When Denise Maupin talks about her troubled past, she uses adjectives like “suicidal” and “destructive” to describe life as a drug addict and convict. When she talks about life now, she can use the word “perseverance” to describe her turnaround into a college graduate who founded a support group for former gang members.
The road that finally led the 35-year-old Maupin to the California State University-Fullerton commencement ceremony earlier this month, where she received her bachelor’s degree, has been winding and unyielding.
Maupin, who is of Cuban and Italian descent, resided in foster and group homes and did not meet her biological mother until she moved to California at age 12. Soon after, she dropped out of school, and by 14 she was on her own and addicted to cocaine and methamphetamines.
Maupin managed to earn her GED when she was 18, but her life didn’t turn around until she hit rock bottom at 27. It was then, imprisoned for drug possession on her second strike — one more strike meant life in prison — that she realized the life she’d deemed “normal” had to change.
“Something had to happen, so I went to a treatment facility when I got out of prison, and my life changed from that point,” she says. By the time she was 30, she had completed a 12-step program. “I started to find more direction and purpose.”
A friend who was an attorney suggested that she go to school and walked her through the process of applying to a junior college.
