You need to know this

You are precious.

When you choose to put drugs in your body it’s because you don’t believe this.

You are trying to forget how you feel about yourself, how others have made you feel.

But it’s true. You are a treasure.

If you don’t like yourself it’s only because you don’t know yourself well enough yet.

Give yourself a chance.

I promise you are amazing!

Get to know you, look inside, deep inside, explore yourself, discover what makes you tick.

You have the beautiful capacity to exude life and light and hope and kindness and beauty.

You are creative and strong and thoughtful. Your mind is your greatest weapon.

You have the ability to feel deeply and yet persevere through pain and fear and disappointment.

You can spread joy through a smile, you can encourage through a word, you can make a difference in the course of another’s life just by being you.

You are powerful and brilliant.

Do you not realize how precious you are? Don’t let addiction take that away from you. Because it will. Any kind of addiction.

It will possess you and rob you of yourself.

It will rob others of you – and you enrich their lives by being in it. They need you.

It will take away your light, your future, your humanity.

It will reduce you to a pointless feeder, a one-track minded leech who only thinks of sucking more drugs into its system, burying you and erasing your very being, even while you continue to walk about.

Nobody chooses to be an addict. But they do make the choice to take that first hit.

They hand themselves over to a force other than themselves.

Don’t open the door, even if you are feeling lost right now.

Respect yourself enough, believe in your worth, protect your light.

Addiction will extinguish it.

I know it’s hard when you don’t love who you are.

Maybe you’ve made so many mistakes that you think you are the sum total of those screw-ups.

But that isn’t who you are.

You may have been used and abused or ignored and neglected.

But that still doesn’t define who you are.

You might be mad at yourself, or disgusted, or disenchanted.

But you aren’t looking at yourself deeply enough – you are seeing surface and distorted reflections that you compare to others.

That is NOT who you are!

You are precious

– and no one can change that fact.

Believe in yourself, even if you don’t see it yet, even if no one else believes in you, if you are surrounded by others whose lights have been extinguished and who are blind to your splendor.

Inside of you lives a superhero, a philosopher, an adventurer, a researcher, a poet, a warrior.

If you open the door to addiction you will never live out of your triumphant self, and the world will be that much poorer, and your light – your unique, irreplaceable light – will not shine.

You are so precious. You are a marvel!

Too precious to be lost to this monster.

Believe in yourself. Be your own ally. Stand up, be proud, and delight in who you are.

You are a gift to yourself and to others!

On behalf of all those who seek inspiration, hope, and greatness: Stay strong. The world needs your light.

–In heartbroken memory of a past student whose light was stolen by addiction