Things the recovery industry will not tell you: 1. The drug worked. That is why people use it. Not weakness. Not moral failure. A neurological event so complete and persuasive that any honest account of addiction has to start there. The problem is not that the drug fails. The problem is that what it does is unrepeatable, and you will burn your entire life to the ground trying to get back to a place that no longer exists. 2. Shame is not guilt. Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am something bad. Guilt is appropriate. Shame is a cell with no windows. Most people use the words interchangeably. That mistake is lethal. 3. You cannot shame someone who has already named the thing you are holding over them. Say it first. Say it in plain light. The weapon drops. 4. Guilt can coexist with self-respect. Shame cannot. You can hold the damage and the dignity at the same time. I know because I live there. 5. Radical honesty does not give you back who you were. It hands you the clean slate of who you always wanted to be. The mask comes off. The cartoon other people drew of you stays on the page. 6. Nobody gets clean on a winning streak. 7. You have to be almost self-delusional in your forgiveness of yourself. (Go watch Chase Hughes) 8. The greatest sin was not the chaos. It was the absence. Being unavailable to the people who needed you. 9. Sustainable recovery starts with one thing: honesty with yourself. If you love an addict and want to help, that is the only door in. 10. I am only an expert on my recovery. Nobody is an expert on anyone else’s.

I see your profile picture. That’s Johnny Cash. My hero too. Arrested seven times. Smuggled 668 amphetamines across the Mexican border in 1965. Took every drug there was and drank like I did. Cheated on his first wife. Slept with more woman than I ever did. Hit bottom in a cave in Tennessee in 1968 trying to crawl off and die. And then he got up. He got clean. He spent the rest of his life singing for prisoners and addicts and the people the country threw away because he knew he was one of them. That was the whole point of the Man in Black. He wore it for the poor and the beaten down. He wore it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime. He wore it for the ones who never heard a word of Jesus. He wore it for the addicted and the dying. He wore it as a standing witness that no one is past saving. You picked his picture. You did not pick his message. Try listening to the words.