In high school, Tiffany Jenkins was cheerleading captain and student body president. Then she became a drug addict.
As a popular student with good grades, Jenkins was hardly the girl people would vote “most likely to end up strung out on the floor of a jail cell.” But that’s where she ended up in 2012, at the low point of her opioid addiction.
Now five years sober, the mother of three has a popular blog, Juggling the Jenkins, where she blends mom humor with stories of addiction recovery. The unlikely combo has helped her gather more than a million Facebook followers in less than a year.
In this video from Circa, Jenkins explains how she uses her humor videos to draw people in. “They’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love this girl, she’s so funny,’ and then they get to my page and find out that I’m a drug addict, and they’re like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. This is not what I think of when I think of drug addicts.’”
She uses her platform to share her story as well as stories of recovery and hope from others.
Jenkins started drug rehab after a 120-day jail stint, inspired by her father who had recently entered rehab for alcoholism. Then she got pregnant.
“I had been clean for 10 months and living in a halfway house when I got pregnant with my son,” she says. “I already had a good foundation of recovery, but knowing that a little human was growing inside me and would depend on me from now until forever gave me a motivation and determination I didn’t know I had to keep going.”
