#195 – Quinn Harlow
How To Get Sober Young With Quinn Harlow
Quinn felt her addictive personality early. As a child growing up in New York, her first addictions were sports and dance. Anxiety and depression came along early as well and when she first started drinking and smoking weed, she could tell her relationship was different to her friends around her. They immediately filled a void that nothing else could.
In middle school she also started a relationship that was co-dependent in nature and shaped her relationships for the next several years. She needed drugs and alcohol. She needed to be in a relationship and nothing would stop her from getting either. And with all of it, her addiction grew.
After high school she got into her dream art school, something she didn’t think was possible, but then again the drugs were there to take it away and she came home again. Her parents tried everything they could. They put alarms on the doors and windows to try to keep her safe from herself, but as soon as she was out, she made up for the lost time, by creating a year’s worth of havoc in an incredibly short amount of time.
She attempted to move away from the problem again and again. Heroin and IV drugs entered the picture. She shuffled around Florida trying to find recovery. She ran endlessly until one day she couldn’t run anymore.
Today she’s 4 years sober and works as a peer recovery specialist. There she helps others who feel like they couldn’t possibly get better.
Tune In to Learn About:
The Early Signs of Addictive Behavior: Explore how Quinn’s addictive personality manifested during her childhood and early adolescence. Understand the critical role of early intervention in addressing addictive tendencies.
The Spiral of Co-Dependency: Delve into Quinn’s co-dependent relationship and its impact on her subsequent choices and relationships. Gain insights into breaking free from unhealthy patterns.
The Struggles of Relapse and Seeking Recovery: Learn from Quinn’s experiences of repeatedly attempting to escape addiction and the challenges of finding lasting recovery. Discover the power of resilience in the face of setbacks.
The Turning Point: Uncover the pivotal moment that marked the beginning of Quinn’s journey towards true healing and recovery. Explore the factors that motivated her to seek help and create lasting change.
Becoming a Beacon of Hope: Join us as Quinn shares her experiences as a peer recovery specialist. Understand the profound impact of her work in supporting others on their recovery paths, offering hope to those who feel trapped in the depths of addiction.
Episode Resources
Connect with Quinn
- Instagram | @quinnharlow
- TikTok | @rehabbestie
Connect with The Courage to Change
- Podcast Website | lionrock.life/couragetochangepodcast
- Podcast Instagram | @couragetochange_podcast
- YouTube | The Courage to Change Podcast
- TikTok | @ashleyloebblassingame
- Podcast Email | podcast@lionrock.life
- Podcast Facebook | @thecouragetochangepodcast
Lionrock Resources
- Lionrock Life Mobile App | lionrock.life/mobile-app
- Support Group Meeting Schedule | lionrock.life/meetings
Episode Transcript
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Coming up on this episode of The Courage to Change, sponsored by lionrock.life.
Quinn Harlow:
I packed up my suitcase and got all my stuff together and I was like, “I’m going to take a bus back to the East Coast. I’m going to use my last money and then I’m going to figure it out.” And I walked down the road with my little suitcase and then I literally just stopped and I was like, “I’m so exhausted. I don’t want to figure it out anymore. I’m so sick of figuring it out.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Well, hello beautiful people. Welcome to the Courage to Change, a Recovery Podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame, and I am your host. Today we have Quinn Harlow. Quinn felt her addictive personality very early. As a child growing up in New York, her first addictions were sports and dance. Anxiety and depression came along early as well. And when she started drinking and smoking weed, she could tell that her relationship with it was different from her friends around her. So she moved on to Molly and pills while her friends had not even graduated from weed in middle school, she started a relationship that was codependent in nature, which would go on to shape her relationships for the next several years. She needed drugs and alcohol. She needed to be in a relationship and nothing would stop her from getting either. After high school, she got into her dream art school, something she didn’t think was possible, but then again, the drugs were there to take it away.
And she came home again. Her parents tried everything they could. They put alarms on the doors and windows to try to keep her safe from herself. But as soon as she was out, she made up for lost time and created years worth of havoc. She attempted to move away from the problem again and again, but heroin and IV drugs entered the picture. Today, she is four years clean and sober and works as a peer recovery specialist there. She’s able to help so many teens and parents with their struggles with substances. I had such a wonderful conversation today with Quinn.
She brought up so many points that we haven’t touched on here in a while, and I was really, really excited to get her perspective and a reminder on how cunning, baffling, and powerful the disease of addiction is. I know it can be really confusing for families to try to understand what’s going on with their loved one who is struggling. And this episode really describes a lot of the thought processes that do, or in this case, do not go into decisions being made around substances. And I hope it’s helpful and bring some clarity. Feel free to check out more of Quinn’s content at rehabbestie on TikTok. All right, friends, I hope you enjoy this episode. And without further ado, I give you Quinn Harlow. Let’s do this.
Speaker 3:
You are listening to the Courage to Change a Recovery podcast. We are a community of recovering people who have overcome the odds and found the courage to change. Each week, we share stories of recovery from substance abuse, eating disorders, grief and loss, childhood trauma, and other life-changing experiences. Come join us no matter where you are on your recovery journey.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Thank you so much for being here. Let’s start out with, what is your sobriety date?
Quinn Harlow:
Actually, it’s June 7th, 2019.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Stop.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, today is four years, and I didn’t even plan that when I scheduled it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, that’s awesome.
Quinn Harlow:
But yeah, it’s perfect.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Congratulations. Okay.
Quinn Harlow:
Thank you.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay so firstly talk to me about, so four years and how old were you when you got sober?
Quinn Harlow:
Initially? I was 22 when I got sober, and that was April 4th, 2018. And then I had a relapse that I’ll tell you more about, but it was a pretty quick relapse, and that was 2019, so I was 23 at the time of my date.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Awesome. Okay. And so I want to get into your story, but I want to hear a bit about what, on your birthday, June 7th, what are some of your reflections at four years?
