The Courage to Change: An Interview with Tia Lewis (Part 1)

Tia Lewis is a mother of five, grandmother of one and a peer support specialist at the Mental Health Peer Connection in Buffalo, New York.  She provides empowerment and support to individuals who need employment and who are hard to employ.  Tia recently sat down and discussed her long road to recovery from alcohol and drugs with Mental Health World. 

“I first became involved with Mental Health Peer Connection through drug court.  I have been in and out of the penal system since the age of 11.  I am now 48 years old.  I have spent about 20 years of my life incarcerated, give or take a year.

“I was in and out of the court system quite a bit.  I became a ward of the state.  I lived in many group homes.  I did this until my mother gave me to a member of our family who was a madam.  I was sixteen when I got involved in a life of prostitution, pimps and drugs. At the age of seventeen, I eventually ended up robbing a bank for a pimp.  I was caught and sentenced.  I had to serve four years in the JFK Federal Youth camp in Lexington, Kentucky until I turned twenty-one.  I did manage to get my GED in the camp.  I was able to get something out of this experience.

“When I got out, I went right back into the same lifestyle that I had been living before.  At that time, I thought it was glamorous.  I grew up with a lot of glamour.  My mother was a hostess of exotic dancers.  We had a dancing group in our family.  So I was always around lights and stages and stuff like that.  When I got out, I picked up the same lifestyle.  I started traveling extensively, performing exotic dancing and working with an escort service.  At that point I was not involved with any more pimps.  I was handling a lot of money.  Eventually, I met a guy and he introduced me to crack cocaine. 

“My addiction took off in 1984.  I also was drinking.  From there, it was all downhill.  All of the glamour, all the money, all the diamonds, everything was gone.  Everything was gone from using drugs. 

“After 1984, I started spending a lot of time in jail.  I went to Montreal and lived there for three years.  My daughter was born in Montreal and I did time up there.  I stayed in jail everywhere that I went.  I became careless.  I was engaging in more criminal activities so that I could get money to do my crack cocaine. 

“Eventually, I wound up in drug court in Buffalo, New York in 2000. That is where I met my peer Mona White.  I would lie to her.  I would get out of jail and she would take me home. I would go in one door and when she left, I would go out the other door.  She let me bump my head.  She did not force me to do anything.  She tried to empower me. 

“I eventually got caught and went back to jail and did my year. I got reconnected with Mona and she started working with me.  I finally had had enough.  I got involved with another abusive man and I had two children with him.  He was very, very abusive.  His abuse of me led one of my older daughters to kill him.  My daughter is now in jail serving twenty three years. 

“After this happened, I began having these experiences that made me feel as if I was floating out of my body. I wasn’t clean yet but I was close to it.   I started praying a lot.  I would be sitting out on the stoop on Genesee Street and I would be praying.  Sometimes, it was even praying for the drug, ‘God give me one more, and I will go to rehab.’ 

“I played that game for a while.  I would wake up and say, oh, I promised God I would go to rehab.  Always, in the back of my mind, I had a conscience about God.  So I would go.  But I would never stay.

(Continue..)