Jen Cutting is a public speaker and she's also the founder of a wonderful organization called Supplies for Life and she's doing some really amazing things in her community. According to Jen, there’s no specific way of how Jen got into public speaking, she “literally just kind of fell into it.” Her whole life, she’s been petrified of public speaking, it was never her thing. And then lots of things changed in her life, she got sober, and started to find power in telling her story. From there it kind of just blossomed and Jen fell in love with it. Jen feels public speaking is “probably one of the most empowering things I’ve ever done in my life,” counting it as being in the top three.
story of what happened and now I’m here telling it. Because it is no longer happening, but it’s now becoming steppingstones for someone else to no longer be embarrassed and sad.” Jen finds it powerful when you can say, “This is where I started, this is how I fell down, this is how I got back up, and this is how I’m changing still everyday – learning, moving, becoming who I’m supposed to be and evolving.”
their life where people are going to try and change their life for the better, to be the people that they’re capable of and supposed to be, there are women who are getting their menstruation cycle and not having anything; no toothpaste for people, no clean undergarments, no soap, no deodorant. Jen shared that “we act like they’re asking for these great things, like they have these high expectations because they want toothpaste.” Jen shared, “I don’t know how you’re supposed to bury your soul and heal from all this past trauma when you don’t open your mouth to speak because you haven’t brushed your teeth in a month.”
According to Jen, “the amazing community that I have on YouTube that they’re like family and friends. I know it sounds crazy to say, but these individuals are amazing people and I cherish every single one of them. They bought my wish list out like seven times, to the point that the post office was like, you have to come pick up your own packages because we don’t have a truck big enough to deliver all your supplies.” From here, Supplies for Life just continued to grow. Jen now has her own office, which has “slowly but surely taken over.” Jen works with individuals in the community who are experiencing homelessness, domestic violence, substance abuse. She works with a lot of parents, and has parenting supplies like diapers, wipes, things like that. She is “just really grateful and blessed that I’m able to do work in the community where I once was.”
She documented her fear of going back into the court system after being in it for criminal things and family things. She documented going through the custody battle. She documented her daughter coming home and their life now. Basically, she documents the trials and tribulations of being a woman in recovery trying to be a professional, but also trying to navigate and balance being a mom, a wife, a human being, an activist, an advocate. She really promotes, “you know, we talk about prison, we talk about addiction, we talk about substances, because that is part of who I am in my story.” But, as Jen noted, “that’s not the gist of my content; my content is really about life after addiction.”
and amazing. She has found it’s usually the local people that are bitter, usually people well-related to her husband and herself unfortunately are bitter and sour because they don’t understand. Jen shared, “unfortunately, that’s just par for the course.” She guesses “some people just have smaller closed minds than others.”
as much as my subscribers are a part of my community, I’m a part of their community.” It gives a support system all the way around. She has subscribers who became friends, who will call her up or message her to see if she is okay, asking “you seem off, are you alright?” It has helped her through that.
you go to that helps you stay sober, service work is not just for the people you’re serving, it’s also for you. You can’t keep what you don’t give away.”
rent, this is what I do, this is what I give back to my community. This is what keeps it fresh for me and shows me how I never want to live my life again. But this also shows my child and my loved ones, this is we don’t.” This is the main principle of harm reduction for Jen, meeting people where they’re at, but also not leaving them behind.
it doesn't fit for what they want or what they want to do.” She’s had people that told her where to go, or whatever, and after a few weeks or months the person then apologizes to Jen who responds “I get it, I get it, it’s okay.” Jen has one person, George, that she’s worked with for a very long time, “and he and I have gotten into it numerous times. He’s like family to me, I absolutely love him and his entire family. My husband and him have a relationship, they were in school together and everything. We joke around about it on [my YouTube] channel. He basically told me to go after myself a couple times and I was like, okay. And when he was ready, he was like I’m sorry and I’m like, I know, I know.” It is what it is for Je, who knows what it’s like being there. For the most part, Jen noted that people are always extremely grateful that she’s there, extremely happy for the support and the love. Jen thinks the people have come to know that they can count on her. She’s gone above and beyond for most of “my people” as much as she possibly can. She gets very attached to the people that she’s working with because she gets It. On a very personal level she gets it. She knows what it is like to be overlooked, unloved, looked over, ignored, pacified, judged, all of that. She feels “it takes one to know one, that’s why the peer movement is such a powerful movement, because life experience.”