Quinn Harlow:
I don’t know. I’ve had a lot. There’s been so much change each year, but my relapse was actually on weed. It was such a less drastic place than when I first came in 2018, so I was having a lot of reflections of where I was at then in April, I was having all those memories come back. And then now I just was really thinking of how much courage it took to get the white chip and come back and everything, and how I’m so grateful that I did that in 2019 because thank God my relapse didn’t go any further than the weed, but I felt that that was going to happen.
Just a lot of gratitude that I was plugged in enough at that point, and I had heard enough stories to know, okay, I’m seeing the signs. This isn’t going to turn out well if I keep going this direction. I just was kind of thinking about going to that meeting that day, telling everyone that I had relapsed after I had just gotten a year, which was such a big deal at the time because I wasn’t like a chronic relapser. I just really didn’t get it until I got it. So a year was a really long time for me. Yeah, I’ve just had those kind of reflections of how it felt to put that pride aside, come back.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So did you start drinking and using, because you had a horrible family in childhood, or what was your impetus for using, you always wanted to be a drug addict?
Quinn Harlow:
No, I had actually a great family, a good childhood. I do think I had the genetic predisposition. There’s a ton of addicts and alcoholics, especially on my mom’s side of the family. So the first time that I tried smoking or drinking, it was like that. It was instant. I definitely was a perfectionist as a kid, put a lot of pressure on myself, never felt comfortable in my own skin. I was a dancer, so there was a lot of criticism on my body and all this stuff that I really internalized.
It was like I just did everything to the extreme. If I was going to do dance, I did it seven days a week, and then I just immediately cut it off and I did the same thing with school. I had to have straight A’s, and then the pressure kept building, and then I was like, “Nope, I’m not going to try at all anymore. I’m going to make it clear that I’m not trying. So that the pressure’s off.” The first time that I drank and smoked, it was like, “This is what I’ve been waiting for, finally comfortable.” And it was really quick.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, I relate to that a lot in the sense that I felt I had a lot of the straight A’s perfectionism, and then when I was like, “How do I get out of this? I’ve committed myself to being a straight A student to this is what everybody expects of me.” The drugs and alcohol gave me this out of like, “Well, now no one can rely on me, now no one can expect this of me because I’m now unreliable.”
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, exactly. And it was an identity too. I had always tried out different styles, different friend groups, I never really felt comfortable. And then with that, it was like, “Okay, this can be my identity.” I can just try to be the bad kid who doesn’t try and be the best at that, because I didn’t feel like the best at any of the other things I was doing.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Did your parents talk to you about substances when you were growing up?
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, they did. I think it was, they had pretty normal reactions as parents back in the beginning, and it was like the first time I drank, I threw up all over the basement and did all that stuff. And I think that they were sort of just thinking, “All right, she’s experimenting, she is rebelling, whatever.” And they thought that it would reel back in. And that was in middle school that I started, I think it was 13 when I started to drink and smoke. So before that, I don’t remember a whole lot of talking about it, warning me of the effects or anything. But after that, they would really try to talk to me about it in a pretty normal way.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What did you think when they talked to you about it?
Quinn Harlow:
I don’t know. I was very much a teenager. I was like, “Whatever you guys don’t know,” just very rebellious and just wanted to go against whatever they wanted me to do at that point. But then at the same time, I did have guilt that would come up, but that really started to snowball more after a few years when I was really having consequences. My family was really having consequences, but before the consequences really built up, I was like, “You guys don’t know. I’m just a kid. I’m just having fun.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
When did you start to see the difference between how you used and how you friends who still were, let’s call it normal, how they would party and experiment? When did you start to see, “Oh, maybe I’m a little bit different than they are?”
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, it was pretty quickly. I remember my brother is a couple years younger than me. He had a very different reaction immediately, even though he was in sort of the same general friend group and everything. But there would be days when I would ask him if he wanted to smoke, and he was like, “No, I’m good.” And I could not relate to that at all. I was like, “What do you mean you don’t want to, if it’s here, how could you not want to?”
So yeah, I kind of saw the consequences when it came to my friends pretty quickly because the people that I was hanging out with didn’t want to party every single time we hung out. So my best friend, Phoebe and I kind of split off from that friend group and started hanging out with people that did react more in the same way that we did, because I couldn’t relate to not wanting to do it every time. And it just was that black and white thinking of, “This isn’t me anymore. These friends aren’t me anymore. This is my identity now.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I remember thinking it was so wild, and I attempted to do this and it went miserably, but how people would save drugs for a special occasion, you’d have a bag of mushrooms, and they were like, “We’re going to the woods Saturday.” I am, “But it’s in your possession right now.” They were like, “No, no, no, but we’re waiting till… We’re waiting for a great setting to do the drugs.” I’m like, “But you have the drugs right now. We have to use the drugs now. We can’t wait three days. That’s insane.” And just that it was a different, I could not hold onto any drugs or alcohol that I had to save it for a specific timeframe. It was always, “We’re going to use what we have all the time, whenever we have it.”
Quinn Harlow:
Mm-hmm, yeah. And I would get it with the plan that I was going to save it. But as soon as went into my system, it was over. It was all going to be gone.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What were some of the consequences when they started to build? Obviously you changed friend groups, this is your new identity. What were some of the early signs and consequences for you?
Quinn Harlow:
I had gotten into a relationship sort of at the time when I had started smoking and drinking, and it sort of immediately tied relationships and codependency in too. But the guy that I was in a relationship with sold weed, and he smoked a lot of weed.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Significantly older.
Quinn Harlow:
And he was a couple years older.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay, yeah.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, two grades older than me. So that was in eighth grade that I got into that relationship, and I was in the relationship for almost all of high school. And in that time period we got arrested. I had to go to a class for drugs, not a class for drugs, but a class against drugs about the consequences and everything.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Was a pro drug class.
