“You should start a Substack,” my ex suggested last October.

We were talking on the phone. She uses me instead of a podcast while walking Luna, the dog we used to share.

Her only concern?

Consistency.

“You tend to put so much energy into things in the beginning. Then you let it slide…”

I used to be brilliant at beginnings. Only to fall asleep before the finish line.

That’s why I was surprised to learn that I’ve written nearly 150 blogs since that conversation.

It’s never too late to change.

I guess I have a lot of things to say.

But what surprised me most about all that writing was how dramatically it changed over time.

Early blogs were visceral, emotional and anchored entirely in my experience.

What was happening to me?

Over time, my perspective widened beyond the kitchen mirror. I started noticing the world around me — recovery meetings, the swimming pool, friendships, the coffee shop, university.

The question shifted from What is happening to me? to Where am I going?

Confessions of a Crack Smoker doesn’t feel like the right title anymore. It belongs to those early days — disoriented, manic, uncertain, and a little monstrous.

All this to say: it’s closing time for these Confessions.

I started a new Substack called A Guide to Being Human for Ghosts. That’s also the name of the book I’m writing.

(Original title: you guessed it, Confessions of a Crack Smoker.)

Some of the stories will be familiar. I’m going to revisit stories that I already posted here and try to write them in a more serial format.

But I’m also going to try to write new chapters there — and maybe even nail the ending.

This was a good place for me in early recovery.

I hope it was good for you, too.

Is it weird that I feel like I feel you here when I’m writing? Like you’re right here on this page with me?

I guess that’s why this page has been so important for me.

It made this ghost feel a whole lot less alone.

So thanks for keeping me company all this time.

Maybe I could interest you in joining me at the new Substack?

You can subscribe right here.

Maybe we can write the next chapter together.

There’s probably no way to really measure a human soul.

So far, the best instrument I’ve found is music.

You can learn a lot about a person by what hurts their heart, what makes them sing in the car, and what song is on repeat when no one’s around.

I have 1,829 songs in two Spotify playlists — How Will I Live Without a Body? and Farewell Transmission.

They're both curated collections to be played at my funeral.

I made them when I was an addict and obsessed over them whenever I was high.

I was high for a very long time.

I know, planning your funeral playlist is a strange habit for the living. It might even be a cry for help.

In early recovery, music was downright dangerous.

Listening to it — once, one of my favorite feelings in the world — only invited the wrong kind of memories. When I was high, it would ring out in my rented rooms for days on end.

And because smoking crack made everything so vivid, music etched itself deep inside. When I went clean, it was impossible to listen to those songs without longing to be in a certain state of mind.

If music feeds the soul, then as an addict it was often the only thing I remembered to feed. Drugs ate on everything else.

But little by little, I began to reclaim music — eventually, even the songs I knew so intimately while high.

In fact, there’s one playing right now. And you know what? The song doesn’t remain the same. It gets better.

For a long time, I thought the drugs had given those songs their power.

I was wrong.

Since getting clean, about 18 months ago, I’ve added just five funeral songs — usually when I’m sad or uncertain or just straight-up feeling sorry for myself. And, let’s face it, that can be a kind of comfort.

But in recovery, I've also minted seven new playlists:

• Mom exercise (she often works out with me)

• Afghan Whigs (because Afghan fucking Whigs)

• Feeeeelings (we all have them. or most of us.)

• Trails (for hiking)

• Meditation

• Patio (for starry nights)

• Writing (for right now)

The funeral playlists add up to 1,553 hours of non-stop music. It’s nice to be prepared. But are you going to stick around that long to bid me farewell? I’ll have long shuffled off this ex-crack smoker’s coil — and probably won’t be haunting anyone in particular.

Those playlists are still there.

But the soundtracks for living are catching up.

Every day, it grows.

A song for the gym. A song for the trail. A song for the night sky. A song for sitting with myself in a room — and actually having a nice time.

My soundtrack used to be for the end.

Now it's for the journey.

This is the sea.

“Do you know what I did yesterday?” Willy asked me while we were basking in the hotel sauna. “I baked 17 loaves of zucchini bread.”

“That’s… a lot of zucchini bread.”

That’s also quite an undertaking for a woman in her 80s. Then again, Willy isn’t like any senior citizen I know. She’s at the pool every day, bouncing up and down and flapping her arms in the water — part of an inscrutable exercise routine that includes something resembling a yoga class in the gym once a week.

“Do you know why I baked all those zucchini loaves?” she pressed.

“To eat them!” I chimed.

She laughed. “How am I ever going to eat 17 loaves?”

“No,” she continued. “I baked them because I grew 17 zucchini in my garden. I had to do something with them.”

Willy always has to do something. Logic is secondary. Motion is the point.

She has a perfect memory too.

“How’s your book going?” she’d ask. “What’s it about again?”

How do you tell someone who squeezes every drop out of life how much of yours you smoked away in a darkened attic? Willy and I had spent a lot of time growing in opposite directions. She reached for sunlight. I reached for my pipe.

She never knew about any of that. I bet she’d be supportive. But who wants to tell someone like Willy that some people grow zucchinis in their garden — and some people spend years letting their gardens grow wild.

She did try to settle down once and enjoy retirement. “I couldn’t last a couple of months.”

So she started taking care of her great-niece, full-time. They hiked and swam and went to movies together.

Then Covid happened and Willy was exiled to her home.

“My family treated me like I had the plague,” she recalled.

That was the closest Willy ever came to feeling old. Not because her body failed her, but because the world suddenly stopped needing her.

But Willy eventually broke free. She devoted herself to gardening and taking the bus to the pool and telling jokes and doing all the things most of us slowly stop making time for.

Willy always had somewhere to go, something to grow, someone to love. She treated life like a garden: if something wasn’t blooming, she planted something new.

I spent years doing the opposite. I sat in the dark, convinced there was nothing left to grow.

Willy knew better.

Life doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. Sometimes you have to move first. Sometimes you have to plant something and trust it will grow.

“If I’m not doing,” she said, leaning toward me in the sauna, “I’m done.”

I’m still tuned into Recovery Radio.

Maybe I should change the dial and get on with writing all the things I dreamed of as a kid — adventures, fantasies, stories for children with secret messages for grownups.

But the truth is, I don’t think I’m finished writing about this one thing.

