I’m a recovered drug addict and alcoholic. By recovered, I don’t mean cured. Cured would mean that I could drink like regular people. I’ll never be able to do that. I’ll never be able to safely share a joint before a show, and I’ll never be able to safely have a glass of wine with my wife. Believe me, no one who knows me misses the way those situations always turned out.

I can’t do these things safely because I’m incapable of having just one. My experience has shown me this 100% of the time. I blaze past the finish line, crash through the gate, and screech into the long horizon until some blinding disaster stops me.

Once I manage to kick and then resolve to stay clean, you would think that having this knowledge about myself would make it easy to abstain. For instance, I have a friend who is deathly allergic to strawberries. He has no problem turning them down. He’s never had to sit on his hands or swear them off forever. To him, it’s a non-issue. That’s because he doesn’t suffer from a mental obsession the way I do. He’s not crippled by an irrational thought that doesn’t respond to reason.

This is the fundamental crisis for those suffering from addiction. This is the heart of the matter and the crux of the biscuit: that the primary problem of the alcoholic and addict centers in the mind. No matter what precautions I may take, I have a mind that, left untreated, will take me out.

That is not to say that people don’t find freedom from this. They do. Every day. And though the point of all this wasn’t to talk about my own sobriety, it would be remiss of me not to mention that I experienced (and continue to experience) a complete psychic change in the 12 steps by approaching it with the desperation of a drowning man. All in.

What I really wanted to do was describe what I was thinking in the moments just before a relapse of mine years ago. There is nothing particularly unique about it. It’s essentially identical to the thoughts that millions of other people had just before they did the thing they swore they would never do again.