Growing Up With A Brother Addicted To Drugs

Hanging out with the wrong people who influence you to do things that are bad for your health can lead to the downfall of your life in plenty of ways. Growing up, I idolized all of my siblings. I thought that they were the coolest people ever, and I wanted to do everything I could to be just like them, but out of all four of them, I looked up to my older brother even more than the rest of them. He was athletic and well-known at his school, and I admired that. He had a good group of friends and had decent grades because if he did not have good grades, he would have gotten kicked off the football team. 

Everyone always says that your junior and senior year are the best years of your life and that you should live them to the fullest, but there should be limits. He ended his junior year with a good group of friends, good grades, and he played as the wide receiver on the varsity football team. He was even told that he could have gotten a scholarship for football. His life was going great, but he started meeting new people and most of them were not the best people to be around. They would drink alcohol, use drugs, and do bad actions while they were with him. When he first started hanging out with them, he refused to do that stuff because of football and because of our family. 

He loved football and his family with everything in him and didn’t want to stop playing or hurt us in any way. But he started hanging out with that group of people even more and they started to influence him to participate. He eventually caved and tried things he should not have been trying. Unfortunately, he did end up getting addicted to drugs. Using drugs can make you choose to make bad decisions; without thinking, he decided that he wanted to move to a different school to play football there. When he moved there, he realized that he missed the environment he was in before and went back to his old school but found out that he couldn’t play football anymore. 

That decision quickly led to the downfall of his senior year - his grades started dropping, he skipped school, got into fights, and disappeared for days. 

As a younger sibling, watching my older brother who I idolized very much go into a dark place was very traumatizing. After rarely seeing him, watching him constantly argue with members of my family, quit all of his hobbies, sell things that meant so much to him, and seeing cops come to my house, I realized that he was not the kind of person I ever wanted to be like. Thankfully, with the help of our family and others, he got out of that dark place and is now sober with two kids and a steady job. Drugs almost ruined his life and can ruin anyone's life, but it can also ruin the lives of friends and family of the person addicted. Because of this experience, I will continue to fight against drugs for the rest of my life. I don’t want to put myself or other people through this experience.