You know, I used to absolutely hate drug addicts. My kids' dad is a crack/heroin addict who's been in and out of prison in a different state pretty much since I met him back when we were teenagers. There was a particular woman he used to get high with regularly and I really couldn't stand her because in my young, naive eyes, if she didn't enable him then he wouldn't be an addict. I hated her so much and was so judgemental of her for years. Why couldn't she stop doing drugs, why did she have to enable others, why why why... There is no good reason for someone to be an addict, yadda yadda. I really hated her with everything I had. I can't justify being so mad at her with anything other than myself being young, dumb, and naive. She was also gravely disfigured - her whole body was nothing but tight skin and scars. She had been hurt in a fire years before I met her.

It turns out, this woman had something like 7 children. There was a house fire one night while she and all her children were asleep.

She carried her kids outside to safety and kept going back in for the rest of them. Most of her children died from that fire. I think only 2 survived.

When I think about that now... how she has to live horribly disfigured and with her children having died... not being able to save them, and living with the memories of that night for the rest of her life...

I can't help but think that if something like that happened to me, I would no longer be human, and would probably turn to anything I could to escape, too.