Welcome. Yes, you! Come on in. We see you. We’re here for you. No one amongst us hasn’t felt, at one time or another, excluded. We’ve all sought attention in our own ways—cried for it many times. Today’s spotlight is on a proud woman in recovery who has spent most of her life starved of attention and community. Today’s spotlight is on Chanel S.
Chanel’s story reads like a rollercoaster designed by a drunk architect: dizzying, wild, and full of steep drops and sharp turns. But here’s the twist: she’s the one who finally got off the ride, took a deep breath, and made a choice to turn the whole thing around. Born into the chaos of LA with a single mom who worked two jobs, Chanel learned early that feeling alone was just part of the gig. At 10, she discovered that the dad she thought was hers wasn’t—cue the emotional meltdown. As if trying to process that wasn’t hard enough, her real dad didn’t want anything to do with her either. “I grew up feeling not worthy—not good enough.” Time may heal all wounds, but hurt like that doesn’t go away quickly or easily.
As a kid, Chanel was a walking contradiction. Loud, rebellious, and always in search of attention, “I was what people now call the ‘pick me girl.’” She spent her childhood in the echo of *why doesn’t anyone want me?*—a question she chased through friendships, relationships, and eventually, drugs. “It wasn’t love I was after. It was being seen, even if it meant losing myself.” Her escape began at 13, when she smoked her first joint…well, tried to. The first time she tried to smoke weed, she and her friend placed it on the table and a gust of wind blew it all away. If only she took that as a sign. Once she finally figured out how to shield her pot from the elements, she instantly discovered that weed could fill a hole better than anything else in her life, at least for as long as she was high. Little did she know, that gust was about to take her too.
By 15, Chanel’s mom started staying with her boyfriend which left the house open for daily parties. It was the perfect storm. Booze, Xanax, cocaine—what else did a teenager need to feel like they belonged? But no amount of drugs could silence the fear that had been there since childhood: I don’t belong here. That feeling followed her into her twenties, where she found herself in toxic, abusive relationships—beaten by her boyfriends, staying with them only for the attention and drugs they provided her. Eventually, this spiraled into heroin and meth.
In the car with her friends, who she thought only smoked weed, Chanel was offered a hit of Marijuana wax. “They were smoking off a paperclip and saying they were ‘playing the violin.’” She tried it, knowing in her heart it wasn’t what they told her it was. “I was losing it. This wasn’t wax!” But that realization didn’t stop her from immediately stating, “‘Let me try it again.’”
Chanel would show up to her community college classes high as the Hubble. She even took a class on drug and alcohol counseling. Why? To this day she has no idea. One theory is that maybe it could have been to have enough credits to get financial aid, but who’s to say? She was blacked out at the time—an unreliable narrator. “I remember my professor saying, ‘The state you learn something in is the state you’ll remember it in.’ So, after that, I thought ‘I’m going to come high every time and be all the time because I’ll remember it when I’m high.’ I’ve forgotten it all since then.” None of this seemed like an issue to her at the time. This was just normal life to a girl who had no semblance of normalcy to begin with. Her mom was in the dark when it came to most of the intimate details of her life—their differences made it all the harder for them to relate to one another. Chanel’s daily drug use was reaching its peak. She was working at Little Caesars, snorting lines of coke and meth off of the dough rolling counter (I knew their pizza was addicting for a reason!) and breaking every rule she had promised herself. The worst of which was sleeping for men for drugs. “I didn’t think I had a problem,” she admits, “until I got pregnant.”
It was her 28th birthday when the test came back positive. Before the candles were blown out, the meth pipe was already lit. “I cried and smoked meth for an hour straight.” For months, she used meth with the goal of losing the pregnancy or, frankly, losing herself. “The goal was to smoke so much meth that I would have a miscarriage or die.” She wasn’t just in denial—she was drowning in it, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the drugs could take away her worst fears: the guilt of motherhood, and the shame of the woman she had become.
But here’s the thing about Chanel: she never quite lost the thread of hope, even when it seemed impossible. After her daughter was born and went straight to the NICU, Chanel felt like she was losing everything. “How could I live with myself?” she wondered. DCFS got involved, and she left the hospital without her baby—still not knowing if she could be the mom she needed to be. Her addiction had a death grip on her, and no matter how much she wanted to stop, she didn’t know if she could. But something shifted. Slowly, and with the kind of grace only someone who’s been through the fire can understand, Chanel started pulling herself out.
Throughout all of this, her mom knew nothing. Nothing. She didn’t even know Chanel was pregnant. When DCFS showed up at her door, her mom found out and spam called Chanel. Eventually, she answered—already crying in the DCFS lobby. For the first time in her life, her mom was empathetic—not sympathetic—empathetic. “She told me, ‘The way you are feeling is exactly how I felt when I had you at 18.’” Together, they were going to fight through this. All of this.
Unfortunately, that rollercoaster had one more loop. She and her boyfriend at the time, got into a fight outside of a bus station and, out of anger, she hit him with her car. Instantly she had a white light moment. “What am I doing?” Chanel called the cops and waited three hours for them to show up. When they did, they took her away and she was charged with assault with a deadly weapon. In jail, she was given plenty of time to think about what her life was going to look like next. Instead of leaving jail on her release day, she begged them to transfer her to a county where she didn’t know anyone. She stayed an extra night in jail just so she wouldn’t get high when she got out. She knew her path had to be straightened.
What followed was a hell of a lot of learning how to rebuild a life from the ground up. The woman who couldn’t feel welcomed anywhere—who always felt like the odd one out, who couldn’t fit in with her family, with the people around her, or even herself—became the woman who now makes it her job to welcome people into Beit T’Shuvah. That irony is not lost on her.
“I’m an Intake Coordinator now,” she laughs, with a grin that says it all. “I’m literally paid to be the person who makes people feel like they belong here.” After all the years of trying to fit in, of seeking attention from the wrong places, she’s now the one offering people that same attention. “I was always the odd one out,” she says. “I never fit in. Now, I help others find a place where they do fit in.”
It wasn’t a clean cut, though. Chanel didn’t just snap her fingers and become the perfect mom, the perfect employee, the perfect person. It’s been a messy, beautiful journey of rebuilding, and even now, she’s learning what it means to fully step into her worth. But here’s what we know for sure: she’s doing it…and she’s helping others do the same. From the girl who used to be lost in a crowd, never feeling worthy of love, to the woman who is now the one making people feel seen and heard, Chanel has done what many thought was impossible. “I never thought I’d be a mom, and I never thought I’d be productive,” she says with a laugh, the pride in her voice unmistakable. “And look at me now. Who would’ve thought?” That’s the thing about recovery—it doesn’t come with a roadmap, but sometimes, it comes with a full circle. So, to quote what Chanel says to incoming residents every single day,
“Welcome. Come on in. We see you. We’re here for you. You’re home.”