Former heroin addict Lynsey from Co Antrim helping others through her Recovery Rocks programme

Now aged 42, Lynsey, who has 17.5k TikTok followers, has conquered her addiction and wants other people to know they can achieve a happier life through ‘good habits’.

Lynsey, who grew up in the Rathcoole Estate, was only four years of age when her mother died of leukaemia at 24.

“My mother worked in a bar, my father was a welder. It was an average Housing Executive life,” she says.

"My sister was born in the May of 1985 and my mother died that September.”

Her ‘nanny’, her father’s mum took the family in.

"We had a nice life, but I don’t think the trauma of losing my mother was ever dealt with.”

With no extra money for hobbies, Lynsey played on the streets.

“I started smoking, sniffing tins of gas and lighter fluid and drinking alcohol from the age of 11 or 12, because that’s what the other kids were doing.”

It got to the point where when she was 14, she was drinking a quarter bottle of vodka every single night with her older boyfriend.

"That was causing so much upset in the house. I was coming home and upsetting the whole family.”

When she was 16, and after a “bit of a blow up” Lynsey moved out of her nanny’s home and in with her boyfriend. She got a job as office junior and immersed herself in the rave scene, taking all sorts of drugs, from ‘ecstasy to speed to acid’.

“I thought that because I wasn’t ‘book smart’ and didn’t go to university I didn’t deserve a better life. I thought I might as well just party at the weekend and go to my 9-5 job. So I continued to numb the pain and before I knew it I was injecting heroin,” she says matter-of-factly.

Lynsey was at a party one night and was offered the Class A drug by some girls.

“Normally people try smoking heroin first, no, not Lynsey Brown, I was straight into the veins. I’d had to buy a wee bag of it, which was £25, but I only took a small bit. That meant that I had some of that bag left to take home with me.

“I was physically sick, I was completely out of my head and the next day I got another bit because I was dying of a hangover and thought it would make me feel better – and it did make me feel better. I just kept going back to that wee bag over the next few days and injecting. When the bag ran out, I decided I wanted more. And that was me, I was then a heroin addict for quite a few years.”

Lynsey says she was spending between £25-£75 per day on heroin and was ‘wheelin’ and dealin’ to fund her habit.

“I always thought I was being a good girl, because I didn’t actually physically steel myself, but I was there with everybody doing it. We stole jeans from the city centre, which I was helping to sell.”

Her partner eventually noticed the injection marks and supported Lynsey through recovery treatment at Holywell Hospital.

“There were a few relapses where I went and used again. One day after work I decided to go into the city centre and I had heroin within the hour. It was that easy.”

Another day she ended up getting heroin with a homeless girl, after the latter had begged enough money for a bag.

“There’s a lot of other stuff when you are living in the world of addiction. I got raped, I got beaten up, I’ve had my arm broken, I’ve been in bad relationships.

"And coming off the pharmaceutical drugs (to help with her addiction) was tough – as tough as, if not tougher than, coming off the drugs.”

Eventually Lynsey got help through the Northern Trust Community Addiction Service (Railway Street, Ballymena) and started to turn a corner.

She bought her own house, but was still smoking cannabis every night.

"I didn’t cure the addiction part, I was just replacing what it with something else over the years. That was until I found mindset material online and until I really started to do the work that I needed to do to deal with that trauma of losing my mother and really started to believe that I didn’t need to put poison into my body every single day.”

She adds: "I am somebody that’s high energy, that wants to feel those endorphins released and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just about what you use to get high and that’s what I want to show people – that it’s ok to want that feeling, but we just have to find good habits to replace those old habits. And that changed my life around.”

Lynsey joined a running club, started doing half marathons, and now, incredibly, runs for Ireland in her age category.

She has also done talks at addiction groups and has set up an online business called Recovery Rocks Global (www.recoveryrocksglobal.com), to help others overcome their issues.

“I am trying to make mindset material fun. I want to bring this type of material to people from a working class background, to the Housing Executive. I want to show people how to love themselves. I want to create a recovery movement.”

Lynsey would also like to share her story and recovery journey in prisons, schools and with businesses.

"I want to change lives, the way my life’s been changed. I wake up every morning and the first thing I say to myself is ‘I am grateful for another day’.”