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“It was becoming evident to me that addiction is addiction is addiction—that all the ways in which people binge, hoard, numb, act out, control, and self-medicate are just equally desperate attempts to cover up the same deep spiritual pain. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single room in the twelve-step universe that I don’t relate to or qualify for, at some level or another, because my anxious mind never stops looking for ways to escape its host of human dilemmas.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“Stepping out of other people’s drama cycles was scary, weird, and difficult for me at first. I felt guilty for keeping the focus on myself, and I wondered how anyone could possibly survive without my overinvolvement in their lives. (Spoiler alert: They all survived. And I gradually started hanging out with healthier people.)”

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“I was not just sorrowful that first summer after Rayya died but also, at times, enraged. It was not only anger at Rayya’s absence that I was feeling; it was anger at myself for how much of myself I had given away—and anger at what she had left behind for me to clean up. She had assigned me the task of handling the details of her estate, for instance, which did not turn out to be an easy job. Rayya had been both contradictory and grandiose with her friends and loved ones about what her bank account actually contained and how she wished her money and possessions to be distributed. With a furiously clenched jaw, I did my best to clean up the confusion she had left behind and to manage everyone’s frustration—including my own. The financial gifts that she had promised to her friends I paid from my own account, because her own account was pretty much empty. I paid off her credit card bills, too—although people told me this was a stupid thing to do. (“Why pay the bills of the dead? What are they gonna do? Dock her paycheck?”) But martyrdom is a central characteristic of codependency, and so of course I paid her bills—not generously, mind you, but angrily. Victimly. “Why am I still down here serving you,” I remember shouting at Rayya in the woods one day, “when you get to float off into heaven and become fucking music?”

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“People often talk about crawling into the rooms of recovery on their knees, but when I turned to twelve-step for the second time, I felt more like I was walking in there with my hands up—like a career criminal turning herself in, ready at last to give up the game.”

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“As I listened to the other addicts share their life experiences, I began to hear the story of my own life, told in a hundred different voices. I heard from people who’d had some of the same painful childhood experiences as me, which had led them into the same unmanageable behaviors and compulsions. I heard from people who, just like me, had blown up marriage after marriage—their own marriages and the marriages of others. I heard from people who’d lost their jobs, their sanity, or all their money and belongings because of their obsession with some person or another. (“I took one look at that guy from across the bar and said, ‘I would follow that man straight to hell’—and then I did!” said one woman, while the rest of us nodded in quiet understanding.) I heard from people who had been living in desperate yearning for decades with partners who were emotionally unavailable, or who had lived their whole lives in degrading servitude to people who did not respect them or love them back, or who were pining in fantasy about relationships that had ended years earlier. I heard from people who had traded sex for love, or love for sex, or both for money. I heard about insecure attachment style and avoidance and unconscious compliance. I heard about emotional anorexia and cortisol addiction. I heard terms I’d never heard before but that immediately made sense to me (because I’d been doing those things for years but didn’t know they had names): love bombing, trauma bombing, attention pulling, ecstatic recall, digital stalking, insta-macy. I heard about assigning magical qualities to others and making them into your higher power. I heard about mistaking pity, lust, or loneliness for love. I heard about sexualizing our feelings of guilt, shame, fear, rage, and grief. I heard about rape, abuse, pregnancies, venereal diseases, pornography, prostitution, suicide, violence . . . I did not hear a single thing in those meetings that I could not identify with at some level. In fact, to this day, I have still never heard anything in any twelve-step meeting that shocks me. Whenever I hear people talking about their most self-destructive behaviors, I’m either like, “Yeah, I’ve done that” or “Yeah, I would probably do that” or “Yeah, I can see why someone would do that, given the chance.”

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“It was difficult to know where to find comfort, especially since I could no longer medicate myself with my oldest and deepest fantasy: that someday in the future a magical person would show up, fall in love with me, and fix everything. Nobody would be showing up now. There would be no fixing of anything.”

