Daniel Joseph Coorey

~ WE WANTED TO SHARE THESE WRITING'S WITH EVERYONE~

DANIEL WROTE THESE TO HIS MUM BEFORE HE FELL ASLEEP ON

OCTOBER 19TH, 2006...

A lot Of Regrets

I gotta lot of regrets with just life in general and if I could go back and change things, id change a few but if I had the choice to be anyone else in the world, rich or famous or be me, I'd be me cause I got a great family, great mates, a good job now and my plan with this book is to help kids not to make the same mistakes me and my friends or now enemies made.

See when you get into drugs you don’t even realize it slowly changes the person.  I know because it happened to me and a lot of other people.  People start to steal to get it, friends aren't friends for long.  They lie and try to deceive you, steal from you and these are the people that you think are really nice and go on holidays with, even hang out with them and work together and then they rip you off.  You live and learn but its best not to do drugs in the first place and avoid it all. 

Life's just so much clearer, the quality of your life is just so much better, you don't get into trouble with police much unless ur a violent drunk .

After starting drugs I got expelled from Warwick High School.  I started a tafe course in Information Technology and I was doing certificate 2 and I was a really good student in class and I wanted to get a job in IT.  The first module was operating a general computer.  I blitzed it.  I was really smart but as I was smoking I couldn't perform to the best of my ability or know what my full potential could be if I was drug free at the age of 15, but I wasn't as a teen.  You don’t even realize what its doing to you and some people never do and its sad what drugs do to people and that’s what kids don't realize all these people on drugs used to be kids once, they played with toys just like me and just like your kids and I just want to get across to them and you that kids grow to be adults, and parents cant watch them all the time.  Kids will always have their free will, that’s the greatest thing about this world.

After I hit the adult world I changed and made a lot of bad decisions with drugs and life in itself and you or your children never realize these things until you go down that track and if someone does it may be too late so if we do anything at all to kids the best possible thing to do is educate our kids on what they are actually getting themselves into when they take this road.  Well I've been down it and it's f.......d, friends soon turn against you they steal off you and if you fall down far enough down this endless well you may find that indeed you may turn into one of these scumbags, but the worst thing is you, yourself don’t realize this is happening to you.  Instead of you using the drug it's really using you and I don't hate these scumbags.  I infact feel really sorry for them, because once upon a time they were innocent kids, who had hopes and dreams and now all they got to look forward to is a life of money troubles, friends deserting them, job losses, jail and a life of misery and unhappiness.  You
wouldn't want to wish that upon anyone, even if they did pick on you your whole life and unfortunately I've seen it happen to so many people that who were great mates and now they have nothing. 

It’s sad, it really is.  As a kid I’ll admit I don’t think this stuff even happened at all.  It's like a horror movie that's real and it plays for life - your life, but at the time you only think I'm getting high having a good time with mates and it's so much fun but you don't see what happens long term, and if you do you really just don't care but by then the drug has consumed you......

But back to what drugs did to me from the age of 15-17 when I was supposed to be learning but when a young mind is taking in so much of the drug you cant learn, you forget, get easily distracted, lose track of what your doing and after a while you just really don't care.  I was a bright kid to, I had only been smoking for not even a year full time and my interest in everything I loved disappeared.  By doing these things all my hopes and dreams just dripped down the drain.  If it happened to me it could happen to anyone. 

But I didn't care.  I didn't wanndo it and all I ended up doing was smoking heaps of pot.  And it did it to me.  It turned me into something I wasn't, it had taken over me and I still didn't even see it and it was right in front of my eyes.  Looking back it was unbelievable that something as simple as weed could do this to me but it was.  I thought I was six feet tall and bullet proof.  It was taking my dreams and hopes away in front of me and I just didn't care. 

So after I left my tafe IT course I enrolled at Assumption College, it was a pretty good school and I even got off drugs for a while when I was at school I started excelling at IT once again.  I was one of the top students and in IPT I even made a programme for an ATM.  I even got set up with job working for the council at the age of 16, and the job involved networking the council’s computers, and the pay was absolutely brilliant.  But for some reason I started getting stoned at school.  We had assignments due and id wait till they were just about due.  I copied the assignments off people.  Well I kept getting stoned and the job opportunity of a lifetime left, the last plane had gone and I missed it.......I'll never get another opportunity like that in my whole life.  My grades started to drop in all my subjects, I started to develop schizophrenia and I started to hear voices in my head.  I didn't understand what they were.   It first started when I was at Warwick High I was sitting at the table with my mates
and these things started falling in front of my eyes.  They were like little see through spirals and hairs. (No one else could see them though)  I just ignored them though, but if I knew then what I know now I would have stopped the weed instantly because little did I know I was about to embark on a journey through insanity.  So it began I was smoking weed before school behind a building through a pipe.  That’s how it started every day before school. 

