At age 41, Hallie Franceschi never thought she’d be here.
After decades trapped in addiction, multiple incarcerations, and losing custody of her children, she now wakes up each morning in her Mountville home with something she never had before: choices.
“I never thought that I would ever be here,” Hallie said, her voice filled with a combination of relief and disbelief. “The fact that I get to wake up today and decide what I want to do—and I can change my mind tomorrow if I want—I can do that now.”
But the path to this point was anything but straight.
Early Descent
Hallie’s struggle with addiction began early—around age 11 or 12. There was no gradual progression, no slow descent into substance use. As she put it, “It was off to the races as soon as I started.”
While her peers experimented with alcohol or marijuana, Hallie quickly gravitated toward harder substances … pills, heroin, “anything I could get my hands on,” she said. Even then, she felt like an outsider—someone missing what everyone else seemed to have.
“I could be in a room of my peers and just not feel part of the group,” Hallie said. “I always just felt like an alien, like I was missing something that everybody else was getting.”
Growing up in what she describes as a “good house” with working parents—her mother a nurse, her father a mental health services worker—Hallie was “the last person anybody would have thought would grow up and be a heroin addict.” Her parents’ divorce during her early teens created plenty of emotional turmoil, but it also created something else, too: opportunities for her addiction to flourish under decreased supervision.
The Spiral Continues
Despite her struggles with substances, Hallie managed to excel academically, taking accelerated classes and graduating high school. She even earned acceptance to the University of Pittsburgh, where she planned to study marketing and advertising design. But the pull of addictive substances proved stronger than her academic ambitions.
“I wasn’t able to show up for any of it,” she said. “Could I pass things? Could I write papers? Yes. I could kind of white-knuckle my way through it. But I could only go so far with that before professors were like, ‘All right, I don’t know what you’re doing, but you can’t do this.'”
Years of Survival
What followed was decades of what Hallie described as “living like an animal.” Her world shrank to a singular focus: drugs—how to get them and what she needed to do to obtain them. Everything else fell away.
The cost was devastating. She lost custody of her three children. Multiple arrests led to years of incarceration. Despite attempts to enter recovery and maintain sobriety through various programs, nothing stuck.
“I had completely accepted that this is what my life had become,” she said.
The cycle of substance abuse led to increasingly dangerous situations. She faced multiple DUIs, assaults, and other charges.
“Chaos was just kind of my jam,” she said, reflecting on years spent cycling through jail stays, failed attempts at stability, and deeper descents into addiction.
Rock Bottom and Beyond
Even during periods of apparent stability—maintaining jobs as an executive assistant or in commercial cleaning—her addiction always won.
“Who wants to show up for work?” she remembered thinking. “I want to go out and do drugs.”
The pattern seemed unbreakable until her final incarceration. This time, the court offered early release on one condition: she had to go to rehab. This ultimatum led her to Colonial House in York, PA, where she spent three months. It was there she first heard about The GateHouse and faced a fork in the road.
“I still had a home to go back to,” Hallie said, “but I knew if I did, it was just going to be the same thing. So, I took a leap of faith, listened to a couple of people, and ended up at The GateHouse.”
Finding Her Way at The GateHouse
When Hallie arrived at The GateHouse in May 2021, she said she was “a shell of a person.”
“I had nothing. I didn’t even have myself,” she recalls. “I wasn’t capable of holding a job. My clothes were disgusting. I had just spent the last 25 years surviving.”
The GateHouse became more than a recovery program for Hallie—it became a bridge back to humanity. Staff members helped her navigate the basics of modern life that had passed her by during years of substance abuse and incarceration. Simple things like electronic payments at stores or using ride-sharing apps were foreign concepts.
“They took me out and just showed me the world with this whole different mindset,” Hallie said. “They showed me that I can fit in somewhere without the use of drugs.”
Learning to Live Again
The program introduced Hallie to activities she’d never experienced before—bowling, miniature golf, movies with friends.
“These were not things that I did,” she said. “Just participating with other people that were staying straight and didn’t want to get high anymore, it was strange. Getting through all of that weird, awkward stuff was uncomfortable, but I did it.”
Through The GateHouse’s programs, Hallie progressed from Residential Extended Care to GateHouse Transitional Living. Each step built upon the last, helping her develop crucial life skills and self-confidence.
“They showed me how to do things for myself,” she said. “Nobody did anything for me. They just showed me what I could do. That empowerment—I can’t even explain how much that meant to me.”
Building a New Life
Today, Hallie has her own place, shares her home with a roommate she met at The GateHouse, and works at an aerospace engineering company. More importantly, she’s exploring new career possibilities that align with her desire to give back to others. She’s even reconnected with one of her children.
Her goals have evolved as she’s grown in recovery.
“Things that I thought I wanted, I no longer want,” she said. “I’m trying to find a job, a career that is more authentic to who I am and what I can contribute. That’s become super important to me.”
The Power of Support
As Lancaster County’s Extraordinary Give approaches, Hallie’s story exemplifies why The GateHouse is so vital. The transformation from survival to revival doesn’t happen in isolation—it requires support, structure, and a community that believes in second chances.
“Everybody deserves a chance at success,” Hallie said. “If I can do this, and if my life can change because of a place like GateHouse, it can happen for anybody. I’m not special. There are so many people just needing that little bit of extra encouragement, those little glimmers of hope that their lives can get better.”
When asked how it feels to be at this point in her life, Hallie paused for a moment and then smiled.
“It’s nice to get to a place where I feel like I can just breathe,” she said. “I can trust in the fact that, because I put the work in, I can figure it all out without burning my life to the ground. That is a wonderful feeling.”
During this year’s Extraordinary Give, please join us in ‘Giving Extra’ to help community members like Hallie continue their journey to recovery and build healthy, meaningful lives. Your support helps to provide a foundation that makes transformation possible. Visit our Extraordinary Give page to bookmark our page and make a contribution on Nov. 22.
