An Alberta Woman’s Journey from Homelessness to Triathlons: Overcoming Addictions

Ariel Hornstein was a middle-class teen from a good Calgary home when she started smoking crack cocaine.

Years of struggling with her weight and low self-esteem had brought her to that point and she eventually ended up living on the streets.

At the heart of her addiction, she says, was an inability to process emotion, and like many in her situation, she coped with the pain by using drugs.

For some, addiction comes in the form of food, shopping, and gambling, she said. “Everybody knows somebody who struggles. And it may not be with drugs; it may not be with alcohol.”

Four years ago, Ms. Hornstein started painstakingly pulling herself out of drug addiction. In the process, she gained 75 pounds, bringing her weight to a disabling 400 pounds. Food addiction had become her next battle.

Middle-Class Roots: ‘A Pretty Nice Life’

“I grew up in a really good family,” she told The Epoch Times. “I have parents who basically sacrificed everything for themselves for me and my sister and sent us to private school.”

She had a “pretty nice life,” she said. “We didn’t have everything, but we had what we needed and some of the things that we wanted.”

At about age 6, she started putting on “unhealthy” weight, she said. She was bullied at school and developed low self-esteem.

Then she started high school, with a much larger student population than her small, private Jewish elementary school. “I didn’t really know how to make friends or what a real friend was. I sort of thought that I had to give people things in order for them to like me.”

She found herself creating relationships “where people depended on me, because I felt like if they didn’t need me, they would leave me.”

She gravitated toward classmates who were into drinking and drugs; she gave them rides, cigarettes, and money.

“I really hated myself for a really long time,” she said. She started smoking marijuana when she was 14, and by the time she was 18, she was using cocaine and crack cocaine.

She knew she had a problem and figured a fresh start by moving away from Calgary would solve her problems. It was a method of dealing with problems that she would try multiple times, unsuccessfully. “Wherever you go, there you are,” she said.

Her problems remained within her in Winnipeg and she again gravitated toward the wrong crowd, creating relationships of dependency.

“Ultimately, I got taken advantage of quite a bit. And, I mean, I knew what was happening when it was happening, so it didn’t really feel very good.”

Although Ms. Hornstein was using drugs, she was still relatively high-functioning and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2004. She was accepted into a master’s program in criminology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and managed to remain sober through her first semester. Eventually, however, she slipped into heavier drug-use and didn’t graduate.

Working at a job in a halfway house for federally sentenced women, she felt conflicted. “How can I be talking to these women about recovery and changing their lives while I’m doing coke in the bathroom?” Ms. Hornstein said.

She decided to leave again in 2007, this time to go home and live with her parents in Calgary. But she reconnected with old friends who still used drugs and within a year found herself living on the streets.

‘The Worst’

“That was the worst,” she said. “I didn’t know how to survive on the street. I didn’t grow up like that, I had no experience. I was badly taken advantage of.”

She had a vehicle at first, but when it broke down she ended up in shelters and wandering around daily looking for drugs. “Not a very nice existence,” she said. It lasted for about two years until she went into treatment.