support, but you don’t know. How do you cope with appointments when working with individuals who aren’t ready yet, or have fallen down again … I cry a lot, and I just keep going. I have to say to myself, and this is very difficult because I’m clerk in a surf Bob and what that means is I’m an advocate and a coach. I’m certified, whatever, call that fancy stuff. Basically what that means is I am to walk alongside you on your path, so even though I can see that ginormous hole in front of you and I want to push you to walk around that, if you choose to fall in it again that is your choice, that is your life, it is your decision. It is my job to do what you need me to do, and just support you. Sometimes it’s very difficult. Like I said earlier, I genuinely fall in love with every single person I work with. Every single person gets a piece of my heart, it’s just who I am as a person. It hurts me when I watch them fail, but my job is to walk alongside them. I know for me the only way I learned was going through it. Everybody and their mama could just claim don’t go there, don’t go that way, don’t do this, and I wouldn’t have heard them. Everybody’s experience is to themselves. I cry a lot, especially when it’s a fatal mistake, but I just keep going because I know it took me a very long time to get on the path that I’m currently on. Some days are better than others.”
was an inmate in the Delaware County Jail. Now she works alongside of the people who arrested her, everyone who didn’t believe in her or thought she could never accomplish anything besides being an active addict. She now gets to sit down across the table from them for something for work, or they have to call her to ask her for advice on how to better help somebody – she was the one who was never going to make it.  The complete opposite of addiction is connectivity for Jen. “When we are active we are isolating, we are by ourselves with our one or two using buddies or significant other. For me, my husband and I were active addicts together, and now we’re sober together. The complete opposite of addiction is connection, so you can’t go through these horrible things in life by yourself and then recover by yourself. I’m sure if you were locked on an island somewhere you could, but nobody wants to go through all this to be a lone or not have support or not be with anyone. I just feel like we go through all of this and the traumas that we’ve suffered. No one wakes up and says hey I want to be an addict today and ruin my life and go through all this pain and horrible stuff or whatever. It happens because of traumas, sexual assaults, genetics, the list goes on and on. They’re all really heavy horrible things that get us to this point. To have to stop doing what makes you feel better, which is the drugs. Let’s face it, they do make us feel better, that’s why we do them. To have to unpack all that heavy painful stuff that we’ve gone through in the past to become a better person, that’s why when I hear people say oh my God, druggies – they’re so weak, they’re just such weak people, it makes me want to throat punch people. That is the complete opposite. We are actually the most strongest, capable, amazing, creative, talented people I have ever met in my life. We go through these horrific events in life and we still keep going, and then we run into these brick walls of our addiction because of the trauma that we’re still trudging through. And then we bare it all for complete strangers, usually change our entire lives to become better people, and then nine times out of ten usually turn out to be people who devote our lives to helping others get through the hell we just walked through. But we are not good people, we are as weak as can be, and we just suck and we shouldn’t get anything in life.” Leslie shared that addiction has touched her life, and she thinks the more people start to talk about it, and “pull their head out of their ass, they’re gonna see that literally nobody can escape this right now. Like that whole six degrees of separation.”