The last time I wrote this feverishly, I was writing obituaries for the newspaper. They made me feel like I had a purpose. I was chronicling a life from beginning to end.

It didn’t feel like I was the story’s creator — just its conduit. After interviewing everyone, I’d race back to the newsroom and heave the whole story onto the page almost at once. It flowed through me, trickling from my fingertips and finally distilling into a drop or two of wisdom.

I was a receiver, dialed in.

When I became an addict, I had trouble locking into that signal. More and more, I relied on craft — the tricks they teach you in journalism school — while casting about for a message.

It’s not like the signal disappeared. It just got lost in years of emotional static.

But what if I was never dialing into some otherworldly radio station in the first place, but rather the divine in my own heart — and yours too?

When I learned how to live honestly, my heart cleared. And so did the static.

I found the signal.

That’s why my radio is still tuned to recovery. This is how I express my truth. You might express yours differently — through music, dancing, knitting, cooking, or cuddling.

Truth manifests in everything we do. Even the seemingly simple act of hugging.

That makes sense because I used to really suck at it. My ex was exceptional, though. She’d often rope me in for a life‑affirming embrace. How I squirmed.

I was incapable, I guess, of giving an honest hug; my heart too clouded by guilt, resentment, and toxic shame.

You should see me now.

Maybe we can say the same about the words you’re reading. Because they hail from a place that, for once in a very long time, is true.

When you find your truth, you find your signal.

Every addict says they've got a book in them. Oh, the stories they could tell.

And certainly, crack offers a devastating narrative. But many of these stories share the same problem: they rarely offer meaning. And people trapped in active addiction often have a hard time finding wisdom in their suffering.

Instead, stories become a kind of exaltation in the past. (See: Sheen, Charlie)

Or else, it’s the same series of extraordinarily sad stories — with every addict’s experience joining the same tapestry of tragedy.

Now, who wants to read that book?

Well, I am writing a book. It started very badly. I remember sitting on a bed in a rented room with a laptop at my fingertips. Only my fingers couldn’t receive the signal. They just loitered around the keys — mostly the Backspace button.

Let’s see: Memoirs of a Crac— No, no.

How would I begin this book, anyway? I hadn’t slept in days. There was nothing on my mind, save for a growing urge to scrape resin from the pipe on the night table.

A few days later, I took the laptop to a downtown alley, and traded it for a fistful of dope. I couldn’t write anyway. I couldn’t even live.

I found a way out of that place just before the story with no beginning reached a very bad ending. I found a desk at my mother’s house, overlooking a lilac tree. At first, I fumbled for sentences. My mind was flooded with memories — none of them good, and all of them keeping me awake at night. But as that cold winter passed and the flowers bloomed, something in my mind began blooming too.

I enrolled at the local university.

I wrote my first essay, my fingers dancing over the keyboard, possessed. Whole entire sentences! It felt like a new drug. Now, I’m writing to get high. It’s a strange kind of intoxication — one that gives something back.

Writing a book helps me imagine my experience as an unlikely gift — one that might give me what we spend our entire lives seeking: wisdom.

If I do gain wisdom from this catastrophe, I want to share that gift with you — without you having to go through the inconvenience of being a miserable, broke-ass junkie.

Maybe writing could make room for a conversation less trapped in the same old stories — one that is more compassionate and less dangerous.

At least, maybe addicts and their families will feel a little less alone.

Finally — maybe most importantly — I’m trying to nail the ending.

I learned about endings when I had a job writing sad stories about animals that needed help. They were being poached into extinction or needed a loving home or being forced to fight each other. I could never promise my reader a happy ending.

How could I — while still being honest? We’re devils to animals.

My editor came up with a workaround. Give the reader the power to make their own ending. And how would they do that?

Well, every animal story I wrote ended with a tag line at the bottom. Something like: ‘If you think you might be able to provide a home for the loneliest dog in the world, reach out to the so-and-so humane society.’

Or, ‘If you think the owners of Seaworld are evil bitches who are brutalizing beluga whales to make a buck, write to your local congressman today.”

It’s called a ‘Call to Action.’ It gives the reader somewhere to put their grief besides helplessness. Think about it: if the stories always ended along the lines of, ‘We’re fucked,’ would you keep reading?

When I listen to the tales we tell about addiction, I often hear the same message: ‘You’re fucked. I’m fucked. The world is fucked.’

When I listen to people in recovery, on the other hand, I hear the same words — only in the past tense. There’s still lots of drama in a recovering addict’s story. The end is never assured. Will the addict really stick the landing? There’s delicious uncertainty in that.

It’s hard to answer the fundamental question every survivor eventually faces: What was it all worth? Not why did it happen. Not how did I escape. But whether something beautiful can grow from something that nearly destroyed me.

It’s also got my favorite element in any story: a redemption arc.

I don’t know what the final chapter of my book will say. I don’t know if I’ll get the ending I’m hoping for. That’s the terrifying and wonderful thing about recovery: the story is written in moments, not chapters.

We are all made of pages. But not all of us are books.

Some of us are still stitching the pieces together, discovering what redemption might write with the pages we have left.

My goal in recovery isn’t to abstain from drugs.

To be sure, getting high again isn’t anywhere near my life goals right now. After the horrors I’ve known as an addict, that divorce feels final. In fact, I’m building the kind of life that not only makes drugs incompatible, but profoundly undesirable.

But here’s the thing: I don’t think drugs were ever the whole problem. I think something inside me was broken long before they showed up.

Somewhere along the line, I damaged my governance module — the internal system that recognizes when I’m drifting away from the life I want and gently steers me back.

A kind of conscience.

I don’t know exactly when it happened. Maybe something from the past finally rose up and tore into my present. Maybe old hairline fractures finally became fissures.

When I used to do coke on a Friday night, I’d spend all of Saturday reading, bathing, drinking smoothies, and generally feeling quite ashamed of myself. The rubber band always snapped me back to reality.

Never again, I vowed!

Until next Friday. It wasn’t the healthiest attitude towards weekend recreation. And, looking back, it wasn’t even fun. Worse, that attitude led to certified catastrophe.

Instead of bouncing back after a weekend binge, I hungrily looked to return to a high state of mind as soon as possible. Even if it meant cheating a little, by calling in sick to work on Monday. Or sneaking in a mid-week session.