Quinn Harlow:
But I just didn’t really take that seriously. We would smoke weed, go to the class, eat pizza. I didn’t see as much of a consequence. It just sort of went with this kind of lifestyle that I was signing up to live. But it really was at the end of high school, I had started to get into harder drugs. I guess it was junior, senior year, I had started to do Molly a lot, and that was really having consequences on my serotonin levels. And then I just was having these high highs and low lows. So the come downs, I would be just miserable. I remember just sitting in the woods sobbing. So then I started to take Xanax to make the come downs more bearable. So it was like those sort of cycles started to build, and I started to lose my friends that I had been partying with were starting to get sick of my shit.
And then that relationship, he had sort of stopped at stoner. He really didn’t have a problem beyond that. He went to school, held a job, so he ended up breaking up with me, and then it was this huge spiral. And that was the big, really big consequence. It felt very big at the time, especially because I had been with him for such a big fraction of my life from eighth grade to senior year. So that was the first really big blow. And I just remember when he was breaking up with me, he was like, “Do you really think that you’re like, okay, and our relationship is fine.” And I was like, “Yeah.” I thought everything was fine, but I was so in my own little world that I wasn’t even realizing the wreckage that I was creating yet. And yeah, there started to be more really embarrassing moments of, like because I ended up sort of skipping the Molly and just going straight to Xanax. After that, I was blacking out all the time and hearing things that I had done and peeing myself all the time.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, yeah.
Quinn Harlow:
And [inaudible 00:14:18]-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Very relatable.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah. I remember falling asleep on people’s couches, waking up with PM myself. It became just a normal regular thing. And then also my-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
If I don’t remember, did it really happen? Did you DNA test this couch? It could have been a passerby.
Quinn Harlow:
I started, I would spill water on myself and I’d be like, “Oh, I spilled.” And I had drank so much that it was so diluted that it was not even, at least I didn’t think it was identifiable as pee, but… And then also my graduation party. I remember having one of those moments of clarity after where I was like, “Oof, this is starting to get embarrassing and everything,” because I completely blacked out with my entire family there, extended family and everything. And my mom had made it really nice. I just felt so much guilt after I was like, “Wow. I just embarrassed everyone.” That was sort of one of the first moments where I remember being like, “This probably isn’t good.” But it wasn’t bad enough yet that I was considering stopping. It was just like, “I’m going to use more, so I don’t have to think about this anymore.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right. Could you imagine at that time if someone had said, imagine life without drugs or alcohol? Could you have even pictured what that would look like?
Quinn Harlow:
No, definitely not. It felt so ingrained, and I also at the end of high school, started dating my drug dealer. So it was like a complete rebound, had no idea how to be alone. He was the person I was seeing the most. So yeah, I got into that, and that whole situation was just humiliating from beginning to end. He was super abusive and he would have temper tantrums. And when I think about who I was in that relationship, it’s like, “What was I even thinking?” I can’t even picture, but my brain was in such a different place. A bunch of consequences came with that too.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I hear a lot from parents that their child is, or adult child or loved one, whatever, is smoking weed and that it’s starting to get out of control, but they don’t think it’s that bad because it’s weed or their loved one is cut back to weed. And there’s this idea that I see. And for context, I got sober at 19 and have been sober 17 years. And so went to college, did all the things, and I started with weed and then moved eventually with shooting heroin and all the boyfriends and dated the drug dealer and the codependency. I went to treatment for codependency because I couldn’t stay sober. So very relatable to your experience. And so many times I have the conversation with people where they’re trying to tell me how weed is not as bad or harmless, and I’m just curious what you’re, as a young person, do you think weed is harmless
Quinn Harlow:
For some people? I think it’s pretty harmless. I definitely don’t think it’s as harmless, even just for a regular person as they kind of try to make it out to be right now. Even with my brother who’s not an addict or anything, you can see the difference in just his day-to-day habits when he is smoking a lot versus when he is not. But for me, I think it’s very harmful and it comes up a lot because I’m a peer recovery specialist and I work with parents who are trying to get their kids back or the organization is DCF in Florida, department of Children and Families, but it’s like CPS in other areas. So I work with a company that works alongside them called the Children’s Network. I work with teenagers and then also with parents. And now that the medical card has become so easy to obtain, that’s been coming up a lot more because they’re like, “It’s a medication. I’m prescribed this.”
But I know that for me, weed was never enough when I relapsed, it so quickly took over my mind and all of my daily habits in the same way that any other drug would, and I knew that already it wasn’t getting me high enough anymore, even just over the month that I was smoking and it was going to lead to other things inevitably for me, and that’s the experience that I’ve seen a lot of people have that they try just smoking weed, but it’s still a crutch, and then eventually it’s not enough. So then they go back to their substance of choice.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Just to commentary on that, which is this was something that working in the treatment field that I dealt with a lot, and I just thought I’d share with the audience what I came to, because we had to think about this a lot. Do we allow people into our program who are prescribed marijuana? Because we do allow people into our program who are prescribed medication from a doctor, and here’s what I came up with, marijuana. When you have a medical card, you’re not prescribed a dosage. There is no other medication where you’re prescribed something and there is no dosage and there’s no regularity on take it this often at this, even if it’s prescribed PRN, which is as needed, it’s still not to exceed X amount. There’s still a dosage. There’s still all these parameters around it, and every single substance, including water, has a toxicity level and a non-therapeutic level.