was any type of evil in anything, and you leave it alone in the dark, the darkness allows it to grow and get out of control because you’re not looking at it so you don’t see it until bam it smacks you in the face and you can no longer keep that dirty little secret in the dark any longer.” Jen always says “that’s how the devil gets in the darkness. You leave a little crack and you just let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go. And that’s what we’ve been doing with addiction for so long.” COVID, as horrible as it was, was also a blessing in disguise for certain things. It allowed things like telemedicine and prescriptions. COVID opened up an entire world of health care that never was there before. It allowed people who were too embarrassed, too stigmatized, too judged, too alone, to be able to finally get some help that they needed from the privacy of their own home, from behind the technology. Jen observed, “the more we ignore stuff, how’s that worked out in the past.” This is affecting the entire world. And then you have these people who don’t know what they’re talking about trying to pretend they’re an authority on something, trying to fear-monger society by saying people are putting drugs, “like these crazy Halloween posts I see all over the place. That makes me want to pull my hair out of my head. And I get it, I’m a parent too. This shit’s scary. I get it, but let’s be rational. Let’s use our intelligent minds. Let’s have an open conversation that doesn’t have a bunch of judgment and stigma clouding our views. Let’s be realistic. Drugs are expensive, drugs are hard to find. People are not giving out free drugs to children that they don’t know, that they don’t care about, that they have no connection, when they can barely afford to get their own. Let’s be realistic about that. People aren’t even giving out free pot seeds because things are expensive. The society is struggling as a whole with everything. Nobody’s giving out drugs for free.” The drugs available today are not the same as a decade ago. They’re trash, and that, according to Jen, is part of the problem. They’re not the same drugs that they were. They’re the same names, but the structural makeup of the drugs is no longer the same. Everything is fake, processed, man-made. There’s no real oomph behind the drugs, so people are jacking up the prices to make it even more crazy. People are buying more in order to try and be able to obtain the same type of high, but when it’s fake stuff, like processed sugar and real sugar, you’re constantly using more processed sugar to get the same place you would with regular sugar, but it’s harder to obtain and you’re spending more money. That’s literally what’s happening, the drugs back in the day when heroin was actually heroin, meth was actually meth are no longer around. Now it’s street made crap unless you “got a really good hook” you don’t really even get
heroin in your heroin anymore, you basically just get fentanyl. Everything is basically fentanyl. Leslie asked Jen for any advice she has for parents with children, or really anyone with loved ones struggling with addiction. Jen responded, “I guess we could have a whole thing on that. As a parent, I have a child who saw my addiction, literally went through my addiction with me unfortunately. I feel like because of that it has opened up a lot of conversation that might not have been. My daughter knows what Narcan is, she knows how to use it. She understands that drug addiction, being an addict, is not a crime, that being an addict does not make you a bad person.” Jen feels that we are so gung-ho to shove down people’s throats that drug addicts are bad people. And Jen does not agree with this. As Jen stated, “they’re people who are sick with a disease. You wouldn’t treat somebody with cancer and ask them why they were so weak and why they couldn’t just stop, because it’s a disease inside your body. You can’t just stop. It doesn’t work that way. We are not the all-powerful and can just make our diseases stop.” Just stop with the tough love Jen shared. She doesn’t even know why that was ever a thing. Tough love kept her an active addict for over a decade. She knew “I was being a shitty human. I knew I was messing up. I knew I was doing bad things. I couldn’t help myself and I didn’t know how to not. And because I always felt like the people that were supposed to care about me hated me, were mad at me, didn’t want anything to do with me, it kept me sick that much longer. It kept me away from the people that potentially could possibly steer me in the right direction, that were supposed to love me. As addicts, as human beings, we are our own worst critics. We pick apart and analyze everything that is happening in our lives before someone else can. That’s what affects our self-esteem, our mental health, all of that. When you’re an active addict, that’s like a bazillion times more, it just plays on repeat in your head constantly – the feelings of inadequacy, the feelings of disapproval and let down and disgust and despair and depression and all the ugly feelings in the world. You walk around with it inside yourself 24/7. So when you go to the one person that you truly want to love you and they just berate you and berate you and berate you, it feeds your disease, it helps the addict behaviors stay alive.” Jen urges everyone, “If your child is suffering, your significant other, your loved one, find someone like me, my information is all over the Internet. Reach out. Find a recovery coach, find a therapist that you can sit down and talk to and get advice on how to sit down with your loved one and how to help them. There are many things that you can do, there’s many ways you can approach a conversation. You can sit down with your child and say what’s up with you, please don’t tell me nothing’s wrong, respect enough that I’m your parent and I can see something is wrong, what can I do to help, what are you struggling with. If you don’t want to talk to me, can I give you some names and numbers, can you talk to these people. There’s tons of Facebook groups, there’s tons of amazing informative Tik Toks out there, let’s go on YouTube. Nowadays with social media, you have a support system at your fingertips. Do not be afraid to use it. It literally can save someone’s life.” Especially since we have such instant access to people on the different forms of social media, the group is big enough there should always be somebody there no matter what time of day or day of the week. Unfortunately it often feels like we focus on the negative because there's so much of it. Jen feels like joining with Moxxi Women’s Foundation to bring a chapter to Delaware County is going to be a beautiful way to start focusing on more positive and supporting women because let's face it we make the world go round absolutely every day. Jen shared that “one of the perks of doing this is traveling and I usually try and take my daughter with me.” In June they went to Arizona and are part of a new series for the new Arizona Health Alliance Committee out there called Substance Use and Motherhood. “I got to see some of it the other day, and even though I knew what was said, watching my daughter speak on film and stuff I was a sobbing baby.”
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