I wasn’t doing drugs any more.

I was on them.

Being high became a preferred state. My default.

In recovery, I’m not focused on how long I can endure this life without getting high. I’m trying to repair what failed me.

That’s why I stopped counting my clean days. It began to feel like I was playing with dominoes — seeing how many I could stand before one inevitably fell and brought everything down.

Days are not dominoes. They’re for living.

Recovery taught me that abstinence solved an urgent problem. It didn't explain why I'd spent years trying to disappear in the first place.

For me, drugs became the magician's trick of addiction: the hand I kept watching while the real trick happened somewhere else. We’re fighting the symptoms, not the cause. Probably because it’s much easier to demonize drugs than it is to examine ourselves.

The problem was easy to diagnose: Drugs. At first, that felt like the whole answer.

But in time, I realized ‘never’ is too big a word for that pinprick of light we call a lifetime. I don't want fear to be the only thing keeping me alive.

This probably isn’t what you want to hear from someone who used to turn his own suffering into everyone else’s problem. There’s a good chance I burned the option for ‘maybe’ — and, considering how good these days have been, I’m not complaining.

I don’t want to do anything that imperils today. It’s that good. Besides, perhaps the addict’s brain never forgets the shortcut to oblivion.

I only know this isn’t the end of the trip. If it’s going to really work, I’ve got to figure out what went wrong. I don’t want my recovery to be based solely on fear. I want to understand myself deeply enough that my choices come from freedom rather than compulsion.

Maybe doesn’t mean I’m planning an escape route. It means I’m willing to admit I don’t know everything about who I’ll become.

I’m not looking to live a life built on never. I’m trying to become the kind of person who no longer needs it.

Recovery isn’t teaching me to fear drugs.

It’s teaching me to trust myself again.

It’s another bright and shiny day at the Mahtay Cafe.

Alex and Nana are behind the counter chirping merrily about a concert in Toronto, a bit of TV, and a new apartment.

Joy Division is playing. I’m stirring a tall glass of mint tea.

And someone I knew from a long time ago — pre-addict days — pulls up a chair and dumps his whole life on me. It’s my own fault, I guess. I was looking up with a blank, cheerful, stupid smile on my face. Inviting trouble.

My old friend, whose name I don’t recall, is delighted to see me: “What have you been doing all these years?”

Smoking crack.

Formalities out of the way, my friend proceeds to thoroughly unburden himself. And what a weight it is. He drops his ex-wife on me (“She took everything”). The kids too. (‘Selfish, ungrateful… don’t give a damn about anything.’)

“And my dog…” PLEASE. NOT THE DOG. “… died last week.”

Well, it’s good to see you too.

It will take every drop of my mint tea, many more post-punk classics from the ‘80s and even a sliver of my soul before I rid myself of him. It’s not such a bright day at the Mahtay anymore and I have only myself to blame. Happiness is a beacon. Eventually, someone shows up to explain why the world has wronged them. Including the poor dog.

And for all that, he still has that easy laugh I remember from high school. Jeff! That’s his name. We used to call him The Nose — only because he had a perfectly normal-sized nose. It seemed clever at the time. He still loves his kids too, even if he can’t stop telling me how disappointed he was in them.

The strange thing is, I keep recognizing pieces of myself in Jeff. The certainty. The grievances. The belief that if everyone else would just behave differently, I would finally be okay.

Listening to him, I realize something uncomfortable: I spent years being exactly the kind of person sitting across from me. The difference? Jeff is showing me the person I might have become if I had never looked closely at myself.

As we get older, life’s accumulated losses, disappointments and assorted frictions become heavier to carry. And some people never learn that their baggage is theirs to carry. Eventually, their perspective becomes a closed circuit, admitting less and less light from fresh experience into their world.

One thing they don’t do much is listen. They don’t make room for other perspectives. They don’t wonder if they might be wrong.

And please, God, shut the fuck up.

If you think a drug addict is bad company, try hanging around someone who has never learned to examine themselves. Blah blah me me me. The endless autobiography of someone who thinks their disappointments are the most interesting thing that has ever happened.

But you know who I love talking to?

People who got clean.

Recovery is learning to check your bag at the door.

Of course, they didn’t walk out of the darkness without scars. They’re still carrying the weight of whatever abyss they crawled out of — and whatever monster pushed them into it in the first place.

But they’ve learned not to hand it to someone else.

I think that happens because recovery demands an honest reckoning. You take inventory. You look at what you’ve been dragging behind you. And then, finally, you decide what is worth bringing into the future.

Recovery is rebirth.

And boy, are people who have found their way back good to be around.

Their lives are no longer closed loops. They’ve learned to be curious. They’ve learned to listen. They’re funny. They’re not afraid to cry. They’re open to other ways of living and thinking.

I wish I had gone through it sooner.

Maybe then I wouldn’t have made the people who loved me carry my bags for so long.

In this house, resurrection is a daily ritual.

Each morning, there’s a tall glass of lemon water with molasses waiting for me on the kitchen counter. It’s good for a waking body.

There’s a parrot too, eyeing me up and down from the top of the lamp — “Whatcha doing?” He runs the house.

My mother’s either in the backyard, admiring her garden, or she’s leaning against the kitchen counter admiring her other garden. The one she coaxed from seed in the harshest climate of all.

The one that is me.

Over the last 18 months, loved ones have basically poured their entire life force into bringing me back from the dead.

Today, with the resuscitation apparently a success, we’re asking ourselves: what next?

And I’ve got more ideas than I know what to do with.

That's the pink cloud—the burst of optimism many people experience in recovery. It swallowed me whole. Watching a medical drama has me wondering if I should become a doctor. A courtroom show leaves me researching law school. Ten minutes of Baywatch and I'm Googling professional lifeguard training. Even the mail carrier looks like he's found his calling.

What do I do with myself now addiction has been lifted from these bones?

Years in the wasteland don’t shine on a résumé. Feel like giving me a job? I don’t blame you. Crack smokers aren’t famous for reliability, organization, and showing up when they’re supposed to. The problem isn’t only convincing employers — it’s convincing yourself you’re employable.

The pink cloud only changes the hearts and minds of those who live inside it.

So what are this ex-junkie's options? Ideally, I wouldn’t have to leave home.
How do you leave the place that saved your life?