I got smashed as but then in classes, instead of doing the work I'd just chill and have fun in art.  I'd draw scare crows with signs saying' "No Feeding birds" and I’d just draw crazy stuff.  My marks went from A's to C's then to failing but I was so smashed I just didn't care, I just kept doodling away and that was just in art.  In my other subjects they went down too.  I was having trouble concentrating; I didn't want to work any more.  I just stopped doing my homework and that drove my grades into the ground.  But I didn't even notice.  See the drug was now using me instead of me using it, but I wasn't even using any bad drugs, it was just weed right?  Wrong look what it was doing to me and I didn't even notice or even care.  Just imagine if I was using heavy drugs.

I believe if you just have to try drugs do it after you graduate or better yet don't do them at all.....They change who you are and for the worse.  I went from A's and B's to D's and E's and then I didn't even graduate.  I left school to go smoke pot with my friends, so I did 2 whole years of school, started grade 12 and then left about a month into it and never went back.  How sad was I, and I so wished I did cause if I did,  it would of opened up so many more opportunities, and if I never started weed while at school it would of opened up even more good job skills, big money.  It’s so hard to find a job and when you finally do, its got shit pay, and worse hours.

I believe if I had never started drugs while at school I Just would have gone so further and would have fulfilled all my hopes and dreams.

Hey mum this is a cover letter I wrote, I'm at mission, well here it is......
 
A while back I had a mental illness and I went to the hospital and stayed there for a while, while there I made some new friends, played games, listened to music, watched my shows in the morning and did a bit of art, I just made the most out of being in hospital. You manage to save money while the pressures of life really aren’t on you, and yes I know everyone’s got problems but it's really depends on weather you want to realize the problem and what you want to do with it  which will depend on if you get better and how long it will take.
 
It's always fun meeting new and interesting people with different sorts of talents, but if you don't have talents why not get one why not get one, maybe you could get a musical instrument, maybe you like art or you could even be a novel writer and you may not even know it. You should always try new things because you never know something you've never done before could be the most fun thing you've ever done. There always something for everyone in this world you just have to explore different paths and find out what you specialize in.

It's always better going threw life doing what you want not what some one else wants you to do, You'd be a lot happier doing something you enjoy rather then what others want you to do. I guess in this world you really have to think of the bright side of things because if your always negative no matter where you go or what you do things will always seem the same and generally it's that your always unhappy or you've got so many problems that you start blaming others for your own misfortune. Around the world even here in Australia there are a lot people less fortunate then us, but we don't care as long as it's going good for us. It doesn’t overly worry us maybe we don't even realize that even with natural disasters hitting cities there are still people over in the world vision countries are still worse off. You need something to keep your mind active and always try to do something constructive weather it's something to help train your talents or just something to keep your mind going. A good mind doing nothing i
s really a waste but alas if you don't really don't want to use your brain no ones going to force you, but really when you think about it the only person that effects is you.

In having been around mental illnesses, having had problems myself. I have grown a passion for wanting to help these kids to try to help them to try to understand a bit better about what their going through. I guess just having someone to talk to having gone through a mental illness  is a really good thing, someone that's just like you that enjoys having a good time and it's not all about that you just have to get better, you've got to have fun as well or I’ve seemed to notice when there's no fun the kids are just depressed and yes the nurses give them activities to do, but half the time it seems that the kids don't even want to try them but if there forced they complain and say there unfairly treated. Then if the kids happen to want a musical instrument they can play it when they get bored, while building their talents so when they do leave they've picked up something along the way.
 

I believe that having the qualifications for being a mental health worker is a great asset but the kids having someone who’s been though something similar, someone who won't judge them and take them for who they are. I just want to help give them more of an understanding into the mental illness world while they can just have a good friend to talk to, someone to just chill out with and do fun things from meditation in a room with nice peaceful relaxing music to having a game of pool. Well everybody needs a good friend some one you can just relate to, someone you feel doesn’t put pressure on you, someone who lets you say what you want and doesn’t care what you say and i'll proberly have crazier stories then them.  Hope you like it....