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“My own sober dating plan is approximately three pages long, and it includes such items as “NO WEEKLONG FIRST DATES.” My plan also forbids me from texting obsessively between dates, dropping any existing plans or projects because of a new relationship, falling into fantasy with someone I have met in my travels (aka not in real life), moving virtual strangers into my home, trying to rescue unrecovered alcoholics or drug addicts; buying expensive gifts for new lovers; or sharing bank accounts with anyone, ever. If all this sounds boring, or feels like it removes the spontaneity and intensity from romance, that is exactly the point. Spontaneity, for sex and love addicts, is exceedingly dangerous, and intensity is something I am wise to avoid.”

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“My mind was spinning around this inflaming and infuriating thought: Why can’t I be a normal person who does normal things like normal people? That’s when I heard Rayya’s voice. “Because you aren’t normal, babe,” she said. “You’re an addict. And addicts can’t do normal things like normal people.”

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“I read today that all addiction is a form of misplaced worship. I get that. And I’ve certainly done that. I’ve mistaken the delivery device of heavenly pleasure for heaven itself. And thus I have worshipped so many things— and so many people, too.”

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“I find these days that all I want for Rayya anymore—if you can be said to want anything for somebody who has been dead for more than six years—is that she be free. Utterly and totally free. “True love always liberates the beloved,” says my friend Martha Beck, and only now do I feel that I understand the generous, unfettered spirit behind these words. I want Rayya to be free from the need to take care of me or anybody else—even from beyond the grave. I want her to be free to vanish into the eternal mystery with all her ancestors, and to become music—because that is what she always wanted to be. And I can feel that Rayya wants me to be free, too. She wants me to live autonomously and happily and peacefully on this side of the divide— in a world that I have finally come to accept as my own, and from which I am no longer trying to escape. (It’s not such a bad world, actually, once you surrender to reality, and once you finally start showing up for your own care.)”

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“There is a prayer that we recite in those rooms that I love very much. It simply says, “Dear God—thank you for all that has been given, for all that has been taken away, and for all that remains.” Like many gratefully recovering addicts, I stand in amazement at all that remains—astonished that I was allowed to keep anything, after all my many years of madness and acting out. By all rights, I should have lost absolutely everything in the course of my various and sundry maelstroms and upheavals. Many people with minds as disordered as mine have indeed lost everything.”

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“PRAYER FOR A RECOVERING CODEPENDENT What is missing from your constitution right now, my darling, is not empathy, but courage. It takes fortitude not to leap into somebody else’s suffering with them and call that love. It takes faith to know that you are not the appointed arbiter of anyone else’s journey. And it takes humility to admit that you cannot control anyone— that you might not even understand what you’re looking at. What you call a “crisis” might be someone else’s awakening, ten thousand lifetimes in the making. (The awakening, my love, might even be your own.) And what you call “care” might be dangerous disruption of an ecosystem of unimaginable delicacy. How hard that person’s soul might have fought its way through the cosmos for millions of ages to finally arrive here—on the final precipice of egoic collapse. How close they might be, at last, to freedom. All they have to do now is shatter. Maybe stand back. Maybe let it happen.”

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“As a sex and love addict in recovery, I define a “clean day” as any day where I have not used another human being—not as a stimulant, or a sedative; not as a badge of honor or a bodyguard; not as an emotional support animal, a sleeping pill, a sex toy, a babysitter, a parental-replacement figure, or a good-looking trophy; not as some infinitely wise Delphic oracle who is here to answer all my most challenging life questions; and certainly not as a mirror that I can stare into, searching for evidence that I am lovable, attractive, worthy, normal, respectable, special, desirable, valuable, irreplaceable, adored, secure, or good.”

