The absolute last thing I wanted to be was sober. I knew it meant the end of fun, and since I thought happiness meant flinging yourself from one fun experience to the next, I considered that the end of life. Yet the crazy part of my staunch belief that sobriety was the absolute...

My name is Tim Ryan. I am a grateful recovering alcoholic and drug addict. My journey is just like many others: I let my world be taken over by drinking and drug use. I first tried heroin in 2001 and that took me down another 12-year road to hell. Many consequences occurred in...

Nearly ten years ago, I stood in a doorway with nothing but a couple trash bags of clothes, a Jeep on a car title loan, and a decision to make. Behind me were fourteen years of obsession and insanity surrounding drugs and whatever I had to do to get them. Fourteen years of...

At the end, there were only two things I cared about: the bag of heroin on my glass topped coffee table, and the cell phone next to it. They were my two life lines. After a decade of abusing opiates, I couldn’t stop using heroin. I was psychologically, physically, and...

I nearly died from alcohol poisoning when I was seventeen. It was the bottom-shelf, plastic-bottle vodka from a liquor store in Portsmouth, the kind we see discarded in alleys and not recycling bins. I was hospitalized and intubated. The nurses accidentally ruptured and...

A friend accidentally sent me a text message meant for someone else: “Hi. Here with a friend who just lost her son.” Then: “Oops.” Although the text wasn’t meant for me, it was about me. I am that friend who just lost her son. I am the woman with that sobriquet of sorrow that...

Growing up, society taught me that I should not disclose that I am an alcoholic or an addict; that my addiction is something I should be ashamed of. I heard this message every time someone described someone’s behavior to be that of a “crackhead,” every time someone talked about...

Here’s the thing about overdoses: they never get easier. It’s not like a wipeout, like when you miss a trick and your board goes out from under you and you have about a tenth of a second to think about whether you’re going home with road rash or a broken kneecap. And it’s not...

The phone call that no parent wants to receive came on November 10, 2016 at approximately 8:15 AM, the day that forever changed our lives. If we knew more, questioned more, educated ourselves, the outcome could possibly be different. Tori made decent grades during her first year...