This story originally appeared in The Epoch Times

Far from the pomp and grandeur of sharing the stage with her son, Vice President JD Vance, at President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, Beverly Aikins was standing alone on a modest wooden platform in a rural southern Ohio village in the Appalachian foothills.

Microphone in hand, she was sharing her story of recovering from addiction. At the Aug. 30 event, people from all walks of life spoke about overcoming similar battles.

Aikins, who celebrated her 10th year of sobriety this year and turned 64 on Trump’s inauguration day, recalled the first time she got high on drugs.

“I was working as a registered nurse at a hospital,“ she told a crowd of about 50 people. ”I had a headache, and one of my coworkers suggested that I take a Vicodin.

“I took it from the medication room and felt like I never have before. I thought it was the answer to my problems with the energy it gave me.”

Aikins said her addiction went from Vicodin to Percocet and eventually spiraled to morphine and heroin.

“I stole the morphine, the hospital found out, and I lost my job, my nursing license, and my family,“ she said. ”Addiction cost me the most important things in my life, and it almost cost me my life.”

As the addiction escalated, Aikins said, she was living out of her car. She was estranged from her children. Her parents had died. She felt alone and uncertain about the future.

“I remember telling someone there that I’m going to die if I don’t stop using drugs, and I wanted to die,” she said.

“I also remember the last time I got high. I woke up on a bathroom floor, naked and covered in my own sweat and vomit. That was far from the feeling of euphoria I had the first time I got high.”

Aikins married Donald Bowman in 1983. The couple divorced in 1984, not long after Vance was born.

She focused on raising her two young children alone and worked long hours.

Today, she travels the country sharing her story. She said she hopes that “it will have a positive impact, even if it’s just one person in the crowd.”

Aikins is honest about her life choices. She has been married five times, survived multiple suicide attempts, and undergone multiple unsuccessful rehabilitation stints that would lead to sobriety for a few months before she returned to using drugs.

Vance, for his part, was able to overcome a tumultuous childhood.

He has spoken about how he started to get in trouble and skip school as a teenager before going to live with his grandmother. He credits “Mamaw” with getting him back on track.

Vance served in the Marines, earned degrees from Ohio State University and Yale University Law School, and flourished in Silicon Valley before returning to Ohio.

Before becoming a senator from Ohio in 2022 and then Trump’s running mate in 2024, Vance was catapulted into the national spotlight with his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

“I was the abandoned son of a man I hardly knew and a woman I wish I didn’t,” he wrote in the book.

After the event in Greenfield, Aikins told The Epoch Times that her recovery story progressed when she attended 12-step recovery classes through Narcotics Anonymous and was admitted to a treatment program and sober living house in Kentucky.

It was there that Vance visited his mother and told her about his memoir and the fact that it did not portray her positively.

“Will it help with your healing?” Aikins said she asked him.

She recalled her son responding, “I think it will.”

“Hillbilly Elegy” became a New York Times bestseller, and Netflix adapted it into a movie, in which Amy Adams played Aikins.

When Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, were expecting their first child, a son, he invited his mother to witness the birth.

Aikins said that marked a milestone in their reconciliation.

“That’s the type of thing you ask your mom to do, and he asked me,” she said.

When Trump returned to the White House, Vance invited his mother to stand with him, his wife, and the couple’s three children onstage at the inauguration in January.

Earlier this year, Vance led a celebration at the White House to commemorate her decade of sobriety.

At the Aug. 30 event, Kim Davis, president of Hope for Highland, a nonprofit organization in the Ohio county that includes Greenfield, called Aikins “courageous” for “sharing personal, intimate details of things that so often come with shame and guilt.”

“It’s inspiring for people who are now where she was to hear someone speak so openly,” Davis told The Epoch Times. “She speaks for a lot of people who don’t have a voice.”

Aikins said she agrees with Davis. It is what drives her to travel around the country speaking to even sparse crowds.

“We’ve got to tell people that recovery is possible,“ she said. ”We have to recover out loud.