Ariel Hornstein was a middle-class teen from a good Calgary home when she started smoking crack cocaine.
Years of struggling with her weight and low self-esteem had brought her to that point and she eventually ended up living on the streets.
At the heart of her addiction, she says, was an inability to process emotion, and like many in her situation, she coped with the pain by using drugs.
For some, addiction comes in the form of food, shopping, and gambling, she said. “Everybody knows somebody who struggles. And it may not be with drugs; it may not be with alcohol.”
Middle-Class Roots: ‘A Pretty Nice Life’
“I grew up in a really good family,” she told The Epoch Times. “I have parents who basically sacrificed everything for themselves for me and my sister and sent us to private school.”She had a “pretty nice life,” she said. “We didn’t have everything, but we had what we needed and some of the things that we wanted.”
At about age 6, she started putting on “unhealthy” weight, she said. She was bullied at school and developed low self-esteem.
Then she started high school, with a much larger student population than her small, private Jewish elementary school. “I didn’t really know how to make friends or what a real friend was. I sort of thought that I had to give people things in order for them to like me.”
She found herself creating relationships “where people depended on me, because I felt like if they didn’t need me, they would leave me.”
She gravitated toward classmates who were into drinking and drugs; she gave them rides, cigarettes, and money.
“I really hated myself for a really long time,” she said. She started smoking marijuana when she was 14, and by the time she was 18, she was using cocaine and crack cocaine.
She knew she had a problem and figured a fresh start by moving away from Calgary would solve her problems. It was a method of dealing with problems that she would try multiple times, unsuccessfully. “Wherever you go, there you are,” she said.
Her problems remained within her in Winnipeg and she again gravitated toward the wrong crowd, creating relationships of dependency.
“Ultimately, I got taken advantage of quite a bit. And, I mean, I knew what was happening when it was happening, so it didn’t really feel very good.”
Although Ms. Hornstein was using drugs, she was still relatively high-functioning and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2004. She was accepted into a master’s program in criminology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and managed to remain sober through her first semester. Eventually, however, she slipped into heavier drug-use and didn’t graduate.
Working at a job in a halfway house for federally sentenced women, she felt conflicted. “How can I be talking to these women about recovery and changing their lives while I’m doing coke in the bathroom?” Ms. Hornstein said.
‘The Worst’
“That was the worst,” she said. “I didn’t know how to survive on the street. I didn’t grow up like that, I had no experience. I was badly taken advantage of.”She had a vehicle at first, but when it broke down she ended up in shelters and wandering around daily looking for drugs. “Not a very nice existence,” she said. It lasted for about two years until she went into treatment.
She figured if she could just stop doing crack, she could continue drinking and using cocaine, which would allow her to function and stay off the streets.
“In hindsight, that was just crazy,” Ms. Hornstein said. “Cocaine addiction eventually turned into a crack addiction regardless of my intentions.”
In 2009, she was no longer living on the streets but still friendly with people she had met there. That’s how she met the man with whom she spent the next five years in a relationship.
“Red flag central—I mean, he was in jail when I met him,” she said. “He had nothing. He didn’t have a piece of ID to his name, he didn’t have any clothing, he was missing a front tooth. And I was going to save this man.”
She found a job, got them both a place to live, and helped him get his tooth replaced and his driver’s licence back.
“He was pretty abusive. The relationship was pretty toxic, and I got into opiates when I was in that relationship. That took me down pretty hard and fast,” Ms. Hornstein said. “I overdosed a bunch, and I was sick all the time.”
Treatment, Recovery
She started with an 18-day program. “I knew that 18 days wasn’t even going to scratch the surface,” she said. While waiting to get into the Aventa Centre of Excellence for Women With Addictions in Calgary, the programming was pushed back during the pandemic. “I ended up relapsing,” she said.Finally, in August 2020, she got into Aventa and through the program learned how to better communicate and set boundaries. Participants talked a lot about self-esteem and self-worth.
One of the exercises they did as a group involved writing letters to their parents, which they then read aloud to each other. The purpose wasn’t to send the letters or to get feedback from the others. It was to read the letters, then sit there in silence.
“How awkward,” Ms. Hornstein remembers thinking. “Then I kind of had a lightbulb moment: being able to sit in the emotion and being okay—that’s why they’re making us do it.”
Despite the discomfort, she realized, “I can sit in it for a few minutes, and then I can move on with my day, and it’s not so bad. It’s not so bad that I need to go out and use drugs or that I need to escape from it.”
“That was my huge takeaway from treatment,” she said.
Afterward, it was about maintaining abstinence and doing something different—not going back to her parents’ house where she had been using drugs for years. She spent the next two years living in Oxford House, a sober-living home in Calgary. She found a job in transportation, an industry she continues to work in today.
Staying in sober-living care for a long time after treatment was “probably one of the best and smartest things I did, because it kept me accountable,” Ms. Hornstein said.
Aventa also has a continuing care program through which Ms. Hornstein could meet with other graduates regularly on Zoom. They would talk about their week and their feelings. Whenever she felt triggered to use drugs, she made sure to reach out to someone and talk.
Food Addiction, Triathlons
Within 10 months of leaving treatment, she had gained about 75 pounds. She had struggled with weight her whole life, but at 400 pounds, she could no longer function.It was during a visit with her sister in Ontario that she realized it was time to solve her weight problem. On the flight, she could barely fit in the airplane washroom. She bought a roomy first-class seat, worried she would need two seats in coach. She tried to walk her nephew to school, but couldn’t keep up.
“I was doing a lot of unhealthy things around food—just eating lots of chocolate, lots of junk food overnight. In the middle of the night, I would get up and eat a king-sized chocolate bar, and I would do that two or three times overnight.”
Her family had owned a deli when she was growing up and she had always been around food. Her parents and grandparents were all overweight. “I was never really taught about portion control,” she said.
In October 2021, Ms. Hornstein and her mother started the Jenny Craig weight-loss program together. Within a year, Ms. Hornstein had shed 150 pounds.
She entered a triathlon training program offered by the Terminator Foundation, an activity-based addiction recovery therapy program in Calgary.
“I’m still 250 pounds; I’m still heavy; I’m still working on it,” Ms. Hornstein said. “But I was really ready to try something new ... I’m doing all this stuff that I never had ever done before. And I’m loving it.”
The program includes running, biking, or swimming sessions five days per week. “It’s a huge commitment,” Ms. Hornstein said, noting that recovery is a lot of work and requires the will to get better. Her message for anyone starting recovery is: “Stick with it. You just have to show up. Whatever it takes, it’s one day at a time,” she said. “It’s not easy, but the truth is, we can recover.”
After struggling with addiction for about 20 years and now having completed multiple triathlons, the 43-year-old says, “I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do.”
