With her sparkly blue eyes, glowing complexion and perfect beach waves, Dejah Hall hardly looks like she was once ravaged by drug addiction.
“Today marks 4 years clean from heroin and meth,” the 26-year-old wrote in a now-viral Facebook post on December 6. “The top left is me in full blown addiction. I was a terrible IV user and like most, progressively got worse. The bottom left is me the day I was arrested 12-6-12.”
Hall began experimenting with prescription pain medication when she was 17 — just one year after her mother was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for fraud. “It was just supposed to be a party drug,” the Glendale, Arizona–based mom of Lydia, 18 months, tells Us Weekly. But by 2011, Hall had moved on to a $240-a-day heroin habit. “I fell in love with the high. It was numbing,” she says. In 2012, Hall — who no longer cared if she lived or died — began smoking and injecting crystal meth. “I’m 5-foot-3 and I weighed 95 pounds,” she tells Us. “I was sleeping in sheds. My arms were covered in lumps. I was just just so broken.”
Hall’s Hail Mary came in the form of her beloved grandfather’s 91st birthday. “I gave him a hug and told him I loved him and then I started crying and locked myself in bathroom,” she recalls. “I looked at myself in the mirror and was like, ‘What are you doing to yourself? Look at who you’ve become.’ I said, ‘God, I don’t know if you’re real, but if you are. I really need you to save me.’”
Hours later, Hall was arrested on felony warrants that sent her to prison for two years. “It literally happened within two hours of praying to God to save me, and I think I knew that was his way of saving me,” she tells Us.
Though Hall’s grandfather passed away two weeks after his birthday, she believes he is looking down on her and smiling. Four years later, Hall is majoring in Christian Studies at Grand Canyon University and will begin a new job as a peer support specialist at a detox and rehabilitation center on January 2.
