told Arizona television station KNXV. “That I’m doing it.”
Four years later, Hall hopes her message will inspire other and prove that it isn’t impossible to turn your life around.
“The public reaction has been beautiful, and overwhelming,” Hall told Your Daily Dish via Facebook. “It is amazing how many amazing people are in the world, I at one point lost faith in humanity, now I see how wrong I was. There have been negative comments and that has been hard to deal with, but the good far outweigh the bad.”
She continued, “This isn’t just about a drug addict that got clean, it’s about a broken person who found the will to love their self again. I wrote the post simply because I was an addict who got clean and was celebrating my sobriety like most recovering addicts do, there are a lot more of me out there and they all deserve a congratulations!”