Some pasts can never be forgotten, but they can be used to help others.
The suicide of her drug-addicted former partner, Derek Owen, pulled Charlene Elliot back into a world she thought she'd left behind. It made her realize that she could never escape her past.
Elliot had anything but a normal up bringing.
Her mother became pregnant with her at 16, and when she was four years old, her mother married a man who she had known for just three months. The new family moved into a home in Panorama Ridge, and the man adopted her, becoming her father. He was a stockbroker and by the time her parents were 30, they were millionaires. During this time her mother was emotionally and physically abusive; she was manic-depressive and would stay in bed for days. Her father was distant, barely home and working constantly.
Her first year of high school wasn't so bad, but when she was 13, her rebellion started coming out. She would use alcohol, mushrooms, pot, acid and heroin to cover up the pain of everything that was going on at home. "The only thing I can remember [about her] is when Kurt Cobain shot himself, she was there, and she was sitting there with her friends with candles all over the rocks, crying, and I thought they were crazy," said Sean Kane, an acquaintance of Charlene's from early high-school.
That same year she moved out of her home and in with her 17-year-old boyfriend; but that only lasted for three months. After that she moved into a household of 40-year-old men. It was a party house. They would do drugs, mostly acid, and drink excessively. The group was evicted, but both of her parents denied her a place to live.
This is when she found herself on the streets for the first time.
The 13-year-old had a few friends who were already living on Granville Street and she joined them there. The first morning she woke up on the streets she was hungry, and made $100 in an hour panhandling. At first it was new freedom to her - it was so easy to get the money. "I was a clean kid, not drug induced," she recalls, "People probably didn't think I was homeless."
She recalled many fun times - breaking into theaters and watching old movies, hopping roof tops and watching the sun rise, waking up on her 15th birthday with her tongue pierced and a tribal tattoo on her left arm, with no memory of how they got there.
This was around the time that she met Owen.
"I fit right in down there," said Elliot, "It was easy to find that family when mine wasn't there."
The streets of Granville were "predominantly for street youth" then, she said. But, when she was introduced to meth in her second winter out there, things began to change. It quickly turned into addiction, and the feelings of freedom began to fade away. "It wasn't playful things anymore, it was intense. Like people ODing, really intense. We would get high and take things apart." She started selling dope to get by, to support her habit, because the money she made panhandling just wasn't enough anymore.
When Charlene was 16, her mother got her a cockroach-infested apartment, and they lived there for a while.
Nothing was constant.
From the streets, to run down apartments, and back to the streets she went, always scraping by through drug trafficking. There were times when Elliot would become so depressed she would sleep for days and days, only waking up when Owen forced her to, because they had to leave. They moved to Burnaby to try and clean up their act together, but still selling drugs, they found themselves back on the Vancouver streets quickly.
Things changed when Elliot thought she might be pregnant.
Her and Owen were cleaning windshields to earn money, and as soon as they saved up enough, they bought a pregnancy test - and their suspicions were confirmed. The couple decided they needed to clean up their act for the baby and moved to Coquitlam. But, "when the drugs were gone, we were completely different people," Elliot said.
"We could barely stand to be in the same room together, let alone raise a child."
She kicked Owen out, and he moved to Toronto to face manslaughter charges he had fled from years before. She was induced soon after he left so that she could enroll in a school for teen moms in September. She didn't do any drugs during her pregnancy - didn't even smoke a single cigarette.
When Owen returned, he looked clean and healthy and Charlene decided to give him another shot. After six months, she booted him out of her mother’s basement suite, where they had been living.
He would still come to visit his daughter and would give her money from time to time. Sadly, as time went on, his visits, phone calls and money dwindled, and eventually, just stopped.
Elliot began aesthetic school shortly after, which her Dad paid for as part of the divorce agreement with her mother.
Her life, then, consisted of running a beauty parlor she had opened that catered to "uppity clientele" with "uppity beauty machines that I imported from Europe," she said. She spent her days listening to the "gossip and whining of well-off women."
"And I did it all for money," she added.
She got a reality check one night, when she got the call about Owen.
His mother called to tell her that he had hung himself, and that Elliot was the next of kin because his family was so far away. She had prepared to pick up his things from the help centre he was living at when he died.
The harm reduction centre was a place for crystal meth addicts, but it hardly looked like a place for recovery. The counselors looked like drug addicts, people were lying in the hallways with no hands, some with no feet, others with abscesses and deformities. "They were little mice and I was a big elephant, " recalled Elliot.
"I was what they were hiding from."
As she walked into Owens’ room, she had a pretty good idea of what she was about to face, but no idea how hard the reality would hit her.
"There was so much blood, death, pain and suffering," she said. Owen had lost control of his bladder, so his sheets and clothes were stained with urine. The room was covered with needles, and splattered blood from his veins bursting when he injected himself with drugs.
Perhaps the scene itself bringing forth repressed memories is what affected her so much. Or perhaps it was the loss of a great love, the father of her oldest child. But maybe it was the way she looked at herself now, and the lifestyle she led, in contrast to this gruesome scene. "I wanted something real," she said, and "having a sober reality of my past, I was disgusted."
So she changed, again.
The now-married, 26-year-old mother of two is determined to deal with her past by helping others.
Almost two years later to the date of Derek's death she is nearing her graduation in child and youth counseling. "Going through school has allowed me to let it go," she says. She currently works for a child and youth service, and she can be called to work at any time, day or night, and shifts can last up to 24 hours. Her cases can consist of anything from taking a young girl to forensics that has just been raped, to taking a drug addict to rehab, to spending a night in a hotel with a young mother and her child.
She says she loves her job.
Sadly, in her last semester of school she was diagnosed with a mental illness called anxiety disorder. With this illness, her mind will go crazy when she is under stress; thoughts crowd her mind, she becomes restless and will not want to leave the house due to paranoia.She can lose up to 20 pounds in a week. It causes irritability, headaches, sweating, fatigue, just to name a few symptoms, and these flare up in times of stress.
Despite her illness, the demands of her counseling do not trigger her symptoms.
She says she loves her job and that she's gone through "a lot of healing and personal understanding" because of it.
Elliot's life now revolves around helping others trapped in the lifestyle she once had; a lifestyle that killed her ex-boyfriend, a great love of her life, the father of her daughter.
"It only takes one person believing in you to make a difference,” she said.
“Derek was that person for me. He moved me out of the downtown core - even though he went back."
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