So at a certain level, you drink it, it does nothing or smoke it or whatever it is. It does absolutely nothing, non-therapeutic. And at other levels, including water, it is toxic and deadly. And so the marijuana medical cards, if listeners are coming up against this with their kids or loved ones, my question is what’s the dosage? What’s the prescription? And if there isn’t a dosage, a true dosage and timeframe and schedule with it, then it’s not really a true medical prescription. And so that’s sort of how we delineated that, and to this day, I’ve had no one come to me and say, “Okay, here’s my dosage.” It really doesn’t qualify as a medication at that point, unless you have serious cancer, in which case actually they do give you a dosage.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. And I really try not to close people out. I go to AA, so I’ve heard some people who are very judgmental about it and make it so that people don’t feel welcome if they’re smoking weed. And I feel like that’s just more harmful because then they’re smoking weed and they don’t have a program. So I try to really just tell them to keep coming back. You don’t need to share with everyone that you’re smoking weed, but if you keep coming, I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of people, it starts to sink in, and then they make the choice themselves to stop smoking once they have seen enough people, heard enough people’s experiences. So yeah, I try not to shut them out because I think that’s the worst thing you can do.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
100%, 100%. And it’s their journey. Because you and I, both with our relapses, had to experience, oh, it really doesn’t work. Or, oh, I don’t want to do this anymore. This doesn’t feel right. But we had to have that experience to draw on in order to stay sober going forward. At four years, you have to be able to think back to, man, when I did that, when I had that relapse, it really did work for me. And so getting four years in a day is easier than maybe it would’ve been if you had that curiosity in the back of your mind like, “Would it work?” And the longer you go with that curiosity, sometimes it can be this thing that eats away at you.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah. And I had tried it previously too, before I had even gotten into heroin or anything. I had tried just smoking weed after I had been addicted to Xanax, and I was like counting sober days and everything. I moved to Denver. I was like, “I’m going to be in Colorado.” Because I think that was the only place that weed was legal at the time. It was in 2016, and I tried just smoking, but it still kept taking over. Eventually, I was just doing dabs and weed wasn’t enough, and then I couldn’t hang out with anyone without doing, I couldn’t go to school. I couldn’t do homework. It still had this little hold over me, even though my life was a lot more manageable than it had been when I was doing Xanax. But then I kept passing this one guy that had this backpack on the way to school.
I knew that he knew where to get other drugs. I kept just trying to use self will and restraint to not talk to him. But I went through a breakup, and then as soon as I went through the breakup, I was like, “Boom. I know exactly where to go.” There was not even any thought in it because weed wasn’t enough to combat the pain of the breakup. It was enough to get through day to day at that point, but it just came to a point where it wasn’t. I saw that happen really quickly with my relapse. It was an immediate thing. Luckily when I relapsed, I had already had the experience trying that before, and I saw where it was going, but I think I also needed to hear other people’s experiences in AA and everything, and that helped me a lot too.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
How did you progress from Xanax to heroin? What was your trajectory and at what point or were there ever points that you thought to yourself, “Oh, I’m in too deep?”
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, there definitely were, but I had been in that toxic, abusive relationship. Xanax was still my drug choice at the time, and I was drinking a ton. I started to really lash out, especially when it came to men and stuff. I was just trying to get any attention that I could get, and I had such a lack of clarity. I was blacking out all the time, and the consequences were really great, and I had a seizure when I tried to come off of it. I had a really bad seizure, and that’s sort of when decided to move to Colorado, try just smoking and drinking sometimes, and maybe doing coke sometimes, but that was going to be sober for me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I’m going to be sober. I’m going to be smoking and doing coke occasionally, which is sober for me. Of course. Yes.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that was when I moved over there and I moved over there with a guy who was a great guy. He was really trying to help me and everything. I had made his life hell in New York where I was from, and then it just-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You’re co-dependent.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, it was very toxic still, but I was kind of trying to play out this healthy lifestyle. Yeah. Then when I went through that breakup, these three guys from my hometown, one of them was on the run from New York, and they reached out to me and I knew I had used with them before. I knew what type of addicts they were. When I made the choice to hang out with them, I sort of knew, okay, I am going to be committing to the addiction lifestyle again. I started again with just doing Xanax and drinking a lot, and I was just on this crazy bender because I had such a lack of clarity and lack of inhibitions. That’s when I got into heroin, even though I didn’t plan on it and I didn’t want to get into that, but they were all heroin addicts at the time. It seemed like, okay, this is more available. This is in front of me. I was really seeing the consequences with Xanax. So even though it sounds insane, heroin might be better.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
No, I totally get that. I love that you bring this up because I hadn’t thought about that, but do not. If you are looking at your run-of-the-mill addict, and you’re wondering, “How in the hell did you get from point A to point B?” Do not underestimate the impact of availability, because I’ll tell you, I loved cocaine and I went on the run with my ex-boyfriend’s mother, and she was addicted to methamphetamine. I did not love methamphetamine, but I’ll tell you what, there was all that was there. So you know what happened? I’m addicted to meth. It’s like, “I don’t like this, but I definitely have to do this because it’s here.”
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, exactly. And I had always had a curiosity, and it was part of my leveling up in my little drug addict world. I kind of knew I was going to end up in a worse place and then a worse place. But there are so many weird hamster wheels of thought that get you to the point where you’re shooting an heroin, so many justifications, and yeah, the main thing was really just availability. I was around people that were doing it. They were also justifying it to themselves.
So I was hearing them justify it. I was like, “They’re okay. They’ve been doing this for years.” And I remember just sitting back one day, first of all, the three guys had moved into my studio apartment. My whole life had completely turned upside down. The guy that was on the run was doing all these scams. He was scamming me. He was scamming other people. My life had gone from pretty normal to so shady so quickly, and I just sort of sat back and was like, “What the fuck? This is serious. This is way worse than before.” And it had happened so quickly from my little sobriety period of just smoking and sometimes drinking and sometimes doing coke. I was a full-blown junkie. I was shooting crack. I was just nuts. But it kept going downhill from there.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I also think it’s funny that, because I think it’s part of the narrative that changes over time, but one of the narratives I hear, hear is like that you went from this pretty normal to shooting heroin. And the truth, I think, is that when we’re addicted to things, we change our goals to meet our lifestyle, and most people, they change their life to meet their goals, and we are the other way around.
