For a majority of people, June 11th, 2020 was just another Thursday early in the Covid-19 pandemic. For me, it was the day that my life changed forever. After eight years of attempts, relapses, treatment programs, arrest cycles, and homelessness, I walked into a women’s residential treatment facility after calling daily for an open bed for twenty-nine days in a row. Because of the state of the world, treatment beds were scarce, but I was relentless and like clockwork I dialed the same number each morning from the couch in another user’s RV until I was blessed with a detox bed. I remember the forty-five minute Oregon Health Plan funded ride share journey like it was yesterday. I carried with me a cell phone, a tube of lip gloss, and the clothes on my back. When I arrived at the detox center, I threw out my shoes because the soles were worn. I started over from nothing with little more than hope and a dream. My seven-month-old son had been placed with a resource family for several months and getting back to him was my only goal. I had a long and uncomfortable road ahead of me but walking into the residential program felt like the best day of my life. This time would be different. This time my son was at stake. This time I was truly done.
They say that ten percent of individuals who enter treatment are able to remain in recovery for their lifetime. Each morning, I pray to embody that statistic. Since June 11th, 2020, I have completed my Associates of Applied Science in Human Services from Chemeketa Community College, I work part time as a board-certified alcohol and drug counselor, and I have recently completed my Bachelor of Social Work degree summa cum laude at Portland State University. I have also dedicated thousands of volunteer hours to the Oregon Head Start Association and the Region X Head Start Association as a two-time elected Executive Board Member acting as a voting member representing the voice of parents and caregivers in Oregon, Alaska, Washington, and Idaho. I also represent my local Head Start program as the Parent Committee Chair and the Oregon state representative. I have been interviewed for the National Head Start Association for their 60 years of success stories project and this past April I traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with Congressional members to share my testimony in support of Head Start funding as part of the Parents Unite advocacy initiative.
I am dedicated to a field where I can contribute to community well-being and volunteer my time with an organization that provides early childhood education and wrap-around services to vulnerable low-income families because I have lived through the challenges of multi-generational substance abuse and untreated mental illness. I began to perpetuate the cycle until six years ago when I drew a line in the sand, crossed over it, and never turned back. I have trudged forward, one foot in front of the other, blazing a trail that I now am so grateful to share with others. If I can do this, anyone can do it too. The important piece of any recovering addict’s success is community support. I would not be entering my graduate school program this week if not for the resources available to me. As a single low-income parent, I have maintained a 4.0 GPA while giving back to my community in any way I can find because I was taught by the AA program and my sponsor that we can only keep what we freely give away. Being connected to healthy people, participating in pro-social activities, and creating meaning with the adversity I have overcome has given me purpose and pushed me forward.
It is my dream to complete my Master of Social Work degree across the next twelve months in an advanced standing program at Portland State University. This year I will complete a nine-month practicum internship working with adults navigating co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders. I will obtain the necessary hours to become a Licensed Clinical Social worker. I also aspire to obtain a doctoral fellowship in applied clinical research to contribute meaningfully to the substance use disorder field. I am a first-generation college student, and this pathway is foreign territory, however, I know that I have overcome a darkness that few can conquer. I lived under a freeway using heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine intravenously. I survived two septic infections. Six years later I am a college graduate, I have expunged my criminal record, and I am working on pulling my children out of low-income status. With doctoral research I hope to create innovative treatment modalities and curriculum for family recovery, specifically families facing substance abuse issues and child welfare involvement.
For the past year I completed my practicum internship at Linn-Benton Community College working as an affordability navigator helping college students facing basic needs insecurities to persist with their academic goals in the face of a harsh economic environment with limited resources. Through my own journey I have learned that recovery cannot exist on willpower alone. Willpower may help a person pick up the phone, ask for help, or walk through the treatment center doors, but willpower cannot create an open detox bed. Willpower cannot pay rent, provide childcare, fund transportation, remove the barriers of a criminal record, heal trauma, or surround a person with people who believe they are still worthy of a future. Recovery requires personal accountability, but it also requires a community that is willing to leave the porch light on.
I believe drug and alcohol use has become so prevalent in the United States because we have built systems that respond after crisis. Like myself and the clients I work with, many people begin using substances to cope with trauma, poverty, isolation, grief, untreated mental illness, chronic stress, or a lack of belonging. Substances become a way to survive unbearable circumstances, like child removal, even when the survival strategy creates more harm. I didn’t wake up one day and choose destruction. Like a frog in boiling water, I slowly adapted until chaos felt normal.
Our country talks about addiction like it starts with one bad choice; I believe it begins with disconnection. People become disconnected from family, culture, housing, education, employment, health care, and hope. When active use becomes visible, we punish the symptoms instead of treating the wounds underneath. Arrests, shame, stigma, and exclusion do not heal addiction. They deepen it. I know this because I lived inside that cycle. What finally helped me was access. Access to treatment, access to health insurance, access to education, access to recovery meetings, access to people who had walked the road before me, and access to programs that supported me as a parent and reunited me with my son. If we want to improve this epidemic, we need to stop treating recovery as an individual mission and start treating it as a community responsibility. We need more detox and residential treatment beds so people do not have to call every day for a month hoping they can survive long enough. We need outpatient treatment that includes childcare, transportation support, peer mentors, family recovery services, trauma-informed counseling, and long-term recovery housing. We need community organizations to work together to remove barriers and create accessibility.
I also believe we need to invest much earlier. Programs like Head Start, basic needs centers, food pantries, affordable housing supports, parenting resources, and mental health services are not separate from the addiction crisis. They are prevention. When families have support before they break, children grow up with more stability, parents have more capacity, and communities become healthier. My life was changed by treatment, but my recovery has been sustained by connection, education, service, and purpose. Those are the resources that helped me move from surviving to contributing. The solution is more than just building more treatment programs, although we desperately need them. The deeper solution is to build communities where people are less likely to need substances to numb their pain in the first place, and where those who do struggle are met with a path back instead of a locked door. I am living proof that recovery is possible, but I am also proof that recovery requires scaffolding. Someone opened a bed. Someone funded my ride. Someone taught the group. Someone sponsored me. Someone created the scholarship. Someone believed that a woman arriving with worn-out shoes and nothing, but hope could become a college graduate, a counselor, an advocate, and a mother with a future. This is why I want to continue this work. I see my recovery as a responsibility to widen the road for others. Every resource and supportive conversation can become part of someone’s bridge out of addiction. I know because I crossed that bridge myself and now, I am dedicated to strengthening it for all those who are still searching for the way out.
About the author:
Ashley Randle is a single mother of two young children who is currently enrolled in the Advanced Standing Master of Social Work program at Portland State University; an accelerated twelve-month graduate program. She is actively involved in her community as a Head Start parent and works as a Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor II. After completing graduate school she will provide mental health therapy and obtain her Licensed Clinical Social Work credential. Ashley’s advocacy experience, her lived recovery experience, her education, and her clinical experience allow her to bridge the gap between real life barriers, clinical interventions and policy changes needed to address them. She aspires to complete a doctoral fellowship and continue contributing to the field of addiction recovery.