A Tennessee couple shared their inspiring before and after photos from their struggles with meth addiction and went viral.
Brent Walker shared the pictures of himself and wife Ashley, 31, in a Facebook post last month. In the post, he explained that the first picture was taken around December 2016, when he and Ashley were “inactive meth addiction.” The second photo was taken July 2019.
Brent, 30, wrote that it will be three years since the couple has been “clean and sober and living for God” soon.
“I hope that my transformation can encourage [an] addict somewhere!” he wrote. “It is possible to recover!!”
Brent’s Facebook post has gone viral, and it has been shared over 143,000 times and has over 19,000 comments.
“It blew our minds,” Brent told Today in an interview. “I had a bunch of people who told me that our story has encouraged them to get help and check into rehab.”
Brent told to Today, he was 9 when he started smoking and 12 when he began using marijuana and drinking. He also tried acid and other drugs three years later.
According to the outlet, his addiction became serious 10 years ago, when he and his brother Jess were partying and Jess asked Brent for a ride home, Brent declined, because he wanted to sleep before work, Jess drove himself home and was in a fatal car crash.
“That is when I went to the hard drugs and tried meth for the first time,” Brent said.
Brent told Today that he first met Ashley about nine years ago, and they used meth together. In 2016, Brent was released from prison after serving two years of a 10-year sentence, the outlet reported.
He was worried that he would be sent back to prison if he failed his probation drug tests.
In December of 2016, Brent explained, “I said to Ashley, ‘I want to build a life,’ and I asked her to come with me and she said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go.’”
They got married 30 days after getting sober. During their first year of sobriety, the couple worked together to get through the challenges.
“We just fed off each other. If I was having a bad day and craving she would help talk me out of it and vice versa,” Brent explained to Today. “We blocked and erased every friend we had who did drugs.”
The couple returned to school, and Brent received a GED diploma and Ashley earned her nurse’s assistant certification. Today, Brent working at a local steel plant and does occasional heating, ventilation and air conditioning work, while Ashley works in the local hospital’s intensive care unit.
“Whenever I was an addict I thought that because I had ruined my life there was no way to turn it around,” Brent told Today. “It just had to stay that way. You don’t have to live like that forever. You can have a better life.”