Believe me. Resurrection has its perks.

My mother devoted herself to raising the dead.

One rainy afternoon, she let me walk out the door carrying a couple of bags. We both knew what that meant. Neither of us tried very hard to stop it. There comes a point where addiction convinces everyone — including the people who love you most — that you’re already gone.

Now, it’s hard not to leave the house without a parrot asking, “Whatcha doing?” and my mother urging me to drive carefully.

I wonder how I could ever leave them.

Besides, how do I live alone again — without, you know, falling back on old habits? I don’t want to risk losing the version of myself everyone fought so hard to resurrect. This journey wouldn’t be so fun a second time around.

Here’s the part where I tell you that I’ve got this. But the truth is, every day, I’m inching closer to a sprawling void of uncertainty. Maybe I really will be an astronaut. Or maybe I’ll be a police detective in Bucharest. Or a dishwasher. But please, pink cloud, not a crackhead again.

Because I can be anything else in the future — an unemployed jellyfish, even — and I’d be happy. Just let me stay alive long enough to find out.

It was a 500-piece puzzle dedicated to classic junk food. There was a box of macaroni and cheese, various soda pops and, my favorite, a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal.

Dave wasn’t in his usual place at the table. So I decided to leave him a message embedded in the puzzle.

He’d know it was me, too. Because whenever I visited, I always jammed the wrong piece in the wrong place.

“It doesn’t go there,” he’d tell me, swatting my hand away as I tried to squeeze it in.

“It’s blue,” I’d protest.

But he’d have nothing of it. Every piece had to be in its right place.

“People may not notice it,” he’d say. “But I would know.”

Honestly, I just liked the way he smiled. It came easy to him. “You’ve got to be positive.”

And boy did he have stories. Like how he built his collection of 15,000 records.

“My mom started buying them for me from the bargain bin at the old Zellers. Thirty cents a pop!” There was no feeling quite like placing his prize on the record player when he got home.

He was a bright-eyed, solitary boy. Later, he’d get a job repairing radios at a downtown shop. Then he’d get married.

“She died of lung cancer,” he said, matter-of-factly. “She smoked a lot.”

The death of his second wife, though, would still give him pause.

“Dementia,” he explained. “I’ve never seen anything like that. For two weeks, she just stopped speaking. I would visit her and hold her hand and tell her I loved her. But not a word. Until she was gone.”

Then he’d gently pinch my hand as I tried to sneak in a blue piece in the water section of the puzzle.

“That’s for the sky,” he’d gently chide, beaming again.

Today, in his absence, I was going to do something spectacular. I’d squash a piece from the Cracker Jack section dead in the middle of the popcorn section. Maybe even two pieces!

Where was Dave, anyway?

He was probably my favorite resident at the home. Though he had stiff competition. So many people here. So many stories.

The nursing home has become my favourite thrift store. I never know what treasure I'll uncover whenever I visit.

If I’m ranking favourite residents, Dad probably comes somewhere in the middle. Mostly by default. He spends his days in bed, staring at the TV and asking, “How did I end up here?”

Once, I confessed to a woman in the dementia ward that I’d hit pause on my life and gone back to school.

“Oh,” she smiled. “I understand that completely.”

She talked about going back to school — Brock University — and being the oldest student in her class.

“And I had four kids at home!”

Should I tell her how I really spent much of my adult life? Why not? She’d forget anyway. But another woman interrupted.

“You have beautiful teeth!” she sang from her wheelchair.

“Why, thank you,” I answered. “Let’s see what you’ve got! Smile!”

Big mistake.

“Healthy gums!” I declared, moving along.

But before I could leave, a spritely old gal asked me for a dance.

“A dance? Okay… but I only know the mashed potat—-”

Too late. She had locked arms with me and we twirled to Perry Como on TV.

Papa loves mambo…

She kicked up her legs, one at a time.

Having their fling again

Younger than spring again

She turned around. Time for our posteriors to bump up against each other.

She was nimble, and very forgiving. My mom was with me at the time. She wanted to take pictures. But this stuff isn’t for Instagram. It’s for us, right here in this moment.

Mama loves mambo…

When Perry Como finally faded, I slumped into a chair, exhausted. I wondered whether Dave had finished another corner of his puzzle while I was gone.

Suddenly, towering above me, stood the same woman.

“Would you like to dance?”

Imagine the partners she ran ragged in the course of her life.

My father would have liked her. If he wasn’t so vacant. And there was that other woman he met at the retirement home: Eunice.

“We’re moving in together!” he declared practically the moment they met. And my first thought was gold digger. No, wait. My first thought was, Dad, you’re an idiot.

They never fully moved in together. But Eunice grew on me. She was born in England. She had lost two husbands. Painfully. Her room was like an antique shop, bristling with heavy wooden furniture, porcelain figurines and framed black and whites from her past.

She hated that my dad watched CNN all the time. She missed Coronation Street. But they really did care about each other. They were always holding hands and kissing in a way that makes some people uncomfortable. They were separated when my dad was moved into a more intensive care wing of the residence. She pines for him. Mostly, my dad can’t remember her.

“Eunice?” he asked me once. “Who’s that?”

“Remember?” I insisted. “Your girlfriend. You’ve got her picture on the mantle.”

Eunice has an even bigger portrait of him, taped to her wall like a heartthrob in a teen magazine. “I kiss it every day,” she says, holding back tears.

My dad remembered her eventually.

“I’m working on allowing her to visit,” I tell him.

My dad got silent for a minute: “That would mean a lot to me.”

When I tell Eunice that she’ll see him again — and that the whole staff at the home thinks it’s cruel that they’ve been separated, she breaks into tears and hugs and hugs and hugs.

I hope they find each other again before the end.

But what about Dave? His chair sat empty, and somehow the whole room looked wrong. I’d become so used to finding him bent over that puzzle. The whole picture suddenly made less sense.

He’d never abandon his post. Not for this long.

Unless…

I held a mismatched piece over the puzzle.

Maybe Dave was never coming back.

The pieces in this place are always disappearing.

That wouldn’t be fair. His puzzle wasn’t finished.

A gentle hand fell on my shoulder. I looked up to see Dave’s wide grin. His perfectly coiffed white hair.

“That piece doesn’t go there.”

It’s okay to have crazy people in your family.

