Page 6 - March-April HER

6 MARCH HER
HER Feature
“Icalled my grandma. I don’t remember how the conver- sation started but I was like, ‘Tell me to come home or not. I need you to tell me what to do.’ But inside I was saying, ‘Please tell me to come home. Come get me, bring me home.’ And I remember wanting to say that so bad but I couldn’t. I physically could not ... and she said, ‘Emily, you just need to stay there. Don’t come home.’ I took my brand-new phone and threw it on the wall and I shattered the screen. I fell to the ground and
I was just crying.”
January 2015. That’s when
23-year-old Emily Tilley felt her hope of sobriety fall apart.
“I finally got up and I looked at myself. I looked awful. My pupils were huge. My hair was matted because I didn’t know when I’d washed it last. I had makeup on for who knows how long all over my face and I looked dirty. I looked sick. I was pale. I had scabs all over me from picking at myself and I just remember thinking, ‘Who am I? I don’t know me anymore.’ It was really hard because I felt like I’d lost my family, lost myself.”
Now 28 and in her fifth year of recovery, Tilley is still on the journey of self-discovery as she composes her blog “Finding Emily,” a recount of her experiences during a whirlwind six-month drug addic- tion and aftermath.
“All I could think about was all the bad things I did to people and
6 March/April 2020 ¯ HER MAGAZINE
all these people that I couldn’t tell that I was sorry,” she said. “Even if I did say sorry, it wouldn’t change what I did. And it was so hard. Some of the stuff, I don’t know if I could ever forgive myself for and some of it I have. It was so much. I fell to my knees in the shower and just cried because it was an overwhelming amount of shame and guilt.”
At 17, Tilley gave birth to her first child and a few years later was the mother of two boys.
“I never really had that feeling of having a life like most teenagers do — going out and partying, and having fun with friends,” she said. “I always wanted that and I knew I couldn’t have it because I had two kids. This guy, I’ll call him Michael ... he said ‘Why don’t just come hang out with me? We’ll have fun