Read the prologue from Nothing to Lose by Nix Adams
Start reading from Nothing to Lose by Nix Adams.
I’ve lived three lives.
There was the one before my son died. There were the five chaotic years after. And then there’s this one, the one I’ve been rebuilding from the ground up for the last eight years.
When I look at those three women, they don’t look much like each other. The first one was a young mother of three little ones in Western Australia, kids in bed every night by seven, house clean, plans underway for her own business, the proudest she’d ever been of herself.
The second was a methamphetamine dealer, living amid guns and paybacks, a woman with a broken heart, dirty hands and a raging addiction. Look at me then. That’s not me. But in those five years after my son died, I was a different person.
And then there’s me now — this woman here in my third life, the one you know from your phone and your television set, the one in a crazy wig, talking to a camera in her kitchen, cooking for her kids, making you laugh.
I used to think my three lives had nothing in common. I used to think the second one cancelled out the first, and the third was a gift I didn’t deserve. It took me a long time to see that the same thing was running underneath all three of them.
Whatever I turn my attention to, I do it to the max. Every step of the way, in every shape that my life takes, the thing that keeps me going is always the same. Survival. It’s the part of me that’s always done whatever the situation requires, with whatever resource is at hand. Give me some crumbs and I’ll make you a cake. It’s the small, lonely girl on her bike in a Whangārei driveway, peddling round and round in circles, imagining she’s on a television talk show — host, guest, audience, cue gasps and laughter. It’s the woman writing this book. And right in the middle of my story is the darkness. The morning my beautiful sixteen-month-old baby boy didn’t wake up. His name was Alaska.
People often say, ‘I wish I was as strong as you.’ ‘No,’ I reply. ‘You don’t. You don’t want to feel the pain I went through to get to this.’ The minute my son died I became a drug addict. That’s how quickly it happened. I became a prostitute so I could feed my addiction. I sold drugs to the men I was servicing. I stopped prostituting and went full time into drug dealing. And all those years I just wanted someone to put a bullet in me and end it all so I could join my baby. It’s part of what made it all work for me out there on those streets. There’s no one as dangerous as someone who believes they have nothing to lose. I ended up in jail in Melbourne’s maximum-security facility, the Dame Phyllis Frost. All of that, that’s my fuel. That is the fuel that drives this vehicle every fucking day of my life. I am not going back there. I may not ever fully arrive at the person I’m striving to be, but I know I’m nothing like I was for those years, and that’s a win each and every day. And when something hard comes up for me, it ain’t as hard as that. Doesn’t matter what the hell it is.
Who the hell am I? I’m nothing special. I just made a plan. I found my commitment that this — what I have now, my kids back with me, the life that I’m creating — is actually worth the hard. I’ve picked my hard.I think if Alaska could see his mum now — and I believe he can — he would be proud. This book is for Alaska and for my four other beautiful children, and for their children, and for theirs. So that one day, when someone wonders where the strength in our family comes
from, they will know. It comes from a girl who had to invent herself out of nothing, and
then invent herself out of nothing again, and then again.
So I’ll start there. I’ll start with that morning.
Extracted from Nothing to Lose by Nix Adams, available now.
Nothing to Lose
by Nix Adams
An open, raw and honest account of a mother's journey through grief, addiction and then recovery - this is how Nix Adams went from being a survivor to a star.
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