My Story to Recovery

Every article on this site is about the law. This one is about me.

I write these guides anonymously, and I’m going to stay anonymous here too. But if you’re going to trust anything I say in this section of the site, you deserve to know that I’m not writing about recovery from a distance. I’m writing from inside it.

The years I thought I was having fun

Before law school, before any of the success that let me build this page, I was someone who believed he was nothing. I was riddled with anxiety, and the only way I knew to fix it was to use.

I didn’t realize this until I got sober, but from eighteen years old into my thirties, I was never sober. Not once, not really. Something always had to keep me high, and it wasn’t caffeine or tobacco. It was weed, alcohol, cocaine, Adderall, molly, ecstasy. You name it, I was on it or wanted to be on it.

And I thought I was having fun. Going out, drinking, hooking up, the whole show. But every single morning, I hated myself. That was the deal I kept signing: the night promised everything, and the morning collected.

When the fun stopped pretending

At some point the using stopped being about anything at all except the using. The drive to feel the high, and nothing else. I didn’t even go out anymore. Going out had only ever been the excuse, and eventually I dropped the excuse. I just stayed in my house and watched TV, because nothing out there felt as good as being high felt in here.

I pushed everyone away. And then I started hearing voices.

I want to be careful and honest here, because someone reading this might be closer to this point than they’d like to admit: when the drugs start talking back, you are not “still fine.” I was not fine. I told myself I was.

The bottom

I got arrested with half my hair ripped out. No one did that to me. I had been ripping the hair out of my own head, hearing voices, alone in that house I never left.

They locked me down. And something about sitting in that cell burned through every excuse I had left. When I was bailed out, I stood there and understood one thing with total clarity: I had nowhere to go but rehab. Not home. Not back to the couch and the TV and the next high. Rehab.

The people who turned the light on

I’d love to tell you I walked into rehab with a grateful heart. I didn’t. I resisted. I was there because I had run out of everywhere else to be.

What changed me wasn’t a lecture or a worksheet. It was talking to the other people in that room and realizing they had been exactly where I was, the same lies, the same mornings, the same nothing, and they had come out of it into the light. They weren’t theoretical. They were sitting right in front of me, alive and okay.

And then one of them, a person whose success you would recognize, quietly revealed themselves to me as one of us. I remember the exact feeling. If that person had been where I was and built what they built, then the story I’d been telling myself, that I was nothing and this was all there was, was just wrong. I realized: I can do this.

What sobriety gave back

I gave in. I finally accepted sobriety, and I stopped fighting the people trying to help me. AA and the people in those rooms became part of my life, and they still are.

The anxiety I had been medicating since I was eighteen didn’t magically disappear. I had to learn to live with it sober, which was harder and better than any high. And here’s what happened next: I went to law school. I became an attorney. I have tried multiple criminal cases. I built this website. I have not relapsed once.

The person who believed he was nothing wrote every guide on this site.

If you’re where I was

I’m not going to preach. I’ll just tell you the things I wish someone had said to me plainly, in language I could hear:

• The tell isn’t how much you use. It’s why and how. When the party stops being the point, when you’re using alone, when you’re hiding it, when nothing sober feels worth doing, that was my road. It doesn’t get better on its own. It didn’t for me.
• You are not nothing. I believed that for more than a decade, and it was the engine under all of it. That belief is the disease talking, not the truth. I’m living proof it was a lie.
• Tell one person. You don’t have to announce it to the world. One honest sentence to one human being breaks the seal that keeps the whole thing running.
• Walk into a meeting. AA meetings are free, they’re everywhere, and nobody checks anything at the door. You can sit in the back and say nothing. The people in that room have heard worse than your story, I promise, because their stories were mine. Find one at aa.org.
• If rehab is on the table, take it. I went resisting and it saved my life anyway. You don’t have to want it for it to work. You just have to be in the room.
• If you just got arrested, or picked up a DUI, that can be your door. It was mine. And there’s a practical truth I now know from the other side of the courtroom too: judges and prosecutors respond to real recovery. Getting help isn’t just the best thing for your life, it genuinely helps your case. If a DUI is what brought you here, start with this guide.

Why this section exists

Somebody in a rehab I didn’t want to be in showed me that a person could come from where I was and still build a life. That moment is the reason The Road Back exists. If you’re reading this from the bottom, or from anywhere on the way down, I’m not going to tell you it’s easy. I’m going to tell you it’s possible, because I’m the one writing this.

This is my personal story and my opinions. It is not medical advice, addiction treatment, or legal advice. If you’re struggling, talk to a doctor, a treatment professional, or the resources above, and if you’re facing charges, talk to a California attorney about your situation.