And you specifically moved to a state because marijuana was legal, not because you like the mountains, not because… You were like, “I have to move here because I need this thing that’s legal.” And when you talk about you were always moving all your things around to meet this weed addiction, and yeah, you kept it together enough to go to school and to make it seem normal, all your decisions were driven by this attempt to smoke weed normally. And yeah, it only worked as long as you were only smoking weed, and even then questionable. But that was your whole world. And so I challenged this idea that it was okay. I had it under control until I started doing these other things. Because I think from your description, I mean, your decisions were run by marijuana for years, even though it didn’t get so out of control until the Molly and the Xanax.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, definitely. And I was smoking weed like a crack head. I wasn’t smoking weed like a normal person. I remember when I’d gotten really into the dabs and the wax and all that stuff, and mentally I was like, “Weeds not enough now, it’s not going to do enough.” I did really hiking and stuff, so I had gotten into that more, and I went on this hiking trip and at the top of the mountains, there’s not enough oxygen to light the torch lighter. I was running down the mountains. First of all, I had packed my entire dab rig setup, which is crazy in general. Most people could have a night where they didn’t have it or they could just smoke a joint or something. But I was like, “No, I need this because this is what is getting me through right now.” And yeah I was running down the mountain trying to get enough oxygen to light this torch lighter.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my God.
Quinn Harlow:
It was not normal, but at the time, it was like I had more normalcy than I had had in years. And I think my family was really holding onto that too, because they were like, “She is relatively safe. She is relatively okay.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
But that’s it, is that it’s relative. Everybody’s standards start to drop for us. They’re really high for us in the beginning. And then it’s like, “Well, she’s more normal than she was. She only gets 5150’d once a year, whereas three years earlier…” The standards change. And so I think you’re absolutely right, which is like everybody’s holding onto this closer to normalcy when the reality is it’s still not normal, but the standards have changed.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, definitely. And I had also suffered from eating disorders, which had started in high school, and when I would scale back on the drug use, those would always go up more too. So was there was always an imbalance happening. It was always unmanageability. It just was where the unmanageability was was shifting.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And for me, getting sober and being sober, staying sober, it was always easier to manage. It felt more comfortable to deal with and be in my substance addiction than it did to deal with my eating disorder or my love addiction. I was like, “I would rather be in the substances than deal with those other things and getting sober.” In part, there’s a lot of reckoning that happens, having to deal with those things in order to remain sober, and that’s where a lot of the work comes in.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, definitely. It was different levels. When I first got sober, before I relapsed, I really got into the eating disorder heavily. I was running constantly, but actually first I had just been eating and sleeping all the time. So I gained a little bit of weight, and then that triggered the eating disorder. So then I went completely the other way, and it was all these different types of addictions happening. And then it wasn’t until after I relapsed, when I was shaken up enough to be like, “Okay, maybe I need to do the steps, actually get into figuring out what the problem is here.” That I started to really work on that stuff too. I still had so much imbalance and dishonesty and craziness before that, and a little bit after that too, but just not as much.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yes, we’re works in progress. So talk to me about, so you’re shooting heroin and crack and you sign a lease with these three guys who don’t pay, and life’s just really spiraling in who knows what direction. We have all these moments of clarity, and people think that a moment of clarity is longer than a moment. To be clear, it is a moment and you either capitalize on the moment or you wait for the next moment, and we don’t know when those moments are going to be. It is a small window. So you talk about having these moments of clarity. When is the first time that you capitalize on a moment of clarity?
Quinn Harlow:
I sort of tried to capitalize on that one in that I made a geographical change.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, okay.
Quinn Harlow:
I went with one of the guys that I had been doing heroin with. He had been sober in Florida for a while, so I was like, “I got to get out of here. I’m scared.” Whatever. My parents knew it wasn’t a good idea for me to go to my hometown. So I ended up going to Florida, and that was my little bit of capitalizing on it. And I really truly, if I had taken a lie detector test, I would’ve told you, “Yeah, I’m going to go so I can be sober,” which is again, just smoking weed and drinking and whatever else, just not doing heroin now because my bar has gotten further.
So yeah, really my intention was to do better when I moved to Florida, but immediately I was around way more addicts in Florida than I had been in Colorado. And my first day at work, I met a girl that was doing heroin, and it was immediately the clarity was gone. So that was sort of my first, well, another little shift. And then as things got worse, it felt like it was harder to get away from the clarity because it was so glaring how bad things were. So I was trying so hard to not think about how bad it was. It became this really painful thing of I was doing heroin, but while I was doing it, I was just thinking about how scared I was and how I’m going to die.
This is so bad. I have so much guilt and shame and whatever. And then I would go to detox because I was like, “Okay, I need to get out of this,” whatever. But as soon as the substances were out of my body, the clarity was gone. It was this weird shift because my body and mind were like, “I need drugs right now.” So I started in this whole thing of going into detox, then the drugs leaving my system, and then immediately going back out to do more drugs. And it was this back and forth, and it was like when my brain was in the space of “I need to get sober, I need to do this.” That was all that I could see. And then when that clarity was gone, it was as if I had never… I was like, “Why would I ever have wanted to get sober? Why would I ever have thought I could do that?” And then I would leave. It was this back and forth craziness.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So you go into detox. At what point does your brain start to talk to you about, “Oh my God, I need drugs?” How far into the detox? Or is it when you get out or is it while you’re still in the facility? And were people talking to you about getting into some sort of program other than just detox alone?