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“But for anyone out there whose life is being ruined by an active addict right now, please allow me to say the one thing that I don’t think gets said strongly enough or often enough: it’s okay for you to leave them. Don’t get me wrong: Addicts are precious and suffering children of God, and they do not deserve your contempt. But if you can ever save yourself from one—run. It’s okay for you to leave them. That’s what Rayya used to tell me, anyway, back when she was sober—or at least semisober. It has nothing to do with love, she said. Nothing to do with loyalty. Of course you love them, and you will always love them! But having the courage to cut off contact with an active addict is often the only way to survive their rampages—and it just might be the wake-up call that the addict needs, too.”

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“I remember once listening to Rayya counsel a friend whose younger brother was lost in heroin addiction. This woman kept trying to save her beloved sibling by paying for one rehab after another, by trying to get him jobs, by bailing him out of jail, by letting him borrow her car, sleep on her couch, exploit her financially, use her soft heart as a landing pad. She was wrung out by years of heartbreak. I remember Rayya reaching across the kitchen table for this exhausted woman’s hand and saying, “Listen, babe. Let me break it down for you—you don’t have a brother anymore. He’s already gone. You need to understand this. There is no more brother, okay? What you have now is a vampire. I know it’s confusing, because this guy looks like your brother, and he sounds like your brother, but it’s a vampire. And that vampire will drain you of every dime and possession you have, and then he will discard you once there’s nothing left to take. And trust me—that vampire doesn’t give a shit about you. So you better start giving a shit about you, or else you’re gonna wake up one morning and discover that everything in your life is gone, including him.” “But he could die if I cut him off!” the woman protested. “Your brother is already dead,” Rayya told her. “And you might need to grieve that. But the only question now is whether he will ever decide to come back to life. That’s a matter between him and God. It’s got nothing to do with you.” I also heard her tell somebody once, “You can love an active addict for sure—but they can’t love you back.”

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“Speaking of distortions of reality, I would guess that it was probably sometime around 2011 that I started noticing that the love of my life always carried bottles of Angostura bitters around with her, hidden in her purse. Maybe you are familiar with this concoction, maybe not. Bitters are a staple of every bar—a potent proprietary blend of herbs, spices, and alcohol that, when added to certain cocktails, both deepens and brightens the flavor profiles of those drinks. Bitters deliver such an intense taste sensation that you don’t need much of the stuff—just a dash. But Rayya wasn’t using the bitters to brighten up a cocktail—because she didn’t drink cocktails, because she was sober. And she wasn’t adding a few drops to some nonalcoholic beverage, either, as people sometimes do. No, she was just straight-up drinking the stuff, before, during, and after every meal—on the rocks—often downing an entire bottle at a time. And Angostura bitters have an alcohol content of 44.7 percent, which is equivalent to most vodkas, whiskeys, rums, and tequilas. Now, I know this doesn’t make sense—that somebody who claimed to be sober was also drinking every day—but that’s what Rayya was doing. She was doing this, mind you, while she was still telling her story of sobriety at twelve-step meetings (including Alcoholics Anonymous meetings) and also writing a memoir about her victory over substance addiction. Soon the bottles of Angostura bitters started showing up everywhere—not only in her purse but also in her suitcase, in the fridge, on the kitchen shelves next to her boxes of cereal, in the glove compartment of her car. She even kept bottles of bitters—multiple bottles—at her friends’ houses for when she came over to visit. (We all kept finding them in the weirdest places for years after she died.) She always had to check her luggage when we flew, because she wouldn't go anywhere without a significant stash of these magical little bottles. I never questioned any of this, because I never questioned anything Rayya did back then, because I essentially saw Rayya as a godlike figure who was always right about everything. Nevertheless, she did once tell me that a doctor had “prescribed” the bitters to her, to help her digest her food and to take the edge off her chronic stomach pain. Now, I don’t know what the doctor actually said, because I wasn’t there. I do know a few things, though. I know that, a few years later, Rayya would also tell me that a doctor had prescribed cocaine to her (don’t worry; we’ll get to that story eventually), so she may not have been a reliable narrator on such matters. But I also know that Angostura is what’s commonly called a digestif—which is exactly what it sounds like: something that helps with digestion. The mixture, in fact, was created in 1824 by the German surgeon general of Simón Bolívar’s army, who prescribed it to his troops in Venezuela to ease their stomach problems. Angostura bitters, in other words, were indeed once used medicinally. Then again, so was cocaine.”

