The Journey of Maggie Young: From Fear to Freedom

On the podcast this week, I talked with Maggie Young, the Chief Recovery Officer at Liberation Programs in Connecticut. February 6 was her 33rd anniversary of recovery, and that’s the date we picked on purpose. Charlie Grady connected us. He’s a friend of the show and runs the Hall of Change, the Connecticut program that picks people who came through reentry and made something of themselves so they can speak to incoming wardens, cadets, and police officers. Maggie was in the second cohort. Her story moves from a sharecropper’s hut in Alabama to a basement in Atlanta to a bathroom in Stanford where she smoked one last hit on the way to treatment. I want to walk through it the way she told it to me.

A Childhood Built on Silence

Maggie grew up in Alabama in the 1950s. Her grandfather was a sharecropper. When she was five, her mom left for Connecticut to take a sleep-in job caring for two white kids, and Maggie and her siblings moved in with their grandparents. Nine cousins slept in one bed in one bedroom in a hut her grandfather and uncles built with a tin roof.

She loved the rain because she could sleep under the tin. What she couldn’t sleep through was the Klan.

“What I would hear more times than not was when there would be the Ku Klux Klan come through, and I can hear the voices and I can hear them kind of just galloping through,” Maggie told me. “And the sound that I would hear would be throw, throw, and those were the times that they would then throw flames.”

She never knew which house the flame would land on. The rule in the family was that children were to be seen and not heard, so she didn’t ask. “I learned how to be quiet, to be still, and to actually live as though I wasn’t breathing,” she said.

At two years old, she remembers looking at her mom and dad and thinking, who are these people and when do I get to where I’m supposed to fit. She told me later she realized that’s not a normal thought for a two-year-old. At five, an uncle she thought was an adult raped her. Years later, standing at her grandmother’s gravesite, she did the math and figured out he was 13. She didn’t tell anyone. The rule was silence.

Connecticut, and the First Fight in the Sandbox

In 1967, when Maggie was 10 and a half, her mom came back to Alabama and brought her and her two younger brothers to Connecticut. The culture shock started on day one. Maggie had never seen a sandbox. Her mom sewed her clothes from hand-me-downs, sometimes ripping apart a shirt to make a skirt for church. The other kids had lace on their socks.

One of them told her she was poor. She didn’t know what the word meant, so she went home and asked. Her mom said, “You’re rich in love,” and left it there. Maggie took it as an insult that shouldn’t have been said. The next day she had her first fight, in the sandbox.

Her mom was working two jobs. The note from school never made it home. By the time her mom found out about the fight, Maggie was already a month into the punishment cycle.

Watching Other People Be Happy

Maggie told me something that stuck with me from one of her earlier interviews, and she said it again on our call. For most of her life, up through her junior year of high school, she felt like she was watching other people live. “I was seeing what I thought happy was in other people’s life,” she said. “And I knew how I felt inside, so that emptiness inside of me didn’t match for me what happiness was.”

Her dad was a drinker. She never knew which version of him was coming through the door, the happy drunk or the one who was going to fight her mom about the food. She used to try to hide behind the leg of the kitchen table. When she went back to Alabama as a teenager and saw that table, she realized no person could have hidden behind it. But that’s what she did.

So when her friends started smoking pot and going out for drinks in middle school and high school, she said no. She didn’t want her dad’s life. She picked a college in Atlanta partly because it was far from her mom. If she was far away, she couldn’t disappoint her.

Atlanta, the Shot, and the Pipe in the Basement

For two semesters at school in Atlanta, Maggie didn’t drink. Her roommates drank. She’d go out with them and order nothing. People kept handing her things. Wine coolers, too sweet. Other drinks, too much burn. A guy at a bar on Underwood Field Road finally told her to try a shot. Get it down quick, the burn is quick.

“It was not that I missed the burn nor the taste,” Maggie told me. “It was how quickly I felt the warmth in my body. And how at that moment, I felt like the wild side could actually express whatever without any concern for anyone.”

That was the door. Her roommate was dating a basketball player who played for the Hawks. Maggie went down to the basement one night and saw a setup for freebasing she described as bigger than anything she’d pictured. The guy told her she didn’t have to worry about the taste or the burn. Just one smooth pull.

“That one smooth pull was what I chased,” she said.

By her second year, her weekend started Thursday and ran through Monday. She was missing classes and failing classes. She still didn’t think alcohol or drugs were a problem. She finished college anyway. She told me she’s always been good at sustainability on a job, because once someone gives her a shot she’s going to prove she can do it. She got a job at a local radio station. She called it the perfect breeding ground. She drank with the sales guys, did cocaine with the news guys, smoked with the program manager.

Ten to Fifteen Years of the Same Public Defender

Maggie was in and out of jail and prison for ten to fifteen years. The charges were tied to her addiction. Stealing to support the habit. Probation violations. Running from police with warrants out. Living unhoused in parks. A man she’d known would let her come by when he got paid, hand her a sandwich and twenty dollars. She made sure to stay as far from her mom as she could. She knew it would kill her mom to see what she was doing.

She kept getting the same public defender. Year after year, same woman, same plea, same promise to appear, same outpatient referral to Liberation Programs that Maggie would either skip or half-show for.

The last arrest came after Maggie and someone else tried to break into a bar to take the cash register. They’d run out of drugs. It was a bright idea at the time. Inside, the public defender told her, “If you get a plea to go into treatment, go into treatment. Because you deserve better.”

Maggie said she still didn’t go in because she wanted to recover. She went in because she didn’t want to take the long ride from Niantic back to Stanford before she could use again. “I was trying to shorten the trip for when I left so that I can get a good high,” she said. “And that was it.”

The Front Door, the Back Door, and the Stairs

The morning she went to Liberation, a guy she’d been using as a buffer dared her she wouldn’t actually do it. She called her sister, who worked there. Her sister said, you call them. Maggie called.

She asked the guy for a ride and fifty dollars, telling him she had to pay Liberation when she got there. She had insurance and didn’t need the money. She walked in the front door, walked out the back, crossed the fence, scored on the west side, came back through the back door, and finished part of a screening. Then she told him she had to go home to pack. She locked herself in the bathroom and smoked what she’d just bought.

Then she got in the car. Her sister met her at the door and hugged her. Maggie looked up two steep flights of red stairs at a counselor standing at the top. He said, welcome to life.

“I’m thinking to myself, if I go up these stairs, I’m not going to be able to come back down,” she said. She stood there. She went up.

Inside the manager’s office there was a big teddy bear. Maggie said she remembers wanting something to hold, or wanting something to hold her, but she sat down with the exterior of the tough guy intact. She stayed seven months. And then she went back to prison anyway, because she had an escape on her record for missing parole and probation. She did her time in 23-hour lockup. This time was different. When somebody offered her drugs inside, she said no. That was the first.

Thirty-three years later, on February 6, she runs recovery for the same agency that took her in. Charlie Grady’s Hall of Change has her speaking to the people who run the system she used to be processed through. When she tells them they’re not a number, she means it. She was one.