Victoria woman's appearance in Netflix series after experiencing addiction and homelessness inspires hope

When Carey Oakes embraced her first guitar, she couldn’t have imagined how dynamic the soundtrack to her life would become.

“I’m plucking away at it like it’s a stand-up bass,” Carey smiles about the picture of her as a little girl holding a big guitar.

“It’s much too large for me.”

By the time it would have been the right size, Carey had experienced too many wrong things.

When she was 12, instead of finding comfort in playing guitar, a friend suggested she find solace in doing heroin.

“She said, ‘This will make all of the scary things go away and if it doesn’t it will make it so you don’t care about it anymore,” Carey recalls. “It worked for a lot of years.”

By the time Carey realized it wasn’t working, she’d endured more than a decade of addiction and homelessness.

“This used to be my home for many years,” Carey says, gesturing to a shopping cart full of garbage bags.

“It was piled high.”