From Marijuana, Meth and Misery to the Mass: One Teen’s Story of Divine Rescue
- Clare Kneusel-Nowak
- Aug 15
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 18
Drugs didn’t kill her, but emptiness almost did — until Jesus found her and saved her.
Warning: This article contains tough subject matters that may be hard for some to read.
The Insatiable Desire
As a little girl, Liza had what she called massive feelings of emptiness. Despite a childhood that looked good from the outside, she recalls a constant loneliness.
“I always felt alone and was just profoundly empty,” she said.
Her parents divorced when she was young, and her father moved out of state. Though her mother was loving and protective, Liza struggled deeply.
In sixth grade, she turned to drugs and alcohol to fill the void. She said smoking and drinking were the only way she felt anything at all.
“It made me feel like I was okay,” she said.
Other middle schoolers thought she was cool for knowing how to smoke, but the attention couldn’t replace that love she longed for. She was trying to fill a “God-sized hole” with substances and popularity. And high school would make matters much worse.
“Chasing the Dragon”
“It got to the point where I was probably drinking and vaping weed four times a week,” she said. Liza told herself she was managing well because no one really knew she was doing it.
Freshman year, she found a group of kids who smoked, skipped school and liked the same music. Surrounded now by users, Liza’s dangerous experimentation escalated quickly.
“I’d become entirely consumed by ‘chasing the dragon’ — that’s what they call it when you try to relive that first experience of getting high,” she said.
That year, weed and alcohol were no longer strong enough for Liza.
“I never really had fear of anything except dying, but that went away super fast. I was ready to take the hardest drug anyone could get me,” Liza remembered. “I was indifferent to death. I would take whatever would make me feel good.”
She tried psychedelics, painkillers and whatever else she could get. Her mom eventually forced her into outpatient therapy, but Liza found ways to avoid sessions. Then COVID hit.
During that time, Liza began selling her own content online for drugs and alcohol and had relationships with much older men online. Her mom sent her to another rehab facility, but Liza, who had no interest in changing, never went more than 3 days sober outside.
“I had no desire to get better or to stop using drugs or to make amends for my life ... I had no moral compass,” Liza said. “I felt no guilt, no remorse for the things I was putting my mom through, my family through, no guilt or remorse for myself. I had no standard of morality... I felt completely indifferent.”
Desperate, her mom sent her to live with her dad in Texas. He enrolled her in online school, but she didn’t finish. Despite not knowing anyone, she still found ways to get high.
“An addict always finds a way,” she said.
The Darkest Period
Later that year, she returned to Colorado, where old friends and harder drugs were waiting.
By junior year, she was using cocaine and meth and stealing to support the habits.
“This was the worst period of my life,” she remembered.
She became immersed in the drug subculture, surrounding herself with people who she thought could give her what she wanted — attention, drugs, and a fleeting sense of love.
“I wanted attention, and I wanted to be loved so badly. I was screaming at anybody to love me and to pay attention to me,” she said.
By 18, after more failed stints in rehab, she was living with her aunt. Even her drug-using friends were growing worried. Liza’s behavior was escalating. She sometimes stopped friends from calling ambulances, even when she was sure she was dying.
Her aunt told her mom, who gave her one final ultimatum: rehab or the homeless shelter.
“I agreed to go to rehab again because I did not want to be homeless,” she admitted. “I was planning to fake it until my blackout period [the period during which she couldn’t contact anyone] was done.”
The Christian in Withdrawal
At that center, Liza met a patient she couldn’t stand — a Christian with unwavering joy.
“He was so on fire with the love of Christ,” she said of the man who’d been beaten down by life, but who was still constantly “beaming, just so happy to be part of any conversation or to talk about Jesus. And I remember thinking, ‘This is so annoying.’ I could not stand to be near this guy.”
In withdrawal, most addicts "fake it ‘til they make it.” But not him. He was, despite his suffering, utterly and sincerely joyful.
“I thought, ‘Okay, the Jesus thing is really weird, but if I could just figure out what makes you so happy. I know it’s not really Jesus,” she said. “So what is it?'"
His joy and that of patients like him ultimately convinced Liza to stay. For the first time, she wondered if she actually wanted sobriety. If he could be happy in sobriety, maybe she could be too.
When she got out, she walked the 12 Steps. She named Jesus as her “higher power” — mostly to appease her sponsor.
“I was sober physically, but I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, staying up all night and still being sexually active,” she said. “Even from a secular point of view, it wasn’t great.”
Then a friend invited her to Arizona for a fresh start. Life on the surface improved. She got a car, made new friends and stayed sober. But the old longing never went away.
“At night, when I was alone, I felt that same profound kind of emptiness that I did when I was a kid,” she said.
