An Announcement to My Community
There are certain undertakings that hover at the edges of our lives, waiting for the moment when courage and necessity finally meet. For months now I have lingered at the threshold of a writing course that has remained stubbornly unfinished, as if the words themselves hesitated to be born. Yet something within me has shifted. A stillness has grown roots, and from that stillness a decision has emerged. I have taken pen to paper and begun the task I have avoided for far too long. I have started to write my story. It is not an easy story to approach. It is a tale that begins in shadows and descends further before any light appears. My journey through addiction was not glamorous, clever or admirable. It was terrifying. It dismantled me in ways I could not understand at the time, and it carried me into the company of substances that have taken more lives than I care to recall. There were years when survival was not guaranteed. There were moments when I felt I had already crossed the line between the living and the lost. Yet here I am, six years clean. Six years of clawing my way back after multiple attempts to free myself. Six years held steady by people who saw in me something worth saving, even when I had no such vision for myself. This book, unnamed as yet, is for them as much as it is for me. It is a dedication to every person who helped stitch together the torn fabric of my life, whether through love, intervention, anger, patience or presence. Recovery is not a solitary act. It is a gathering of hands. I have completed the second draft of the first chapter, and as I place these early pages before you, I ask for something simple and rare. I ask for your honest feedback. Not to flatter, not to wound, but to witness. This story has taken years to reach a place where it can be written at all. Now that it has begun, I want to honour it by telling it truthfully, without pretence or careful disguises. This is my attempt to walk back through the darkness with a clear mind and return with whatever truth I can carry. It is an awful tale in places, and a miraculous one in others. It moves from deathliness to life, from despair to something that resembles grace. I write it with the hope that the journey may serve someone else who is still wandering through their own night.