Quinn Harlow:
It depended because I ended up going to detox something like 15 or 20 times. It ended up just becoming a thing that I did. Right. And as I kept doing it, I was learning how to get more prescriptions when I was in there, what to say, all of that. So I would be really comfortable in detox. And then it wasn’t until sort of the end that I was like, “No, I’m not going to a rehab.” Because I would go with the plan to go to rehab at that point, and then the clarity would come later on. But at first, it was sort of instant. As soon as I would start to feel any withdrawal symptoms, I would want to leave, and I would leave literally on the first or second day. When I went to detox, I always went with the intention of getting sober. I started, I would pack an entire suitcase for treatment and everything. Like I want to go to a 30 day.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So you really planned on getting sober?
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, exactly. And then I would be in there and someone would say something about we could leave or whatever. And all the way until when I actually ended up going to treatment and getting sober, I never stayed in rehab for more than a day. It was always just detox.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So you went to detox upwards of 15, 20 times, and you did make it to a treatment program a couple times? Okay nut you just didn’t stay more than a day. Okay.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. Did you eventually go to rehab and stay in rehab?
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, I did. I didn’t go on the east coast of Florida though, luckily. But yeah, I had been in and out of the hospital a lot too with abscesses, and I just was sick all the time, and I was getting more and more scared. And I kind of had another moan of clarity because there was this nurse that would always see me going to that same hospital, and he was like, “You realize it’s crazy that you even had the chance to come back as many times as you have. The fact that you’re even alive is a miracle. And the two other heroin addict that were here today, one of them died a couple rooms down, and the other one was dropped out front dead.” And it was kind of this for some reason, even though obviously I knew that doing heroin was deadly, that was one of those moments that kind of shattered my little version of reality for a minute, and I just was really scared.
But then even after that, I still went home and shot the drugs into the same place that had the abscess when they were telling me, “You’re at risk of losing your arm.” That’s nuts to think about. But I was scared, and it had planted this sort of seed. So I called my mom and I was crying, and I was like, “I think I need help.” And she was like, “Okay, well, let’s get you into rehab.” And I was like, “No, no, no. I don’t need all that.” 30 days in rehab seemed crazy to me. For some reason it seemed like that’s never going to work. Instead, I went home for a few weeks and just created so much wreckage. I was just a mess. I was a tornado. After that time home. I didn’t even want to go to my hometown for a while because I embarrassed myself so much. And at that point, my family was like, “Look, you can’t come home anymore. We’re not going to help you with rent. We’re not going to do any of it anymore unless you really get help. Because at this point, we’re just enabling you.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I’m going to pause right here. For our parents listeners. I just want to highlight what was said, which is that they brought her home. It was a terrible idea. There were a lot of consequences. And then when they stopped giving her money and resources and told her they would only help her if she went to treatment. She went to treatment and got well. Literally think about that formula for a second. Anyone who’s listening, stop bringing your kids home. Stop giving them resources and tell them they only get resources if they go to treatment. Okay. That’s my soap box.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, no, exactly. And they were really trying, they would never give me cash, but they would give me food cards, and then-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You’d sell the food card.
Quinn Harlow:
… by giving me a food card either I could sell it or I could just use the money that I did have on drugs when I maybe would’ve needed to use it on food or gas or whatever. But their intentions were really good, and they started going to Al-Anon and getting more of an idea of, “Okay, what is enabling,” and everything. So yeah, I know it was really difficult for them to do that because they were like, “She’s either going to be on the street and reach a whole new level of low,” because I was homeless at that point. I was staying on these people’s couch. But they were like, “We’re not even going to give you the money to give them for rent. You got to go to treatment.”
And I know that they felt like there was the risk that now she could either go way lower or this could be good. Yeah. I give them a lot of credit for doing that. So yeah, I ended up going from being home in New York. I went and stayed with this family. It was actually the family of the guy I had moved to Florida with for a little bit, like a week or two, and they helped me get into rehab and everything, and I still didn’t want to go. I was still being very resistant. I was calling and saying, “No, they don’t have a bed.” And they would call and just check me. But yeah, I ended up going to a detox and a rehab, and I did have a moment before that I could feel too, this is either coming to a close right now or I’m going to need to reach a new low.
I packed up my suitcase and got all my stuff together, and I was like, “I’m going to take a bus back to the East Coast. I’m going to use my last money, and then I’m going to figure it out.” And I walked down the road with my little suitcase, and then I literally just stopped, and I was like, “I’m so exhausted. I don’t want to figure it out anymore. I’m so sick of figuring it out.” It just is such a tiring way to live.
So yeah, I literally just sort of stopped, and I literally sat there and contemplated for a second, and then I was like, “I’m just going to do what these people tell me to do because I’m so sick of this.” So yeah. Then I ended up going to detox and I stayed there. It was a detox/psych ward/treatment center, and everyone was all mixed up, and it was a strange place, but I stayed there for two and a half weeks. And then I went to Hazelden in Florida, which is a really good program. And I was there for I think three weeks or however much my insurance covered.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What did it look like at your first year of sobriety?
Quinn Harlow:
The year before I relapsed was I was in a couple of different sober houses, which again, at first I had wanted to just go back to New York. But luckily my family did put their foot down because I know that I would not have done well if I went back to my hometown. But yeah, they helped me with the sober house. The first sober house I was in was really crazy and unstable. It was the lady that started it only had maybe five months sober or something, and it was a beautiful house, and at first it was pretty normal, but she started smoking crack unbeknownst to us. I just came home one day and she had moved in seven guys with at first-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Never a good sign.
Quinn Harlow:
… there were maybe eight girls. They were literally all just moving in, and she kept moving my room around because she was like, “You’d do better here. You’d do better here.” So I wasn’t even unpacking my suitcase. I knew I was going to move again, but my level of stability had been so low before that this was normal. But yeah, and then I came home one day and she had put cameras everywhere in the inside of the home, not in the bathrooms, but all around. And she was super paranoid that there were all these relationships going on and stuff, and there really weren’t.
