The chapter
I don't hide
Katrina Collins
I don't hide this anymore.
Not because it’s easy to say. But because silence never helped anyone, and if one woman reads this and feels less alone, then it was always worth saying.
There is a version of this story I could tell quietly. With soft language and careful distance. But that’s not why I’m here. So I’m going to say it plainly.
This is the chapter most people didn't see
Between 2015 and 2018, while I was running my first business, I was living through the hardest years of my life.
I’m talking about addiction. Substance abuse. And specifically, ice.
I say that word deliberately, because the stigma around it is exactly what keeps people silent, and silence is exactly what keeps people stuck. Ice is a drug. A brutal, consuming, extraordinarily hard drug to survive. And it carries a shame that many other substances, ones our culture accepts without question, simply don’t.
I’m not here to debate that. Just to name it. Because the people who know, know. And the people who don’t, deserve to understand what it actually means to live inside it and come out the other side.
What it cost...
It cost me my family home. My friendships. My money. And it put me in the kind of situations that could have ended everything. More than once.
I won’t detail those moments. But I will say; I am still here. And that is not nothing.
Because I believe no woman’s story is a liability.
It’s a lifetime.
It’s the raw material of transformation.
What it didn't cost me...
My self.
That is the thing I hold onto most. My boundaries were tested. My morals were tested. I had to think in ways I never thought I’d have to think, move through a world built on lies and deception, and stay just clear enough inside my own mind to know that I was not those people, even when I was surviving alongside them.
Something in me, quiet, stubborn, certain, never stopped knowing I would get out.
I just had to find the door.
The turning point
It wasn’t dramatic in the way people imagine.
I walked back in one day. Looked at it all with completely clear eyes. Took every pipe, every piece of gear, smashed it, and took it to the tip.
Walked away.
Never went back.
That was over eight years ago. I don’t count the days. That’s why I’m free.
The long road back
Recovery wasn’t a program someone handed me. It was mine, built slowly, on my own terms.
Walking. Meditating. Yoga. Leaning into spiritual teachings that had always called to me. Building what I now call a vanilla life; and I mean that as the most beautiful thing in the world. Real. Ordinary. Chosen. Mine.
Someone said to me once, during those years: “Your mouth smiles but your eyes don’t.”
I think about that line often.
Because now, at 50, I smile from the inside out. All the way to my eyes. I love my life in a way I genuinely couldn’t have imagined back then. The world means everything to me. And I get to live free and at ease.
Not many people get out of ice addiction.
I did. And I believe that happened for a reason.
Why I'm telling you this
This is one chapter in a life that has many. There was a whole life before it. There has been a whole life after it. This is not the centre of my story, but it is part of it, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
I tell it because the women I work with are rebuilding, restarting, reclaiming themselves. They deserve to know that the person walking alongside them has walked through something real.
And I tell it for anyone who is in it right now or loves someone who is. Because you can survive this. People do. I am one of them.
Your story is not a liability.
Mine isn’t either.
The truth sets us free.
Sharing this chapter is not about the past. It's about the women still in the middle of theirs.
If it helps even one woman know she's not alone, then it was always worth saying.
You're not alone.
There is always a way through.
And your story is not over.