COMMERCIAL BURGLARY FOR BRAS
The Goodwill Incident
There was a point in my addiction when I was really fucking sick.
I had been up for days. I was deep in a casino run, spun out on meth, and operating under the completely delusional assumption that I was functioning
like a normal human being.
Somehow, in the middle of all that, I ended up at a Goodwill.
Because apparently nothing is more entertaining to a tweaker than a secondhand store.
One under the influence of Meth can lose hours in there. To a TWEAKER, Every rack becomes a treasure hunt. Every ugly jacket suddenly has potential. They become hyper-focused on finding the perfect outfit that they are absolutely, positively, definitely not going to pay for.
Except for me.
I still ended up paying for it.
Just not with money.
I paid with humiliation and jail time.
Yep. Yours truly somehow managed to turn shoplifting at a thrift store into a commercial burglary charge.
I was a fucking mess, and honestly, I don't blame the management one bit.
I went through that entire store pulling clothes off the racks. If I didn't like something, I just tossed it back on top of the rack. Didn't hang it back up. Didn't fold it.
Just... fuck it.
Then I disappeared into the dressing room.
For who knows how long.
I remember finding a few pairs of badass stilettos. The problem was, there were too many of them to fit in my purse.
So naturally, my meth-addled brain came up with a solution.
I grabbed a pair of nylons.
"I tied them around my waist and somehow tied the heels of one of the pairs of shoes to the nylons so they could dangle between my legs".
Because apparently I had become my own fucking Etsy project.
Eventually, security got involved.
A female officer searched me.
She patted me down and discovered that I had somehow managed to put two bras on my chest.
She looked at me and said something along the lines of:
"Ms. Skroch, if I have to take one more bra off of you..."
And that was pretty much it.
Off to jail I went.
Just like that.
Thankfully, it ended up being cite and release.
But looking back now?
Jesus Christ.
How fucking ashamed I am.
Not because I got caught.
Because I remember enough of that person to know that, at the time, I genuinely thought I was functioning normally.
That's one of the most terrifying things about meth.
It can completely distort your perception of yourself.
You can be standing there with stolen clothes piled around you, shoes hanging between your legs, multiple bras stuffed under your clothes, and somehow your brain is still going:
"Yep. Totally normal. Nothing weird happening here."
Meth doesn't always make you feel crazy.
Sometimes it makes you feel like you're the only person in the room who has their shit together.
Meanwhile, everyone else is watching the train wreck.
I was so ashamed afterward that I actually started donating clothes back to Goodwill.
Not the clothes I had stolen from that particular store, obviously.
I wasn't that committed to the plot twist.
But I would donate clothes I had gotten away with stealing from other places.
Back to the store.
Just never the store I stole them from.
And, because apparently even my guilt needed a little chaos, I kind of liked stirring the pot.
I'd walk into a thrift store knowing I had donated stolen clothes there.
It was ridiculous.
But underneath all the ridiculousness is something that still makes me sad.
I was so fucking sick.
I look back at that woman and I don't see some evil person who woke up one morning and decided to become a criminal.
I see someone who had completely lost herself.
Someone who was operating on no sleep, meth, impulse, obsession, and a brain that had forgotten where reality ended and the drug began.
And somehow...
I survived her.
I survived the casino runs.
I survived the sleepless nights.
I survived the insanity.
I survived the consequences.
And eventually, I got my brain back.
That's the part I never want to forget.
Because addiction will have you believing that this is just who you are now.
It isn't.
Sometimes the person you're ashamed of becoming isn't the person you were meant to be.
Sometimes she's just the person who needed help before she needed another pair of fucking stilettos.
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