It was mostly me and older women. And then there were some younger guys, but none of us were interested in each other at all. She would come in with the footage and replay it and be like, “Why were you in the kitchen? Why did you get a glass of water and then go back to your room and then come out again?” And just all of this insanity. And then it just ended up getting really crazy. So I moved to another sober house, but that was the point when I relapsed was right after I moved out of that second sober house because I didn’t have that accountability. I think the fact that I had hit a year, my ego… I think when they talk about relapsing around a year, that really is true that your ego hits this new level of, “Now I have a year sober.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah because it feels like an eternity.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that’s when, at that point, I had built really good friendships. I’m still best friends with all the same people now, and I had gotten a job. Because I had no work ethic before. I was completely unemployable. The first maybe three to four months sober, I was sleeping until four or 5:00 PM and then just trying to get to a meeting, and that was the most that I could do. I was so out of it. People that knew me then, when they talk about it, I didn’t even have any idea how out of it I really was. My friend calls me most improved because I was such a mess at the beginning.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my God, I love that.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, no, it was rough for a while. I was having little seizures. My health still wasn’t good. I had no energy. It wasn’t easy at the beginning, but I was building these relationships and friendships, and I had been so isolated before that. And just having these moments of laughter and fun was enough to make me like “Okay, I want to keep going.” I don’t want to lose this. And then I kept just getting more and more to lose as time went on. Because at the beginning, I didn’t really have anything to lose. That’s why I just kept going in and out. But at that point, it was like I was getting more and more that I valued, which was so important. Yeah. So then when I relapsed, that’s when I was like, “I’m really going to do this.” Because if you had asked me a few days before, I would’ve told you “No, I would never smoke weed again. I know the consequences of that.”
I had all this self-knowledge that I thought was going to carry me. And then when I saw how quickly my addiction snuck in and just took over and how quickly I went from, “No, I’m not going to smoke at all,” to, “I’m going to do this, and that’s it.” I was like, “Wow, this is a stronger thing than I thought it was even now.” So I was like, “I need to do a full digging of everything, a full cleaning.” So that’s when I actually got into the steps and service and all that stuff, and it changed everything with the way that I reacted to the world.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What does your routine look like in terms of your daily or weekly life at this point that is part of keeping you in recovery?
Quinn Harlow:
I’ve really built a relationship with a higher power, spirituality, all that. So even though I’m not religious or Christian or anything, I do try to pray every morning, pray throughout the day, kind of set my intentions with my conception of a higher power. At the beginning, the God thing, I was like, “I’m not going to even look at that part of all this.” But I really do feel like I built my sort of spirituality going through the steps. So I try to pray throughout the day, every morning, every evening, meditate, and then I go to three to four meetings a week.
And I have had points where I’ve only been going to one meeting and I’ve realized, “Okay, I am starting to see little bits of defects come up or just I’m not feeling as plugged in.” And then I’ve gone back and I feel like right now I’m at a pretty good balance. And then also, I haven’t been writing consistently, but I do try. I am trying to get back doing a little mini fourth step just to kind of clean up any sort of resentments that I’ve built over the past few years since I did mine. But I’m realizing when there’s not a whole lot of pain motivating me, it’s harder to stay so vigilant with that stuff. So that’s been my goal, is to get through that writing now and write every day just to keep myself accountable.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yep. We are driven by pain, unfortunately. You’ve built up quite a TikTok following. What has that experience been like?
Quinn Harlow:
I don’t know. It’s kind of weird. I don’t even tell anyone about it unless they find it. It has been cool to build a community that, probably similar to the people that listen to your podcast, we all have kind of a common thread. So yeah, that’s been cool to see people in the comments have people reach out, asking for help, and yeah, I don’t know. I try to tell stories that will bring people in who have been through similar things and kind of find humor in it or whatever, without glorifying it or making it seem like it was more fun than it was.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to me and telling your story. Where can people find you? TikTok, Instagram, what website? Where can people find you if they want to get in touch?
Quinn Harlow:
My TikTok is at Rehab Bestie, and then my Instagram is Quinn Harlow, Q-U-I-N-N H-A-R-L-O-W. Those are pretty much the main social medias that I use. And then also to make people aware of peer recovery and how beneficial that’s been. It’s a relatively new thing. My job is Peer Recovery Specialists. They now have them in treatment centers. It’s a resource that can be used by a lot of people if you look into it. And it’s just all, everyone that I work with are people that have lived experience in recovery and have been through it in one way or another. So yeah, just to give a shout-out to Peer Recovery, it’s a really awesome thing that’s kind of building. Love
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That. Love that. Thank you for doing that. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here, Quinn. Really appreciate it.
Quinn Harlow:
Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it so much. It was great talking to you.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So I’m wearing this sweatshirt that says Capricorn on it, which felt really cool when I bought it, but as I’m walking around with a Capricorn sweatshirt on, I’m questioning my decisions. Do you have thoughts?
Scott Drochelman:
I think it’s terrible, and you should be embarrassed. You’re much too old. It’s embarrassing.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh good talk, good talk. Okay.
Scott Drochelman:
Are you trying to signal to other compatible astrology signs that-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Now it’s women, because I’m just like, “I don’t give a shit what the men think,” which is even more embarrassing. I’m like, “Do you want to be my friend?” Oh, God, really?
Scott Drochelman:
We are compatible in a zodiac sense.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. No, I’ve completely jumped the shark.
Scott Drochelman:
I-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
But also-
Scott Drochelman:
But also-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It’s winter green.
Scott Drochelman:
Here’s the thing. Here’s what I think about clothes in general.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. Clothes in general.
Scott Drochelman:
Right. So obviously there’s something you’re trying to express.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I’m 29.
