The Journey of Maggie Young: From Fear to Freedom

Growing Up in Silence and Secrecy

When I talked with Maggie Young, the Chief Recovery Officer for Liberation Programs, she opened up about something that hit me hard. Today marks 33 years of recovery for her. That’s an incredible milestone for someone who spent 10-15 years cycling in and out of prison for drug-related crimes.

Maggie’s story starts in 1950s Alabama, where she lived with her grandparents after her mom left for Connecticut to work as a live-in caregiver. Nine kids sleeping in one bed, the sound of the Ku Klux Klan riding through at night, and a rule that shaped everything: children were to be seen and not heard.

“I was taught silence and secrecy,” Maggie told me. “So through it all, being a child in Alabama during slavery times, my grandfather was a sharecropper and there was just really, I remember being at the age of two, living with my mom and my dad and thinking to myself, who are these people and when do I get to where I’m supposed to fit?”

That feeling of not fitting in would follow her for decades. At five, she experienced sexual trauma from an uncle she thought was an adult but later learned was only 13. The silence rule meant she couldn’t tell anyone. She couldn’t ask questions. She just had to carry it alone.

The Culture Shock of Connecticut

At ten and a half, Maggie moved to Connecticut with her mom and brothers. The transition was jarring. In Alabama, she’d gone to a segregated school with maybe 10-12 kids all in one classroom. In Connecticut, she walked into integrated classrooms with kids wearing fancy clothes while she had on a handmade skirt her mom had sewn from repurposed fabric.

A kid called her poor on her first day. She didn’t know what that meant, so she asked her mom. “She said you’re rich in love. And that was the extent of what she said about that,” Maggie explained. The next day, she got into her first fight in the sandbox.

The anxiety was overwhelming. Every morning before school brought that sick feeling in her gut. She was watching other people live their lives while she felt like she was hanging on the outside, trying to figure out how to fit in.

Finding Her Drug of Choice

Maggie made it through high school and went to college in Atlanta. She didn’t drink at first. Her dad was an alcoholic, and she’d watched the chaos that brought to their household. She associated drinking with unpredictability and violence.

But in college, sitting at a bar, someone convinced her to try a shot. The burn and taste didn’t matter. What mattered was the warmth that spread through her body and how quickly she felt free to express herself without worrying about anyone else’s reaction.

Then came freebase cocaine. “That one smooth pull was what I chased,” she said.

The progression was fast. Weekend partying turned into missing classes. She was failing but never connected it to addiction. She rationalized everything. She graduated college. She had jobs. She wasn’t that person she’d seen standing outside her window in Connecticut, sleeping while standing up.

The Cycle of Crime and Prison

To support her habit, Maggie started stealing. She spent the next decade cycling through the criminal justice system, getting arrested, doing short stints, getting out, and repeating the pattern. She was never truly free during those years. Always on probation, parole, or heading back to jail.

“I was either on my way out of jail on my way in jail on probation on parole. Something was happening with the criminal justice system,” she explained.

She did a three-year stint that she wore “as a badge of honor.” But even that didn’t wake her up. She used the time to learn about new drugs and new ways to get them. Prison became a networking opportunity for her addiction.

The last arrest came when she tried to break into a bar with someone else to steal from the cash register. They’d run out of drugs and thought it was a brilliant plan. It wasn’t.

The Moment Everything Changed

Sitting in front of the same public defender she’d seen year after year, Maggie heard something different this time. “You deserve better,” the lawyer said. “Because you deserve better, you deserve better.”

A guy she’d been using as a “buffer” dared her that she wouldn’t actually go to treatment. Between the public defender’s words and that dare, something shifted. She called her sister, who worked at Liberation Programs, and said she was ready for inpatient treatment.

But even then, she wasn’t really ready. She went in the front door of Liberation, out the back, bought drugs, came back, and smoked them in the bathroom before finally walking up those steep red stairs.

“Welcome to life,” the counselor said when she reached the top.

“I’m thinking to myself, if I go up these stairs, I’m not going to be able to come back down,” Maggie remembered.

She stayed seven months and still ended up back in prison. But this time was different. When someone offered her drugs inside, she turned them down. That had never happened before.

The Chief Recovery Officer

Today, Maggie works as Chief Recovery Officer at the same Liberation Programs where she once was a client. She’s part of Charlie Grady’s Hall of Change program in Connecticut, which recognizes people who’ve transformed their lives after reentry and has them speak to new CEOs, police cadets, and others in the criminal justice system.

The woman who once said she’d never been happy now spends her days helping other people find their own path to recovery. The silence and secrecy that defined her childhood has been replaced by openness and connection.

33 years. That’s what recovery looks like when someone finally gets the support they need to break the cycle.