The iron law of sobriety, with apologies to Leo Tolstoy: the stories of addicts are all alike; but each person gets sober their own way. Addiction is an old country song: you lose the dog, lose the truck, lose the high school sweetheart. In recovery you play the song backward, and that’s where things get interesting. Where’d you find the truck? Did the dog remember you? What’d your sweetheart say when they saw you again?

When I got sober it wasn’t because I punched a cop or drove my car into a Burger King or anything dramatic like that. I had a dozen bottoms that would have awakened any reasonable person to the severity of the problem, but I was not a reasonable person. The day I finally lurched my way toward help was like any other. I woke up alone on my floor still drunk from the night before. I remember taking a pull or two from the nearly empty bottle of Old Crow bourbon by my mattress, then searching for my glasses and car keys. Finding them, I calmly drove myself to help.

Beautiful terrible, how sobriety disabuses you of the sense of your having been a gloriously misunderstood scumbag prince shuffling between this or that narcotic crown. The superficial details may change—it wasn’t a truck, it was a business; it wasn’t a sweetheart, it was a family—but the algorithm is inexorable. A drug works till it doesn’t. Dependence grows until it eclipses everything else in the addict’s life. Rotten sun. Joy withers in the absence of light. Passion, jobs, freedom, family. We all have the snorting-spilled-coke-off-bathroom-tile stories. That stuff is only interesting to those blessed with a rare cosmic remove from knowing actual addicts. Active addiction is an algorithm, a crushing sameness. The story is what comes after.

—from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx by Cyrus Shams