The Joint Redemption: Ginger
The Story of Ginger Goolsby Howze: The Hope Dealer
By Monica Jones
Ginger Goolsby Howze now lives a life of purpose. She has seven years clean, an amazing relationship with her son, and works as a Certified Peer Specialist—a job that allows her to use her painful past to guide others. But the path to this stable, fulfilling life involved losing everything, including her mind.
Her journey pulls back the curtain on the real and present underworld of addiction that continues to grip our community. Over coffee, I got to hear her full story, from a childhood of feeling different to the terrifying grip of meth addiction, and finally, to the surrender which saved her life. It is a powerful story of struggle, drugs and devastation, but ultimately of perseverance, and becoming a beacon of light.
The Privilege of Pain and the Sickness of the Drug
Ginger grew up in Columbus, with a successful business-owner father who ran 13 grocery stores called Goolsby Foods, with a loving, Christian family. From the outside, life was idyllic. Yet, from a young age, she was struggling. “As long as I can remember, I’ve always felt like I was different,” she said. In a supportive home, Ginger felt like an outsider in her own skin, fighting an unseen battle with emotional turmoil.
Diagnosed with ADHD, the internal chaos manifested as intense, crippling low self-esteem. She remembers therapeutic confidence exercises she undertook where she was “literally not being able to think of” a single positive thing about herself. Ginger excelled at making others feel good and special; this outward focus was a tragic mask for the intense self-loathing she carried. By her junior year of high school, this compounding emotional pain exploded into a nervous breakdown that required a three-week stay at the Bradley Center.
When she returned, she was vulnerable, seeking external validation and acceptance—a path which quickly led her to rebellion and the wrong crowd.
After dabbling in marijuana and cocaine, Ginger was introduced to meth at age 19. The highly addictive drug found a perfect home in her craving for external escape, offering a false sense of confidence and belonging. The spiral was instant and ruthless, leading her to commit the ultimate betrayal: stealing from the loving family she desperately needed. She watched her parents suffer the sting of her deceit, yet the addiction’s demands outweighed her conscience. Ginger now credits her survival to their tough love. “I always share that I am here today, one, on my parents’ prayers, but two, because they never enabled me,” she explained. “If my using had ever been easy, I’d be dead.” She realized that the harsh consequences—homelessness, jail, starvation—were the only things powerful enough to eventually break the spell.
Meth took a deep, terrifying hold. “It’s a demonic drug,” Ginger says, noting that nearly everyone she knows in recovery from meth has had direct experiences with what she describes as demons. The drug warped her reality, plunging her into deep, visual paranoia and psychosis. Her world became terrifyingly violent and desperate.
At her lowest point, she lived in a dilapidated shed in rural Crawford, Alabama, for three months, in the dead of the summer heat, completely without power or running water. It was a brutal, isolated existence marked by constant physical danger. She suffered injuries which marked her body, not just from the neglect and exposure of the lifestyle, but from the brutal atmosphere surrounding the drug use. She recalls one terrifying night where she watched her partner being beaten repeatedly with a hammer, genuinely believing she was witnessing his murder. The constant hunger, the fear of violence, and the physical degradation—coupled with multiple jail stays and brief periods of sobriety—still could not break the addiction’s terrifying grip.
The Price of Surrender
The final years of addiction were a waking nightmare. The guilt of being away from her young son, Jackson, was “excruciating.” The constant, grinding paranoia from meth use eroded her grip on reality until she questioned everything. “To this day, there’s things I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t real,” she admitted. Her mind, ravaged by the drug, was failing her; she was truly losing her mind, desperate to stop, but locked in the cycle’s prison-like grip.
The deepest cut came as a moment that offered clarity through pain: a jail visit from her former pastor, Roy White. He delivered a message that sliced through the drug-induced haze, a message from her seven-year-old son, Jackson: “Jackson said he’s very angry with you for what you did to Mimi [her mom] and Big Dude [her dad]. And he wants you to get better and come home and be his mom again.” That moment, hearing the raw pain and desperate hope in her son’s message, was crushing. It was the proof that her choices were actively damaging the person she loved most.