The Last Resort
Liza had been living in Arizona for two months. One day, she recalls, was just a perfect day.
“Everything I would have wanted in a day,” she said. “I said goodnight to my roommate, I went into my room ... and I felt a soul-crushing emptiness in a way that I had never experienced up to that point in my life. It was worse than anything I had ever felt on drugs in the sense of despair — worse than my lowest moments when I was sleeping in somebody’s car in 15-degree weather — I had never felt this.”
Sitting on her bed, Liza was wracked with unbearable sadness and agonizing pain. She began shaking, unable even to cry. It was as though all the pain she had been storing over the years was finally released.
“I thought, ‘I’ve done all these things that I thought I should do to be happy, but I still feel no sense of purpose, no sense of accomplishment, no happiness, like at all,” she recalled.
Feeling “sick with sin,” she looked at her bedside and found a Rosary her mom had given her, which belonged to Liza’s late grandparents — “the most perfect Catholic Italian couple,” Liza knew from her mom’s stories.
As a last resort, Liza picked up the Rosary.
“I’m going to feel so dumb,” she remembered thinking. “I had never prayed at all, but I knew vaguely how to pray the Rosary … This was literally a Hail Mary. I didn’t know what else to do, so I prayed maybe a half decade … I was consumed with desperation.”
Liza prayed, and then, totally by surprise, was encompassed by “the most perfect feeling of love I had ever felt in my life … It was almost as if I had never experienced love before, like I didn’t even know what the word ‘love’ meant until that night.”
She felt, all at once, “in a very real and concrete sense, the Blessed Mother pushing me into the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”
“It was an intensity of emotion that I had never felt in my life,” she said. “I was sobbing. I don’t know how long it actually lasted. It felt like a long time, like all these things were being purged out of me in a really painful way, but like the most beautiful kind of pain. Like Teresa of Avila, not in the way that she experienced it, but like a pain that you don’t want to stop.”
Liza knelt and prayed aloud, “I have no idea what that was, but I will give you all of my life. Right now, I will do anything that you ask. Even if I’m damned to Hell forever because of what I’ve done, I will spend the rest of my life serving you, and I will do whatever you want.”
She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but the next morning, she had no hesitation — she had to find a Catholic Church and go to Mass, since she had felt the Blessed Mother’s love so profoundly.
She didn’t understand what was happening during Mass, but she knew enough not to receive the Eucharist.
“I think I would have melted or something,” she joked.
After Mass, the parish had Eucharistic Adoration, and, on impulse, Liza stayed, even though she didn’t know what the Eucharist — or much else in Christianity — was.
“Why are they putting this, like, what to me looks like nothing, in this gold circle?” she remembers thinking, confused, as Adoration began and everyone began to kneel.
“I had this unexplainable moment where I just, like, felt the Lord so profoundly speaking into my heart … I had no idea what the word ‘Adoration’ meant,” Liza said. But I realized ‘I’m made to do this. This is what I was made for.’ … I think it’s a great grace of the Lord because he knows that there was no way he could have gotten to me except in this really profound way.”
The next day, Liza called her mom and told her she had decided to become Catholic and move home.
The Only Thing That Satisfies
Of course, there were details that had to be arranged first, like getting a job.
“I didn’t even want to work a job — I just wanted to sit in Eucharistic Adoration for the rest of my life,” Liza shared. “But my mom said, ‘You need to get a job.’”
Her family did not initially believe this conversion was sincere or, at least, that it would last.
“It was a great exercise in humility for me,” Liza said. “I had let my family down so many times and given them false hope that I was better … I think it was really shocking for them. My sister said she didn’t even recognize me when I moved back — in a good way.”
Liza began attending daily Mass, even though she couldn’t receive Jesus yet. She said it was especially for the moment of Consecration, when the priest elevates the Eucharist — this struck her to the heart.
“I would have waited a thousand years just to lock eyes with Jesus,” she said.
Liza spent two years in OCIA and was finally received into the Church last Easter. Even though none of them are Catholic, her whole family came to her Confirmation.
A newly minted Catholic, Liza began studying the saints — especially St. Teresa of Avila, whom she says taught her to pray and through whom God called her “into deeper love of him.”
Since her conversion encounter, the love of Jesus in the Eucharist has consumed her. She has had “a hyper-fixation on Catholicism” and wants to consume “every apologetics podcast, every Catholic Answers article, every spiritual reading” that she can get her hands on.
“I spend at least an hour in Adoration every day,” she said. “Now I’m the guy that I hated in my rehab —slipping Jesus into literally every conversation. I think … in a very true sense that I’m living the greatest love story ever told. I feel so in love in a way that I never thought I would.”
