With a little fanfare and a small slice of chocolate cake, Lindsay Kersh on Thursday celebrated the official start of her life off heroin.

Kersh, 19, actually stopped using June 19. That's the same day she was kicked out of her house for good. It's the same day her boyfriend left her at a West Jordan gas station with a suitcase and a promise to pick her up later. He came back to tell her they couldn't see each other anymore and drove off.

She had told herself the previous year and a half that she could quit her habit any time she really wanted to. "You know, I always had the attitude that, 'This is scary but I can handle it; I know what I'm doing."'

Standing there in the 100-degree heat staring into the sun, she realized just how much she'd been kidding herself. She was just a few blocks from her mother's house, but she couldn't have been further from home.

"I wasn't doing anything else but the drug," Kersh said after the small graduation ceremony marking the completion of her rehab program at Volunteers of America. "I stopped seeing my friends or they stopped seeing me. I'd get mail and wouldn't open it. I was stealing money from my mom, taking her debit card and just lying about everything. We cover up in lies. I was living a secret life and thinking I was getting away with it. I was going to take care of things — just not right now, just not today."

The last thing Kersh really wanted to do that day was quit using. "But I knew I had to right then and there. Nothing was working. My mom had changed the locks because she just couldn't take me any more." Kersh went home anyway and walked into her back yard and sat on a lawn chair. "I just needed somewhere I could feel a little safe."

Her mother was out of town and a neighbor took her in for the night and took her to the VOA's Center for Women and Children in Murray the next day.

She said she was sicker than she's ever been but had the relief of being taken care of, and she had the one thing she had fought against for so long — structure. Even though every day is exactly the same when you're doing drugs, she said Thursday, you never know what's going to happen next.

"Sometimes when I would eat I would forget to chew," she said. "It's like I would do it and forget I was alive even. It's kind of nothing — there's no love there really. There's pain, but you can get that to go away when you use."