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“There were some people in Rayya’s life who had more piercing questions about the omnipresent bottles of bitters than did I. They’d say, “Wait, aren’t you sober? Are you really supposed to be drinking that stuff?” “It’s just herbs,” she would say. “For my digestion.” “But it’s got alcohol in it,” they might protest. Because multiple times over the years—more times than I can count—I watched Rayya blink in amazement and then say with convincing sincerity, “Really? It does? Oh my gosh. I didn’t know that!” I even remember someone once showing Rayya the label of the bottle and pointing to the spot that read “44.7% alc./vol.” To which Rayya responded, “Wow, I can’t even read that without my glasses.” Once I even heard her say to someone, “Bitters aren’t really the same thing as regular alcohol. It’s, like, burnt alcohol.” (His reply? “I don’t know, Ray. I’m pretty sure 44.7 percent alcohol means 44.7 percent alcohol.”) Looking back on it now, I have trouble making sense of how I made sense of this extreme cognitive dissonance. I was watching an allegedly sober person drink every day without admitting that she was drinking—and right in front of my eyes. I was also watching the single most honest person I had ever met pretending—again and again—that she didn’t know her alcoholic drink had alcohol in it. But here’s where my disease comes in: because I somehow made all this okay. I overlooked it, rather than looking it over. I had to overlook it. My fear- and need-addled brain could not handle a reality in which Rayya had any weaknesses or character flaws whatsoever, because she had become my place of safety. Rayya was trustworthiness to me, embodied in human form. And I could not let go of that. I had to keep living in a storyline where Rayya was the soul of all integrity—or else my terror of the world would come back, and I could not bear to have my terror of the world come back. It is truly incredible what you cannot see, when you cannot bear to see it.”

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“That night over sushi, Rayya launched into the most incredible of tales. She told me that the last time she was home in Detroit, some of her friends and family members had staged a reverse intervention, gathering together to tell her that they really, really wanted her to start drinking wine. Apparently Rayya’s loved ones back in Detroit had claimed that they longed to be able to share a nice bottle of wine with her sometimes—just as they shared wine with everyone else. Why should she miss out on a glass of wine, they said, especially in a sophisticated or celebratory setting? Especially because she was such a foodie, who appreciated delicious things! They’d also apparently reported that they hated seeing her trapped forever in the disgraceful old label of “addict,” when she had not used drugs for so long and was clearly cured of her addiction. At what point would it end—this shameful burden of always having to call oneself an addict? It was as if Rayya were being forced to wear a scarlet letter! She was a completely different person now than she had been twenty years ago! Why must she continue to be exiled from the pleasant experience of adult beverages, like some kind of child? Why must she remain an outsider? If anything, it made them feel uncomfortable when she didn’t drink. “Come, now,” had said these loving—and curiously unnamed—people. “Just have one drink of wine with us! Try it! It won’t do you any harm!” “So I did have just one glass of wine,” confessed Rayya. “And it was really nice! And it didn’t do me any harm. So what I want to tell you is this, even though it terrifies me to say it: I would like to start having a glass of wine with you sometimes at dinner. But I’m so afraid to bring it up, because I’m afraid you’ll condemn me for it, and I’ll lose you!” “You could never lose me, honey!” I said. “Never in life!” And, because I’ve always been a sucker for grand gestures of loyalty, I said, “In fact, let’s order you a glass of wine right now!” and I immediately called over the waiter.”

