Participant Stories

Below are examples and abstracts of the kinds of stories we collect during a primary research session with People With Lived and Living Experience. We gather them using a variety of reflective, “draw talk,” and “life story” arts-based methods. The brief stories below are also representative of longer stories one might hear on a Story Walk with us.

M’s Story: “The addiction still had me by the throws, I laid there in a hospital bed, crying to God, and I was like—if I can just be released from this, I’ll never do drugs again, I’ll never sleep with anybody again, I’ll be such a good person. If I can just have some release from this life. So I said my prayers, and I hung my bids, and I experienced a good come-off of whatever psychosis that was… it took me two months… to start doing drugs again, and drinking all the time, and finding myself alone and scared, trying to really make something of myself, beating my fist against my chest but really not achieving anything. Hanging out with dangerous people, you know, the whole scene right?”

“I had a nice experience where my ex-girlfriend got me a train ticket and said you have to come home, she was in recovery as well, and she didn’t want to see me die. So I went home, and I went to treatment, I luckily got some good information.”

“On my picture here, I’ve drawn the red road, which is, what was explained to me in the Aboriginal healing and treatment centre that I had gone to, the red road of recovery, it’s the safe path, it’s desired to be grounded upon and walk along that road. In hope of finding serenity. I learned a lot of good things from the Elders there.”

S’s Story: “The thing you can see most is the roads, the river and the valley, all the roads lead to town, drugs come through the roads, or they come through the waterways or the train… there’s Wall Mart, the train station, downtown there’s drugs, there’s the valley, there’s gazebos, at shelters there’s drugs, they’re across from the church, there’s cemeteries, people use drugs everywhere in town.”

“Wherever they can. The washrooms, public bathrooms that aren’t closed down, outhouses, the airpark, I could have kept going and going and going, load it up with a whole bunch of different things… people use under the bridge, they sleep under the gazebo, they sleep down by the river because they get kicked out of town, out of our tent cities, they shelter… the roads leading in or out of town.”

“People use the train station to walk through town so they don’t have to walk on the street… people on quads taking drugs up the train tracks…. A lot of drug houses in town have paths to the train. The tracks, bushes, bridges, Bill Moore park, wherever you can find a place to get some peace and quiet to use your drugs, without people coming by and stuff like that.”

“It’s not like weed where you can sit in front of the courtyard and smoke weed now. We don’t have a safe injection outdoor place. We can use AVI, but a lot of people can’t smoke in there. You can’t smoke anything in there.”