My name is Leslie Cardenas and I’m a 2024 graduate of TCC Northeast. This May, I received my certificate in Substance Abuse Counseling. This is important to me for a number of reasons. I, myself, am in recovery. I have been, off and on, for years.
My childhood was rough. I was in and out of CPS, constantly around drugs and alcohol and moved from school to school.
From the time I was young, I promised myself that I was not going to live the life my parents lived. That I would do better. But, you know, history repeats itself and I ended up living the same life.
I never graduated high school. I got my GED from the Boys and Girls Club when I was 26 years old. After I got it, that was it. I didn’t give it a second thought. I never thought about what I was going to do with it or what I wanted for myself. I just moved on.
It wasn’t until I found the strength to flee an abusive relationship that I thought, okay, maybe I do want to go to school.
2014 was a wake-up call for me. My children were placed in CPS for 11 months. My heart was broken. My youngest, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t come home. He would call and just say, “Mommy, I wanna go home.” And he couldn’t. I was too deep into my drug addiction, too deep into withdrawals.
And then I found out I was pregnant.
I remember sitting with CPS after my fourth failed drug test and they just told me, “We’re done with you. If you don’t want your kids, let us know now. Don’t waste our time, we’ll just place them somewhere permanently.”
That’s when I decided to get my act together. I got clean, got a job at the Boys and Girls Club and, at 34, enrolled in TCC.
I found out about Stay the Course® from an email shortly after I started classes. I’m not scared to try anything, so I said, “I’ll give it a shot, and if it’s meant for me, it’s meant for me.”
There’s a poem that I love that starts with:
“People always come into your life for a reason, a season and a lifetime. When you figure out which it is, you know exactly what to do.”
For me, Stay the Course was my reason.
From the very first meeting, I just loved my Navigator, Amiri. She understood me, on a personal level. We had an immediate connection.
My goals for myself in the program were just to be successful. I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in my life, and I knew that I could accomplish this, too. I’m a go-getter, I just needed someone to help me stay on track.
Stay the Course helped with everything I needed from car payments to bills. I’ve always worked two jobs at a time, but balancing four children, school, work and recovery was really hard. There were so many times I just thought, I can’t worry about school right now because I gotta worry about getting this paid or that paid. There were times I was so close to having my car repossessed or my lights turned off. If I didn’t have Stay the Course to help, I absolutely would have dropped out.
Sometimes, our meetings just felt like free counseling sessions. She would ask me how I was, and, honestly, sometimes that was all I needed to get through the day – just knowing that someone else cared.
This fall, thanks to the help of Stay the Course, I’ll be transferring to UTA, where I plan to pursue my Bachelor of Science in Substance Use & Treatment.
It’s funny, because when I tell people what my degree is they always ask me how much money I’ll make. But, for me, it’s not about the money.
My internship right now is at a rehab facility for teenage boys called Clearfork Academy. I met this one kid there, he’s probably 16 or 17. One day, he came up to me and thanked me for the advice I’d given him and asked that I continue to give that advice to other kids that need it. And that, right there, tells me that I must be doing something right. It was so amazing to me that I could be for that boy what my Stay the Course Navigator has been for me.
When I look back on the life that I’ve lived I sometimes feel like I’m two different people. I don’t even recognize myself.
I’m so thankful to TCC and Stay the Course for being there when I needed them the most. Thanks to them, I’ll be able to be there for someone else, when they need me the most.