David Wadsworth, manager of Education and Employment at Light of Life Rescue Missions, outside his office at New Hope United Methodist Church.
The piece was written for Light of Life Rescue Missions. To visit their website, click here.
The typical 20-year-old is looking towards life with a newness - welcoming the opportunities of adulthood and a professional life combined with the blind optimism of youth. Cars are being leased, apartments are being rented, degrees are being earned. 20 is an exciting year.
When David Wadsworth was 20, he was checking himself into rehab. “I did not know myself,” Wadsworth said. “The life I led by myself was total emptiness. I was having such awful thoughts of darkness that I really knew what it meant to have separation from God. I felt so separated from all the good things that I had ever experienced before.”
Wadsworth, 40, grew up in what he remembers as a warm hearted household in the South Hills. Although he admits to feeling as though he never had a firm grasp on Christianity while growing up, faith was still a large part of his upbringing, and he lived out his childhood in the pews of Baptist and Presbyterian churches.
“My parents are people who both live out their faith,” Wadsworth said. “Their faith in Christ is just a central point of their lives.” Despite this, Wadsworth struggled with what he describes as immense feelings of inadequacy, stemming from the deepest parts of himself. Some of these insecurities were the result of a lifelong speech impediment he has combated for as long as he can remember.
“I had and still struggle with a speech impediment...so I really didn’t have a high esteem of myself or value myself even though people around me were very loving and supportive,” Wadsworth said.
These feelings evoked a need to fill an absence of purpose, and Wadsworth turned to alcohol as the quickest escape, beginning before he even started college at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
“It crossed over that line into addiction pretty early,” Wadsworth said. “Even before college, but I became just unmanageable. I loved school and I loved learning, but none of that mattered anymore. I was just so in the grips of this unhealthy pattern of drinking over anything else. It wasn’t like having fun; it got to the point where I felt like I couldn’t be without it.”
After returning home for Christmas following his first semester away from Pennsylvania and the support of his family, Wadsworth acquired a DUI the night before heading back to college. He decided to return to Indiana that very next day to continue to pursue a degree in business - something he said he sees now as a consequential mistake.
“I just didn’t care about anything anymore,” Wadsworth said. “I started to not go to classes and didn’t show up for exams. I was hiding all this, and I really began to live a double life.”
This masked way of living left him feeling an emptiness that was bottomless, and he eventually became desperate for help from his faithful parents - who he says would have never considered giving up on him. He broke down, called home and told them the truth. The call resulted in a trip to the university health center, where the world “alcoholic” was used to describe him for the very first time.
“Even though it was so obvious to anyone who saw me, that was in a way comforting, because then I had a name for what was happening,” Wadsworth said. “I literally thought I was going crazy. I was in the worst place. Even having a name for it, I thought, maybe there’s hope.”
This wouldn’t even be close to the last time he would hear the words “alcoholic” and “alcoholism” as describers for himself. In fact, he would become all too familiar with the monikers throughout his time spent in not only the rehab he entered as a 20-year-old - but three total rehabilitation facilities over the course of his life.
Although his first rehab taught him to temporarily control his alcohol abuse, Wadsworth only remained sober for 11 months following his integration back into real life. He did what he calls “switching addictions,” and started smoking pot as an alternative method in order to return to that feeling of disconnection from his consciousness - and back into the space outside of his thoughts, which he said were destructive in nature.
After enduring and emerging from a total of three rehabs, he still looks back to that first rehab as one of the major turning points of his recovery. Even though he had grown up in church, a visit from a pastor is what it took for Wadsworth to begin to take his relationship with God seriously.
“He came to the rehab just to talk to me and just to encourage me and to say, ‘Dave, you’ve been conforming to the world, but you really need to be changed by the renewing of your mind,’” Wadsworth said. “And that was just music to my ears. The place that I was in, I couldn’t imagine the possibility of having my mind renewed.”
This conversation helped trigger a years-long transformation for Wadsworth. Although it took him years of relapsing, couch-crashing and addictions to more severe substances than he could have ever predicted, Wadsworth reach a consistent place of sobriety. He celebrates his growth with a sobriety date of 2005, and thanks the journey for showing him one of his life’s greatest loves - art.
“At a halfway house in Aliquippa, they had an art therapy person that would come in,” Wadsworth said. “I had never really done art growing up, so I did something with pastels in the basement of the halfway house. It was my first kind of experience in a long time where I felt that I did something I was happy with or was somewhat proud of. I felt like I contributed something of value.”
Recently named as a new emerging artist in the Three Rivers Arts Festival, Wadsworth’s art has evolved, just like his story.
Art therapy is something he has incorporated into his role as Manager of Education and Employment at Light of Life Mission. He landed himself at Light of Life’s doors during one of his recovery periods - seeking help and sobriety for himself. Now, 13 years clean, Wadsworth became reconnected to Light of Life as a refreshed Christian and professional - having gained a master’s degree in special education and a solid lifestyle to accompany it.
It was through his wife, who has served as Public Relations manager for the mission since she moved to Pittsburgh from Virginia, that he found out about possible employment within his field.
Wadsworth’s first title at Light of Life was “education specialist,” but has transitioned into the present management position, where he spends time helping recovering addicts - not dissimilar to where he used to find himself - get back into the workforce. He’s responsible for the curriculum in small groups, as well as helping those in the program become connected with educational resources, like tutoring.
While clients do face adversity along the reemployment journey, such as working around criminal backgrounds, Wadsworth says those setbacks hold no comparison to the potential he sees in those that are in Light of Life’s programming. “I love encouragement,” Wadsworth said. “I know it’s one of my gifts. I love helping other people recognize their strengths and the ways in which they’re gifted and how that could be manifested in work or hobbies or anything, really. I love the relationship aspect of the program.”
Wadsworth says it’s encouraged for participants in the program to get out of the left brain and tap into that healing creative side that helped save his own life. Whether it’s through painting or photography, art therapy has made a difference in the lives of those who find themselves at Light of Life’s door, just like Wadsworth did all those years ago.
“One of the things that really took off is the photography club that we’ve done,” Wadsworth said. “For a couple of guys, it just became one of the best points of their lives. They would never go anywhere without their camera. For a guy who recently passed away, photography ended up being such a blessing the last couple years of his life. It just struck a chord in him that had always been there that just needed an outlet and validation of its value.” A copy of one of his original paintings is hung in a thin black frame adjacent to his desk in his office inside the church, located about a block and a half away from the building where he teaches employment classes, attends chapel and meets one-on-one with clients. Although it looks the part, Wadsworth didn’t buy this piece at a prestigious auction or museum; he painted it with his own hands. It’s not so much a landscape as it is a glimpse at a cluster of trees - the leaves dressed in bright oranges, pinks, reds - signs of a changing season.