Everyone does. I was blessed with a surplus. But, of course, it’s a mixed blessing. On one hand, it really shapes the weird and wonderful dynamic I have with my mother. Sometimes, amid a tsunami of craziness, we become each other’s anchors. No, you’re not dumb or weak or getting senile, mom. Ignore what so-and-so said. Your ex-crack smoking son can confirm that. And, in turn, she confirms that I’m doing all right for myself these days — no matter what toxins may fill her ears.

But mixed blessings are still mixed.

You still have a deranged family member.

Sometimes it feels like living under siege.

My mother always has an explanation.

“He’s just like that.”

“She’s going through something.”

Maybe.

Or maybe decades of trauma, denial and mind-altering substances eventually change a person in ways that don’t change back. The thing is, when you're really close to the inferno for a very long time, it feels less like an explosion than a slow evolution. It's hard to notice the drift when you've been living inside it for years. That’s where other people come in:

“What’s up with your brother?”

“Is your cousin normally like that?”

That’s when you realize...

There was never anything normal about it.

That’s the real downside — when, in an astounding feat of denial, you manage to convince yourself that this is the new normal. From then on, it becomes a lifetime of appeasement.

Which only feeds the madness.

Wouldn’t it be liberating to simply say, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m out”?

Well, it does happen. Sort of. Recovery taught me boundaries. That means you can’t yell over me, belittle, control, bully, call a thousand times a day, utterly fail to make eye contact or any of a million fucked up things you do — without me saying, ‘No thanks.’

What a relief.

Then a friend reminded me:

“You can be separate from it.

But your mom can’t.”

Right.

Sometimes you maintain contact not because you can’t leave, but because someone you love can’t.

That’s the blessing.

That’s the curse.

The last recovery meeting felt different. So did the one before it.

I thought maybe if I skipped a few, I’d build more enthusiasm for sitting in a circle sharing tales of hardship and hope.

But driving home, a sad song on the radio, I turned over the same uncomfortable question in my mind.

Have I outgrown recovery?

The question felt almost sacrilegious. Recovery had saved my life. It had introduced me to honesty, humility, friendship. Recovery taught me how to survive the world without going numb. It gathered people who had finally become too exhausted to lie to themselves. It was the great unburdening — a lifetime’s worth of weight set down, one confession at a time.

“They should teach this stuff in school,” one woman said.

“I wish I could drag my sister here,” rhapsodized another. “She isn't even an addict.”

So why don't more people stay there?

Meetings have a revolving cast. Someone disappears. Someone comes back. Someone starts over.

I even caught myself falling into another old habit: people-pleasing.

I was self-conscious about what I shared. I didn't want to come off as someone too recovered for these meetings. When I spoke, I touched lightly on my return to school, and low-key mentioned that I had recently marked one year clean.

I wanted to make sure everyone knew I was still one of them.

In fact, I even went so far as to say that it's still a daily struggle. Sometimes, I added, I feel like I'm just one wrong turn away from a relapse.

Lies.

All lies.

At a recovery meeting.

Sure, an ex-addict is never completely out of the woods. But I've never felt more confident in being clean.

In fact, I’m mostly reminded of my old life whenever I attend a meeting. If I have to keep visiting the ghost of my past self every Tuesday at 7:00 PM just to keep him alive, am I actually free of him?

Years ago, a doctor warned me not to spend time around slippery people. Back then I assumed he meant dealers, old friends, familiar places. I never considered that he might also mean recovery itself. Not because recovery is unhealthy. Quite the opposite. But every meeting asked me to resurrect a version of myself I’d already spent years leaving behind.

If addiction is the complete absence of growth, recovery is its opposite. Are meetings the exception — something we're never supposed to grow out of?

The struggle against our demons used to unite us. It gave me a sense of kinship with complete strangers. It began to change how I saw myself — even though it was always through the lens of addiction.

I‘d introduce myself at meetings like this:

“I’m an addict. I’m back in school, so I’m a student.”

“I’m an addict. I write, so I’m a writer.”

Friend.

Son.

Journalist.

Comedian.

Every version of myself began the same way.

But recovery isn’t the whole story anymore.

It’s the chapter that makes every chapter after it possible.

Maybe that’s what recovery was always supposed to do — not keep us in the room forever, but prepare us to leave it.

Some people will spend the rest of their lives in these rooms, and I hope they do if that’s where they continue to find their grace.

But churches are meant to send people back into the world.

I’m leaving the church.

It was a beautiful place to visit.

But I can’t live there anymore.

“Hello, my name is Bob,” he said when it was his turn to shine. “And I’m an addict.”

“Hiiii Bob,” we chimed back.

Then he launched straight in.

“Last Thursday was payday, so I went to the motel on Lundy’s Lane,” he began. “You know the cheap ones on the strip. I met a girl there. I already gave the wife an excuse — I was out with the guys. I brought a half-ball of hard. You should have seen that rock—”

“Oh,” the meeting facilitator cut in. “Let’s try not to mention it by name. It may trigger others who are listening tonight.”

It was already too late. Bob had only just begun, and he was in full command of the room. We leaned in.

“Okay, okay, sorry… drug of choice,” he mumbled through a thicket of spit‑stained beard. “Anyway, we’re smoking our drug of choice in the room when the smoke detector goes off. And I don’t know about you, but when you’re doing… my drug of choice… in a cheap motel with a crack wh— I mean, a woman who also smokes your drug of choice, and the alarm goes off? It’s full‑blown panic. She drops her pipe. It shatters. And we just run around like chickens with our heads cut off.”

Sweat prickled down my neck.

“Anyway, I yank out the battery. Then I poke my head out the door to make sure it’s clear. I guess it didn’t matter. Everyone at that motel smokes their drug of choice…”

Here Bob faltered. He twirled his beard and looked around the room, suddenly aware that twenty people were hanging on every word.

Come on, Bob.

Don’t stop now.

Only the kindly counsellor seemed anxious. She probably knew Bob was about to make a magnificent mess of things. Her smile clung to her face like a sticker on a banana. Evening meetings must be murder for underpaid drug counsellors. She’d probably heard this story a hundred times. She knew exactly where it ended.

At last, Bob drew a breath and continued. “So when the dust settles and we clean up the glass with our hands, I realize the drug of choice is missing. Not the little chunk by the bed — the big piece on the coffee table.”

