Anaststia: The Pain she never said out loud

This episode of The Otherside dives into a life that never had a chance to be normal. Our guest took her first hit at six years old — weed and cigarettes before she even learned multiplication. By seventeen she was drinking daily, pulled into a generational storm of addiction, violence, and survival. Her family tree is soaked in trauma: drug use, prison sentences, and a brother serving time for murder.Her path crashed into meth, crime, and eventually prison. When she got out, she tried to outsmart the system by switching to bath salts — a way to stay “clean” on tests long enough to get off parole. It worked… until it didn’t. Relapse hit hard. New charges. Probation. And then the big one: a cathinone lab case, accused of manufacturing bath salts while still on paper. Now she’s fighting for her freedom again.But this isn’t just a downfall story — it’s a war story. She’s been in UHRC for a year, showing up every day, clawing her way toward a life she’s never seen modeled. She’s applying for peer support, taking classes, trying to turn her scars into something that saves someone else.This conversation is raw and unfiltered — childhood stolen by addiction, the reality of prison, the pull of relapse, and the brutal fight to break generational cycles that feel unbreakable. It’s messy. It’s honest. It’s survival in its most human form.Welcome to The Otherside — where we tell the stories of the lives we lived, the lives we lost, and the lives we’re still trying to build. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.