” That was in 2017, I had gotten a year clean and then relapsed for 2 years and then got clean in January of 2019.”
The true shift required what she calls surrender—a moment of radical, spiritual honesty. It was the absolute, crushing realization that she was the author of her own pain.
“The biggest epiphany… was when I really owned and took a real hard look and had to tell myself, you picked drugs, men, lifestyle, all these things over your child… When I really owned my mess, it was hard and it took a lot of work to do that. But when I tell you, God, it was instantly, that was part of my surrender.”
The profound relief of this acceptance was immediate; Ginger recalls that owning her guilt and acknowledging her choices was instantly freeing. She realized the biggest obstacle to recovery was always herself. “You have to get out of your own way,” she stressed. This led to her core belief, which she calls “the magic sauce”: radical responsibility.
She understood that the only thing she could truly control was her reaction, regardless of past trauma. “Take responsibility for anything and everything that you possibly can, because the more responsibility you take, the more control of your life you’re going to have. That’s the magic sauce.”
The opportunity to act on this surrender came suddenly. Her partner, Jeff, was picked up on an old warrant. They had been trying desperately to stop using, and the arrest provided the involuntary break from the drug and the destructive lifestyle they needed. “I heard it in his voice,” Ginger recalled of the phone call. “He said, ‘This is it. This is what we’ve been waiting on.’” With Jeff in custody, Ginger made her move. She fled to the home of the one non-using friend she had left, Kim Clegg. “I kicked dope laying next to my friend Kim’s bed. She saved my life.”
The physical misery of withdrawal—the sickness, the aches, the sheer exhaustion—was the final price she paid to reclaim her freedom. On January 30, 2019, Ginger and Jeff started their clean journey, separated but united in their commitment to a new life.
Redemption Today: A New Creation
The stark contrast between her past and present is best summed up in Ginger’s own words, reflecting on her birthday in 2018 versus her clean birthday today:
Today, Ginger is thriving. She works her dream job as a Certified Peer Specialist for the Georgia Mental Health Consumer Network, using her past as a tool to encourage others. “I get to use my lived experience with mental health challenges and addiction, and I can just encourage … I absolutely love it. It’s just been a dream come true.”
Her son, Jackson, now 20, lives with her. “We have just an amazing relationship,” she said.
The trust she once destroyed is now fully restored with her parents, demonstrating the profound victory of her recovery. “I have a key to my parents’ house. If that ain’t God, I don’t know what is. That’s just leaps and bounds. That’s a huge deal. Life is good.”
In a beautiful commitment to their new lives, Ginger and Jeff married. They were baptized together on Easter Sunday in 2019 at The Fort Church (1342 17th Street), a welcoming space that Ginger calls a true “come as you are” community that has been a constant, massive force in her stability and ongoing recovery.
Resources for Help: Local Hope Dealers
Ginger, who now considers herself a “Hope Dealer,” is a dedicated advocate for the life-saving work done by Safehouse Ministries and her spiritual home, The Fort Church. She also supports Take The City, which houses the Redeem Program—an initiative led by Cindy Hurst (who shares a similar recovery journey) that goes directly into the community to hotels and challenging spaces, offering a boutique and other resources to women and children in need.
If you or someone who is struggling with addiction, Ginger encourages finding a safe community and utilizing local resources:
- Safehouse Ministries: (706-322-3773)
- Offers shelters like the Grace House (women and children) and the Freedom House (men’s shelter).
- Tomorrow’s Hope is a 100% free, court-approved residential program.
- The Fort Church: (1342 17th Street, Columbus)
- 12-Step Programs: NA or AA meetings are readily available throughout Columbus.
- Take the City: An excellent local resource, including the Redeem Program for women.
Because, there is always hope.