Scott Drochelman:
Everybody is. Well, yeah. That’s what you’re always trying to express. Not just clothes, but just life.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Generally.
Scott Drochelman:
I think half of it is you’re trying to put an image on yourself that you’re hoping other people will connect with that image and be like, “Yeah, you’re one of my people.” So-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Scott Drochelman:
If you’re a zodiac minded person, you’re in the, you’ve got a strong family tradition of the Zodiac. It’s a part of, if they want to vibe-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I blame my father.
Scott Drochelman:
… with you. They want to vibe with you, that’s the way in. So I don’t think it’s horrible. You should be embarrassed, but it’s not the worst.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Okay. No, I appreciate that. Because I have all the things to be embarrassed about of myself on a regular basis. I think it’s low on the list, but definitely it’s there. It’s in the realm. Oh my God. So I was reading, I’m doing more information than you want, but I’m putting together some of this media stuff that I’ve done and I’m going through. I had to go through all my media, press articles, whatever. So I have this document I’m going through. I’m clicking through. I see this article that I wrote, it’s actually like five years ago or whatever. It’s actually very good. My writing is good.
Scott Drochelman:
Toot toot.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Toot toot. No, no. Hold on, hold on. Just-
Scott Drochelman:
Wait for the But. Wait for the but.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re click, click, click up the rollercoaster here. Right. The writing is good, but it’s a lot of information to give the world that could easily be found. If you want to know my story, you have to sit down and click on the podcast. You got to find it. You got to listen to it. You have to be committed to wanting to hear my story. With this you don’t have to be that committed. It could just land in your inbox and you could read it. And it’s good, right? It’s a good thing. But I had this moment of being embarrassed of, or shame is the wrong word. I’m not ashamed, but I was sort of like, Oh, I don’t know. I don’t like that people are going to know that about me.”
Scott Drochelman:
It’s like a book description versus the book.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Exactly. Yeah. If you want to know and you want to read the book, we’re cool. We’re cool. But I wasn’t like, “Oh my God, I was probed as a child,” but not far off.
Scott Drochelman:
Yeah. All the Polaroids that you put in there [inaudible 00:53:37] too.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh yeah, the Polaroids.
Scott Drochelman:
Those aren’t as helpful, and they do feel-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, my nudes.
Scott Drochelman:
Right, right. You put a lot, six is a lot for-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Six is a lot.
Scott Drochelman:
… one piece
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
For an Authority Mag article. But I was just like, “Okay, so some people are going to know that who didn’t need to know that.” Oh God.
Scott Drochelman:
It’s better that way. In the long run, it’s better that way because if nothing else, the next time you have a conversation with that person, you can skip all the inane small talk and just be like, “So you too, huh?”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah I could.
Scott Drochelman:
Penchant for the stripper pole. Okay. Just like-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Luckily I left that out.
Scott Drochelman:
When you’re saying all this stuff about your story, it is, when I was talking to Quinn, it’s sort of like I had a little Ashley Bingo card, and I was seeing how many areas of overlap you two had. And I was like, “This is going to be great,”-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Did you win?
Scott Drochelman:
… because I won. I didn’t get all of all the spaces, but I got enough to win. You know what I mean? I got bingo, but if bingo was fill the whole board, it didn’t have that. You’ve got some unique-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Scott Drochelman:
I’ve not heard some of your iterations of things. You have a real talent for your originality, but I-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh God.
Scott Drochelman:
But I found that the similarities that I really liked and why I wanted to talk to Quinn too, it’s like she was able to put context around a lot of the things, but that when you guys talked, you’d be like, “Yep, ding, ding. Yep, yep, yep. That’s me too. That’s me too.” And could understand each other on a level that I always enjoy personally as a listener to the show, not just the producer.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, she’s still like in the first five years, so she’s really building the foundation and was able to pinpoint things that I forget to talk about. I love when she said, “If you had had me take a polygraph test, I would’ve told you I would’ve passed it because I really believed I was going to make a life change.” And I’m like, “That is some real shit.” It is confusing for those people around us because the reality is we are telling the truth. We really do think that. We really do believe that, and we have every intention. It’s just that we’re wrong. We don’t see the patterns. We might see patterns in so many other areas of our lives or areas of other people’s lives. We might be really competent, but when it comes to this area of our brain, these neural pathways that are just well-worn, it’s just not a pretty sight.
Scott Drochelman:
So my favorite story of this episode was the running up and down the mountain because there wasn’t enough oxygen. Were you into that? I just appreciated the commitment to both nature, fitness and a very specific way of smoking weed, which is impressive. I appreciate the ingenuity-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The commitment.
Scott Drochelman:
Right. It turned into a heroic effort just to get to this place. Just running up and down the mountain. I was like, “Wow, if I saw this, I would feel equally as impressed. I’d be like, ‘Wow. I don’t know what’s happening here, but they’re really getting after it.'”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, exactly. She must be training for an Iron Man or something. What’s happening here.
Scott Drochelman:
Ashley. I said Ashley. I think-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Ashley.
Scott Drochelman:
I think we should Ashley now. Ashley?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
For sure. Yes sir, yes.
Scott Drochelman:
Ashley, anything you want to leave the people with this week?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Just gratitude. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your listenership, and I hope that this episode was helpful and you got a nugget of wisdom that you might be compelled to share with someone else or even share the episode. And if you would like to follow Quinn, check her out on TikTok at rehabbestie. See you next week.
Speaker 5:
This podcast is sponsored by lionrock.life. Lionrock.life is a diverse and supportive recovery community offering weekly over 70 online peer support meetings, useful recovery information and entertaining content. Whether you’re newly sober, have many years in recovery, or you’re recovering from something other than drugs and alcohol, we have space for you. Visit www.lionrock.life today and enter promo code courage for one month of unlimited peer support meetings free. Find the joy in recovery at lionrock.life.