Everyone nodded at once. Someone erupted into a long “Uhhhh‑huh.”

We weren’t listening like people in recovery anymore. We were listening like kids around a campfire.

“He got robbed,” someone hollered. “Rinsed!” called another.

“Please,” the facilitator begged. “Let’s not talk over each other.”

Bob raised both hands. Silence.

“Well, I asked her if she accidentally took my drug of choice. It was right there on the coffee table — a huge piece.”

Fool.

“Then things go sideways. She starts freaking out, yelling she’s not a thief. Keep your voice down, I said. She just keeps hollering about how she doesn’t steal.”

The facilitator’s smile was finally calling it a day. She glanced at the clock while I stared at the colourful crayon art covering the walls. Why decorate a recovery meeting like a kindergarten? It didn’t matter. Horrified and enthralled, we were all on the same voyage to the heart of Bobness.

“She’s already got her shoes on. My rock — or drug of choice — in her pocket. And she’s going out the door. But fuck it, I thought—”

“Language, please,” our host interrupted.

Sweat trickled down my spine.

“I let her leave because I didn’t give a sh— darn. I was just gonna call my dealer and get an even bigger piece delivered. No drama that way.

“But a second after she slams the door, I realize my phone’s gone. Wallet too. I run out the door and catch the — the girl — on the sidewalk. She don’t know nothing about my wallet. It’s broad daylight and she’s making a real scene. Then she turns to go and I grab her wrist. I can’t let you go with my wallet, I tell her. And boy, does she ever scream. She shakes and cusses but I won’t let go. Then she punches me right in the mouth.”

“See that there?” Bob asked, pulling his button lip down so we could inspect a tiny swell of reddened flesh. The room issued a collective “ooh.” Bob released his lip, satisfied.

“It looks like we’re running out of time,” the facilitator pleaded.

The room groaned. “Let him finish!”

“I’ll wrap it up quick,” Bob said, bowing to popular demand. “So one thing leads to another. We wrestle — she’s strong. We get tangled and fall half into the street. Next thing I know, there’s another set of hands on me, pulling me up hard. It’s a cop. You know what that mother—”

“Bob…” the counsellor warned.

“Sorry… anyway, I already had a warrant. So I’m hauled off. Straight to the station. I don’t know what they did with her. But she had my wallet, all my ID. And it wasn’t even that. What really bothered me was the way they treated me. They put the cuffs on real tight. They laughed at me all the way to the cop shop. They called me a… you know… a drug‑of‑choice‑head.”

“Sorry, I’m going to have to stop you, Bob.”

“What did I say?”

She pointed at a brightly colored poster over his shoulder.

“The blue giraffe?” Bob asked.

“No, the poster beside it,” she said, before adding, “And that’s a camel by the way.”

Sure enough, there was a long list of rules for meetings. At the very top: “Don’t glamorize drug use!”

Somewhere along the way, we’d stopped hearing a story about lies, theft, violence, and arrest. We’d started rooting for him.

If you’ve never struggled with addiction, this won’t make much sense.

What exactly was glamorous?

The cheating?

The motel?

The robbery?

The blood?

The handcuffs?

And yet, somewhere along the way, we’d started hoping Bob got away.

If that doesn’t make sense to you...

congratulations.

You’re probably not an addict.

Crack smokers eventually give up on finding their soulmate.

Getting high will do just fine.

But when we get clean, we invariably get lonely. All of the people we used to call ‘friends’ are still smoking crack. So some of us embark on that misguided quest in earnest. Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, whatever. And in a testament to their winning personality, many ex-crack smokers overcome the limitations of being broke-ass and living with parents — and actually find some sort of mate.

Then we spend years wondering whether they’re the one.

Maybe this will help: Think about everyone who ever came before you — all the way to the primordial goo from whence all life sprang. It brought you to this moment.

Now consider the person you ended up sharing your life with. That dude over there on the couch. And ask yourself, is this the person that trillions of decisions over thousands of years have ultimately led you to? Is this your soulmate?

If you can say yes, then congratulations. You’ve already found what the universe had in mind. If you’re not so sure, on the other hand — if you have a nagging suspicion that this wasn’t exactly the culmination of some divine plan, then I urge you to keep looking.

But this time, try looking for your soulmate somewhere else. It’s funny how long it takes to realize that the person you’ve been waiting for has been sitting beside you all along — and how hard it is to like him.

It took much of my life to realize that the dude on the couch was actually me. And he sucked. Am I my soulmate? Did all those decisions and situations culminate in me finding myself?

I think that’s the grand design — crack habit and all — that led me here.

To find my soulmate at last. To find myself.

Getting whole will do just fine.

My mom was shaving her chin the other night and talking about her ‘third eye’ and an approaching comet, when it occurred to me just how much she’s changed over the last year.

And before you get prickly about my inclusion of this very personal detail about her, know that she has given me explicit permission to describe her beard. She may even be a little proud of it.

I wouldn’t even call it a beard, really. Just one or two thick white—

“No, no,” my mom interrupts, while I’m reading the above passage for her approval. “Don’t give it all that. You don’t want people to think you’ve got some kind of freak mother.”

Later, she’d say, “The eloquence of how I think compared to the eloquence of how I speak is like night and day.” And I would dutifully write it down.

Anyway, the only reason why I mention her ‘old-lady-o’clock shadow’ is because it’s constantly pricking me.

Because she’s constantly hugging me.

I guess she’s always been wise. I just wasn’t paying attention. Too busy getting high in the abandoned warehouse of my own mind.

When I went clean, I moved back home. You might think a man fresh from a long and feverish drug habit living with his mother would make for a rather combustible situation. And sure enough, in the early days, the tiniest of frictions threatened to take a match to the situation.

But as time went on, we got close. Not in the Norman Bates–ian sense. It’s more like a couple of plants mutually agreeing to water one another.

Probably for the first time since I was a kid, I can actually hear her.

Listening — really listening — makes you feel smaller. In a good way. It allows space for others to exist in, and reminds them that their voices are valued and their perspective is considered. You wouldn’t believe the things I learned from truly listening to the same old people I thought I’d squeezed dry decades ago.

Sometimes, you have to make yourself small in order to grow.

