The pictures of Ginny in those days tell the story of a young woman who was reeling out of control, a swirling, churning blur of chaos and self-destruction. Jail cells, guys that hit her, self-loathing, criminal behavior. She stole cars. She shot somebody. Her children were taken away. And drugs. Always, there were drugs.
“I asked her what it was like in those days, what she saw when she looked in the mirror. And when she answered, her voice rose and she talked faster and faster, as if the memory was something she was trying to drive from her mind forever. And her words… her words have never left me.When you’re stuck on the street and you smell like feces and you haven’t showered in forever and you can’t make it into a social service during working hours because you’re too busy trying to feed your addiction, and your addiction is bigger than you… and you’ve compromised your integrity a number of times over and over and over again, and you’re starting to be victimized by the people on the street… you’re hopeless. You can’t stand your life. You would rather be dead than alive. I spent most of my addiction wishing that somebody would just blow me away.”
Ginny Burton mugshot. (King County Jail)
Three times she went to state prison. And she says that each time she got clean and had time to think and contemplate what she wanted to change about her life.
It really afforded me the ability to stop and think about what I wanted my life to look like. It gave me the opportunity to let the fog clear.
The problem was that she didn’t have the tools to make that happen, and so she would get out of prison and go back to the same people, the same lifestyle.
“This beast woke up,” she says now. “This beast that was so much bigger than I was. I would tell myself, ‘I am not going to use tomorrow. I am not going to use,’ but at the latest by 2 p.m. the next day I was always using.”
And she describes a “drug vortex” that she could never escape.
When I was clean I thought about using, and when I was using I thought about getting clean.
And so it went, on and on. Her last trip to prison was in 2008. She was in for 33 months, and she stayed clean for six months after she got out. But she relapsed for the umpteenth time and was arrested one last time on Dec. 5, 2012, and she says it saved her life.
