The question that helped save my life was simple:
What do I love more than myself?
I've been clean and sober for more than twenty years now, and over that time I've spent a great deal of energy trying to understand what addiction actually is. Not just chemically or medically, but humanly. What drives a person to keep reaching for something that is clearly destroying them? And perhaps more importantly, what helps them stop?
In my experience, addiction is about far more than drugs or alcohol. Those are often symptoms of something deeper. The substances matter, of course, but they are rarely the whole story.
When I look back on my own life, I can see three forces at work. The first was addiction itself: that restless feeling that there was always something missing, that life as it was could never quite be enough. The second was pain. Not dramatic pain necessarily, but the accumulated weight of fear, shame, loneliness and old wounds that I had never really faced. The third was meaning.
That last one took me years to understand.
During my second stay in treatment, I had a realization that changed everything. My son was three years old at the time. For years I had blamed my alcoholic father for the damage his addiction had caused in my life. Then one day I saw, with painful clarity, that everything I accused him of doing, I was already doing to my own child.
Not because I wanted to.
Because I couldn't stop.
In that moment, addiction stopped being a personal tragedy and became something larger. I saw it as something that could move through generations, passing from parent to child unless someone chose to interrupt it.
I decided that person would be me.
That decision didn't solve all my problems. It didn't remove cravings, fear or uncertainty. But it gave me something stronger than them. It gave me a reason.
Over the years I've become convinced that recovery requires more than simply stopping. We also need something worth moving towards. We need purpose, connection and meaning. We need a reason to endure the discomfort of change.
For me, that reason began with my son. Over time it expanded into writing, recovery, service, community and a deeper sense of belonging in the world.
The details are different for everyone.
The question remains the same.
What do you love more than yourself?
In the video above, I explore the three forces that I believe drive addiction and the role each one played in my own recovery.