When I first sat around a table with addicts at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, I had so much to say. My turn! My turn! Hand me the conch shell, already. I wanted to talk about my experiences as a druggie — my frustrations and disappointments and misadventures and how I ruined my life worse than yours.

But I had to wait patiently for everyone else to tell their inferior tales of woe. Eventually, their words — no, I guess the feelings behind them — began to sink in.

When it was my turn to speak at meetings, my stories got shorter. They didn’t seem so important anymore. Everyone knows suffering. Mine isn’t exceptional. Besides, I can’t learn a thing from my own tales of woe — only those of others.

Then one day, it was my turn to speak at a meeting. And all I could do was pass along the conch shell.

By and large, over time, the stock market always goes up. Humankind gets richer too.

But markets crash. So do civilizations, from time to time. A divisive election. A war. Another catastrophe filling the headlines. It may seem like we’ve gone backwards — that there’s no hope for a progressive, enlightened world at all — but that’s because you’re in the weeds.

We’re a little kinder to animals today. Addiction isn’t a crime. And we’re even starting to see that trees are people, too. So hold on to your shares in this world. Believe me. I’ve lived through volatility. That's why I'm betting your investment will pay dividends. The long game is the only game that pays.

A friend of a friend had a lapse the other day. I was asked for a little advice: What should I tell him?

He’d been clean for four years.

That’s more than twice as long as me. And I’m supposed to have some magical words for someone who’s proven far better at recovery than me? He’s the expert. He didn’t make it. If anything, I should be asking him what happened. How do I avoid the same fate?

At first, the news was chilling. Maybe it’s true what they say at meetings. You’re never truly finished with addiction. You’ll have to be on guard for it all your life.

Yet I refuse to accept that. I’ve long felt that I’m building a new human, pretty much from scratch. The old one survived by lying — mostly to himself — to cover the holes inside him. But foundations built on denial always crack.

We’re all slightly perforated people. Addicts, however, often come with gaping holes in their foundation. You can’t pretend everything is going smoothly when there are so many wrinkles in the concrete.

So what went wrong for this friend of a friend? Something unfinished remained. We’re all works in progress. Maybe getting high is just a way of testing the structure. Not there yet. Some buildings take a lot longer than others to complete, anyway.

So I told my friend to tell her friend something along these lines:

No one comes down from drugs thinking, ‘That was wonderful. I’d like to do that again.’ No, we’re dangerously down on ourselves, sometimes fatally. Don’t let everyone else pile on. You’ve got more guilt and shame than you need already. Instead, try something different. Be positive. Insist on being loved.

Looking back, the one consistent feeling I had throughout addiction was a sense of emptiness. It was like there was a hole inside of me. I could pave it over with motorcycles, lovers and vacations. But the pavement would inevitably crack. Maybe that’s why I was a peak drug user when I had a career, a house, a dog and someone I really cared about. Too much pavement. It had become impossible to get down to the foundation to make necessary repairs.

In recovery, you’ll hear a common refrain: “I lost everything.” Addicts always talk about the money, the job and the family. Think about it too much and all that loss can be overwhelming.

Eventually, though, I understood that I had to lose everything. It was all pavement, built over a hole that none of that stuff could fill. Recovery razed it all to the ground. I remember weeping about all that loss. Then came a feeling of unrelenting gratitude. I had an opportunity to build the right way.

So when you lapse, maybe it’s also an opportunity. You didn’t get at the real trouble yet. You had lost everything, went into recovery — and then started paving over the hole again. A lapse is a reminder that it’s still there. It’s another chance.

Getting clean means wiping away all that surface debris and exposing the hole. Recovery is an investigation, maybe even a conversation. Stare into that hole. What does it tell you? It’s only when you understand it that you can start building again.

And all that time you spent clean? That’s quality time — years of gaining the tools you need to continue the work. No one took those tools away from you. You’re not starting from scratch.

Make no mistake. A lapse isn’t a step forward. But it isn’t a step backward either. It’s more like a side door into the darkness. And that’s okay. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you might feel a need to step into it.

The important thing is to remember to use that door again to step back into the light.

“I have a sore neck,” I told Lacey once, between puffs of a crack pipe.

Lacey, who had watched people die on the streets in every imaginable way, leapt to her feet as if I’d announced a terminal diagnosis.

“Oh no!” she wailed. “You poor thing! What do you need?”

“Maybe just some aspirin?”

She held out her hand. I gave her some money. She vanished in a wisp of crack smoke and wasn’t seen again for several days.

The neck pain was probably innocent enough. I had recently awakened from a two‑day sleep coma, and you wouldn’t believe the positions crack people pass out in. Sometimes crouched mid‑sentence. Sometimes upside down. Sometimes folded like a marionette someone dropped.

What troubled me was that you’re not supposed to feel anything when you’re high. If something managed to break through the veil of crack, it had to be bad.

It took months — and a heroic amount of self‑medication — for the pain to fade. Maybe I beat cancer without knowing it. That’s the thing about addiction: when you’re high, you can’t die. You only reckon with the devastation you’ve inflicted on your body when you get clean. For many people, that’s reason enough to stay high.

When a crack smoker wakes up after a long slumber, there’s a brief, terrible window where you feel everything: the aches, the wheezes, the diseases. You feel mortal.

A good session wipes all that away. Crack smokers don’t even age while high — or so we like to believe. Men will proudly announce their age like it’s a miracle.

“I’m 85!” a withered creature will declare. “Can you believe it?”

I’d play along, insist he didn’t look a day over 30, maybe even ask about his skincare routine.

Women follow a different system. Under 40, they’ll tell you their age. Over 40, they drop to their 20s. And any woman over 60 is usually around 37.

Of course, crack doesn’t actually hold back time. But you can’t blame us for believing it. Prolonged illness — even aging — is unheard of in crack country. We tend to just drop dead.

This is why getting clean is so daunting. The first reckoning is with the body. The doctor’s appointment is a horror show: skin condition, parasites, heart murmur, shadow in the lungs — and, oh yes, you’re actually old.

Whatever happened to my neck never mattered much. I probably did sleep upside down.

But if you manage to clean up your medical charts and even take up a fitness routine — I recommend swimming — you experience the first unexpected high of sobriety. Coming back from the dead is intoxicating.

