I still have the cat statue. One ear is broken off — my actual cats knocked it over — but I can’t bring myself to throw it away. It has no monetary value. You couldn’t sell it for anything on Seventh and Market streets. But I bought it myself, with my own money, for my own home. And that, more than anything I can explain, is why I stopped stealing. Not because I got caught. I got caught plenty of times. Not because of a program, a court date, or a condition of my probation. I stopped because somewhere along the way, I started building something I didn’t want to lose.
Let me back up.
When I moved from Hayward to San Francisco with my boyfriend at the time, we were spending every dollar on drugs. Stealing was just practical — a way to get the things we needed when there was nothing left. Then I met my uncle’s girlfriend, a heroin addict who lived in the city. One day, I emptied my purse at her house, and she looked at me and said, “You stole all of this?” I told her, “Yes, I did it all the time.” She laughed and explained that in San Francisco, everything I was stealing for personal use could be sold. Right there on 7th and Market, at any hour of the day or night.
At that time, there was a Carl’s Jr. on that corner that accepted EBT — it was the hub of the whole informal economy. People sold stolen goods to vendors who stood there day and night. If you built a relationship with one of them, they’d request specific items and agree on prices in advance. It was, in its own way, a functioning market.
Once I understood I could make money off what I was already doing, everything changed. I started small — CVS, Walgreens, drugstore basics. But I got good at it. I invested in magnets that disable security alarms. I learned that wrapping tags in foil stopped them from going off. I bought foil tape from the hardware store because it was quieter than regular foil when you were in a dressing room trying not to make noise. I graduated to department stores. Macy’s. High-end handbags. A Michael Kors purse moved faster than 20 bottles of nail polish and paid five times as much.
I want to be honest: I was skilled at stealing. I was resourceful. I was solving a problem — how to fund an addiction and survive in an expensive city — with the tools I had access to. That doesn’t make it right. But it wasn’t random chaos either. It was logic operating under desperate circumstances.
There was one rule I couldn’t crack, though: If I was dope sick when I went out, I always got caught. Every single time. Something about withdrawal strips you of the calm you need. Store security can read it on you. I’d end up with a stay-away order at best, and at worst — if there was a warrant out — I was going to jail, already in withdrawal; the fear of what was coming accelerated the withdrawal tenfold. There were times I had my dog with me and had to scramble to find someone to take her before the cops came. There were times I couldn’t. Those moments I still carry.
Then I got my apartment.
The day I moved in, it was completely empty. I stood there wondering how I would ever fill it — and honestly, my first thought was that I’d probably have to steal everything. Then my friend from elementary school showed up. She came with her husband, her kids, her family car, and a U-Haul trailer packed with everything I could possibly need. Furniture. Kitchen stuff. She just gave it to me. All of it. I didn’t have words for it then. I barely do now.
Slowly, and then more quickly, I stopped stealing. Not because someone stopped me. Because I stopped wanting to.
But the apartment still had empty spaces. And this time, I started filling them differently. I’d go to a store, look around, make a mental note of the things I wanted, and then save up money until I could buy them. The first time I did that — actually paid for something and brought it home — felt better than any steal I’d ever made. Not because it was morally superior. Because it was mine in a different way. I had worked for it. It meant something.
I bought two big pieces of artwork at Burlington Coat Factory on Fifth and Howard streets — on clearance, nothing fancy. I only had one of those rental scooters to get them home. I put the artwork on the front of the scooter, held it between my hands, and took off down Mission Street. Around Sixth Street, the wind caught the canvases, and my handlebars started wobbling. I went flying — slid right into the pavement during afternoon traffic and banged my knee up bad. A stranger helped me up. I took the bus the rest of the way home, limping, holding my artwork. I was so excited to hang it on my wall.
That’s when I knew something was shifting in me. Not fixed — I was still using, still making bad choices, still a heroin addict. I even went and stole a bike one night with a friend, pulled up to the building in my own car, with my dog’s head hanging out the window like we weren’t committing a crime. That landed me in jail for 13 days. My new car was in the tow yard. My dog was in the pound. My fish were in the tank with no one to feed them. Thirteen days to sit with all of that.
That stretch of jail time changed something in me. Not because the consequences were finally bad enough — though I thought they were. But because for the first time, I had something to come home to. A home. A life I had started, slowly, to build. And I had nearly torched it. That registered in a way consequences never had before.
I didn’t get clean overnight. Nobody does. I went home, and I used again. I overdosed on my floor. But I also got a job — a real one, as a concierge at a luxury apartment building. I started setting a budget. I got the Sublocade shot years later, which genuinely helped my recovery in ways I wasn’t expecting. I started making small changes — to my habits, my surroundings, the people I let stay close. Slowly, and then more quickly, I stopped stealing. Not because someone stopped me. Because I stopped wanting to.
I think about the Salvation Army’s “The Way Out” program, and places like Hope House — the structure they provide, the sense of accountability and progress. I didn’t have that formally, but I created something like it for myself. A job gave me structure. The apartment gave me stakes. The Sublocade gave me physical relief from the grip of withdrawal. The combination of those things — not any one of them alone — is what made change possible.
Here’s what I want policymakers to sit with: all those years I was stealing nobody ever offered me anything that changed the math. Jail didn’t change it. Consequences didn’t change it. What changed it was having something worth protecting and, slowly, believing I was capable of protecting it. Housing gave me something to lose. But I also had to decide that it was worth keeping. Those are two different things, and we need policy that understands both.
You can’t punish someone out of survival mode. And you can’t just hand someone a key and call it recovery. What works — what worked for me — was the slow accumulation of things worth staying sober for. A cat statue. Two pieces of cheap artwork. A dog who needed me to come home. One of them has a broken ear now. I’m keeping it anyway.