David Seaman

The first time David Seaman tried opioids, he was 12 years old on a car ride back home to Oakland County nursing a badly bruised hip he injured during a skateboarding competition. 

David loved skating; he compared it to pitching in baseball, where all the pressure and chance at glory was on him and if he wanted to he could win it all by himself. He would often fall down over the course of learning and practicing new tricks, but would usually pick himself back up, brush off his knees and go right back at it. 

This time however, during a skating competition in North Carolina, he didn't pick himself back up. Instead, all the injuries he sustained over the course of skating piled up, and he ended up in the back of his mom’s car unable to move. At the time, his mom was prescribed Percocet and Klonopin for her anxiety and chronic pain and gave David a Percocet to help ease his pain. 

For David, it did more than just fix the hip pain. As a child, David was anxious and constantly overthinking, never feeling like he really belonged, and after that first Percocet he found he wanted to keep that feeling going as long as possible.

Now 30 years old this past June, David is currently attending Georgetown University for a Masters in Addiction Policy and Practice and heading to the University of Michigan Law School next fall. He tells this story not out of pride or shame, but rather to combat the stigma surrounding addiction. For David, addiction is not so simple as a choice, but a complex and arduous struggle where nearly half of the risk, he says, is accounted for by genetics. 

“Rehab is not a panacea” said David, explaining the importance of community and empathy as factors in determining how and if someone is able to become sober. When people struggling with addiction are rejected, shamed, and shunned for their drug use they continue to be pushed back into a dangerous and self-destructive cycle, he said. 

Following his first experience with a Percocet, David began trading pills he found in his mom’s cabinets at his middle school, eventually overdosing at 13 in the principal’s office when he decided to use his whole supply rather than waste it by throwing it away while getting caught.

His drug and alcohol abuse continued throughout high school, where he bounced in and out of home and various rehab centers before graduating in 2010. And while he was able to use sports and musical theater his senior year in high school to keep away from most substances, his addiction never truly went away. 

David would continue to struggle with his addiction, bouncing between jail from drug offenses and the street. However, during every one of these dark moments, he began noticing a sort of pull, seeing people in recovery who were unafraid to be who they are and living inspirational lives, things he aspired for himself. He calls it a “natural gravity to recovery."

However, the time he spent living on the streets and in and out of jail, made it difficult for David to even admit that he wanted something better out of life. Showing weakness or emotional vulnerability was dangerous. And if he were to survive living on the streets, he had to put on a tough face and mask his emotions. The growth of any social or coping skills needed to help combat addiction were continually stunted by his time on the streets or while incarcerated. 

January of 2017 marked a turning point for David’s life. While he was messaging various people trying to get drugs, he got in contact with a friend and former addict who had become a recovery counselor.

 “I called somebody who I used to get high with and thought that was as desperate a case as me, hopeless like me,” David said. “It turned out he was now a detox counselor at Dawn Farm’s Spera Recovery program”. In a spur of the moment, David asked him if there was a spare bed at the center, and was put on a waitlist before joining the program. For David, “there was no rock bottom or anything like that, my circumstances had been just as bad as any other time. You know, there had been these moments of compassion that people showed me throughout my time in and out that sort of added up.”.

And after a couple months with Dawn Farm, David began working at Lunch Room, another of Phillis Engelbert’s restaurants where he eventually met his partner, Meg, became a manager at Detroit Street Filling Station, returned to school and eventually got accepted to Georgetown’s graduate program and the University of Michigan Law School. 

David credits the community at the Detroit Street Filling Station, elaborating that “the culture here that's been established as this community where a bunch of people are in recovery together has a really positive effect on people.”