Then comes the mind. Pills, books, school. You wonder if you have an attention span left. But you do. That thing you used to do with your cheeks — puffing them out like a chipmunk when you thought no one was watching — that’s gone too. Memory still works. The brain doesn’t need a new transmission. Getting straight As still rocks. Planning for the future is a very good drug for grown‑ups.

This is where the addict takes stock of what remains of his mind and is surprised — even thrilled — by the results.

And then comes the final reckoning, the one we worked hardest to avoid: the soul. Feelings return. All of them. The drag of life’s drumbeat — taxes, relationships, toxic people. But music sounds incredible. Relationships can feel really good. The good, the bad, the boring — all of it is food for a soul that’s been starved too long.

Every crack smoker has their reasons for not wanting to feel the world. I’m still not entirely sure about mine. What I do know is that to live, you have to keep showing up. All I have now is a strong body, a clear mind, and an honest relationship with myself. It seems to be working.

Because sometimes — and I swear this — I can feel my soul.

When you can feel the world again, in all its agonizing stupidity and ecstasy, and embrace it anyway, that’s when you finally understand what it means to live forever.

It’s easier to describe other highs. Coke or meth turn the body into a livewire. Heroin makes the world distant, inconsequential. But crack? Crack is euphoria — too much euphoria. The kind that makes you wonder what you’re supposed to do with all that joy. Or why you need it in the first place.

Then it settles down. The world goes quiet.

Maybe it’s easier to describe what used to happen in my head.

You see, I had gathered a lot of thoughts over the course of an existence — some ordinary, some exotic, many troublesome. I would bring this bristling head to the local trap house and many more concerns would arise. Like, how I would make it to work and how would I get my shoes back from the proprietor of the establishment and so forth.

Cheap thoughts burning like cheap candles on a birthday cake.

When I took my first toke, all those burning lights were snuffed out at once. No thoughts. No worries. Just the eternal none-shine of the spotless mind. Only not so eternal.

A wick would re-light. Then another. And another. Suddenly, the cake was covered again — more candles than before, more than it can hold. The drapes were e ablaze.

So I reached for the pipe again. The great snuffing out ensued. Then the lights returned with a vengeance. More candles. More fire. Until I was all out of dope — and hope.

Today is my birthday. I've been clean for about a year and a half.

I still get troublesome thoughts. I don’t have the drugs to sort them out. Only words. Writing helps me process the prickly notions. Words don’t blow out the candles, but they keep the cake from burning down the house.

And now, I find myself wanting more birthday cakes. Real ones. With real candles. The kind you make wishes over.

Also, the time machine frequently blows up mid-flight, taking the pilot with it.

If I could build a real time machine though, I might visit the childhood version of me. I might even offer him a little advice. I’m not sure he’d follow it.

But since I went to all the trouble of building a time machine, I’d tell him anyway. And since I know for a fact that he was a very lonely little astronaut, he’d probably at least listen.

My advice?

Try to do as much as you can in the first run. I mean, everything you want to try, the places you want to see, and the people you want to love. Don’t let them get away because you’re afraid of making mistakes. Life’s too short to circle back for anything you think you missed.

In this world, the only thing you should ever overindulge in is the moment.

Hold fast to it, even if it occasionally blows up in your face.

And if he asks me about the future — about the mistakes waiting for him — I won't tell him to stay away from drugs. But I will say it’s even harder for an ex-addict. We just wake up one day to find the whole middle part of our life gone. All we’re left with are the bookends — youthful memories and haunted old age. With just a void in between.

This life can seem like a breeze until you try to circle back for something you may have left behind. Then you’re facing an unrelenting wind. But many ex-junkies will only run harder because they know that learning this lesson, even late, is the best thing that ever happened to them. Some will even find the things they missed. Others will die trying.

Will the childhood version of me listen to the former crack smoking version of me? Probably not. That kid never thought much of me. He’d probably build the busted time machine anyway. Just to spite me.

But he'll figure it out eventually. And circle back around. Maybe we’ll even meet again.

Ever get the feeling someone you love may be a drug addict?

Don’t check their phone. Even if you could confirm the worst, it’s nearly impossible to go back from what you’d have become — someone who violates a sacred trust. And it is a sacred trust to leave an unlocked phone on the couch without worrying about prying eyes.

In fact, I’d argue that, unless someone’s life is in immediate peril, their phone is strictly off-limits. It holds so much more than just text messages to drug dealers. It’s the new diary. A pixelated window to the soul.

Believe me. It’s much easier to follow the money. Check a bank statement or an ATM receipt if you can. No addict is so meticulous about their paper trail for so long. They’ll trip up.

Why did you take out $500?

I bought a collector’s edition Star Wars Lego set, darling.

It makes sense that my final reckoning came at the hands of an accountant. I had followed a giant sign in a downtown alley: FILE YOUR TAXES HERE.

It was her job to paint people by the numbers. For me, she painted a portrait of an addict.

“You earned $110,000 in 2021,” she says, staring at a T-4 slip. “That’s good money.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “It was a good gig.”

“Where did it all g—” she caught herself.

The numbers already knew the answer.

All that income. No taxes filed. Not for six years!

“In 2022, you made a big deposit to your RRSP,” she said, staring at a screen. “That’s good.”

“And then in 2022,” she added, “you withdrew it all. That’s not good.”

I never imagined a list of financial transactions could carry so much emotional weight. My voice thickened a little when I tried to explain my misadventures. For years, bank accounts swelled and bottomed out.

“I’m sorry, Rozie,” overcome by shame. “I really appreciate this. But I wasn’t in a good place.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “This is a really important part of your recovery. You’re going to get through this and then you’re going to feel so good about yourself.”

It’s true. I went clean, but years of unclaimed taxes still loomed over me. It’s the one, awful thing I just couldn’t face. Until I did. I can’t plead ‘addict’ to the government. To them, I’m just a collection of data. Unchecked boxes where all my tax filings should be. I was an unchecked box where a person should have been.

Not to Rozie and her compassionate calculations. Who would have thought numbers could be so relentlessly indifferent and hopeful at the same time? She’s doing everything she can to help me sort this out, even finding tax breaks in the unlikeliest of places — “You’re a journalist. You can write this off. And this too.”

She knows I’m trying to make it right. But she also knows there’s no mercy clause for addicts. Just the unflinching truth of accountability. My return won’t show up on a balance sheet.