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“Now, listen. I don’t know whether that conversation ever really happened back in Detroit—wherein Rayya’s loved ones formally “gathered together” to beg her to start drinking wine. But I do know that if I had not been so blind with infatuation, or if I were an entirely different sort of person altogether, I might have asked a few pointed follow-up questions here. Perhaps starting with “Wait—a reverse intervention? What?” And perhaps ending with “Wait, tell me again why you want to drink wine even though you hate alcohol?” Certainly, somewhere in the middle of her story, I might have interrupted and asked, “Wait—can you explain to me why you want to hide this information from your recovery friends? Aren’t you the one who taught me that we’re only as sick as our secrets?” But my mind didn’t go in any of those directions. Instead, this is literally what I thought: Rayya is so much cooler than other people! The rules really don’t apply to her!”

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“My codependency gives me outlandish ideas about how responsible I am for others, and my anxiety distorts my perception of reality—convincing me that I can control people and keep them safe, if only I try hard enough. But I cannot control anyone. Nor can I keep people safe from their own choices. Adults get to do whatever they decide to do—even to the point of their own self-destruction or death. And as my sponsor always reminds me when I am about to overstep into someone else’s territory: “God didn’t bring anyone into your life for you to control them.” Because I can’t control them. I have enough trouble controlling myself.”

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“If Satan existed, he could scarcely do better at seeding pain and destruction than to hide himself within the human mind, saying things like “You’re a failure and a fuckup, nobody understands you, you deserve some escape, you should probably just go drink something, or overeat, or spend a bunch of money, or fuck somebody, or take command over someone else’s existence, or blow up your own life, or just kill yourself—but don’t tell anybody I said any of this.” (Satan: translated from the Hebrew as “the accuser”—a shadowy internal figure I know all too intimately.)”

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“Rayya already had a community filled with fellow recovering addicts who had loved her for years, and who would have gladly received her admissions of shame and fear and helped her to process her overwhelming desire to drink. They could have guided her back to the principles of the program—back to the acts of service that keep us sober; back to a position of humility and surrender. But Rayya had pushed all those people away in order to chart her own path. And the last thing you ever want an addict doing is charting their own path.”

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“Reading Rayya’s journals today, and comparing her secret pain with the mighty persona she presented in public, I can see that she did not wish to admit powerlessness to anyone—not even to the God of her own understanding, whoever and whatever that may have been. She didn’t want anyone knowing her “business,” she wasn’t making time for any spiritual practices, and she definitely didn’t want anyone telling her she shouldn’t be drinking. There was no “life on life’s terms” happening here. The terms were all Rayya’s. And since Rayya was the biggest, toughest, smartest, coolest, most badass bitch around here, her terms were always some extremely convincing version of “I got this.” But she didn’t got it, was the problem. And instead of asking for direction from a higher power, she just kept asking herself.”

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“People don’t stick needles in their arms and pump themselves full of mind-erasing drugs for no reason, after all. And the thing Rayya had always loved about heroin was the way it eliminated her from consciousness—how it allowed her to discard her entire identity, as if her “self” were some heavy old overcoat she didn’t need to wear anymore and could just throw to the floor in a crumpled heap. The only problem with heroin was that you had to come back from the high. You had to wake up, stand up, put the overcoat back on. That had always been heartbreaking for her.”

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“How high can you fly before you crash? How long can you stay intoxicated beyond all recognition? How long can you sustain a buzz, a bender, a peak experience, a magic carpet ride, a hot-burning flame of mania, a trip to Venus on a pink cloud? How many days can you cut Earth School before you get called to the principal’s office? These are all very good questions that addicts do not generally like to answer. When pushed, however, an addict’s short response to all these questions is usually something along the lines of: As long as I can. We will keep this ride going for as long as we can. And we will not put it down until there is nothing left to smoke, drink, fuck, eat, spend, hoard, shoot into our veins, disappear into, or lick off the carpet in crumbs.”

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“I do not want to tell this part of the story because part of me still doesn’t want it to be true. I still don’t want Rayya to become who she became toward the end of her life. I want her to remain how I saw her for all those years before—heroic, brave, commanding, honest, astonishing, cool. And I still don’t want me to become what I became at the end of her life—desperate, clinging, resentful, lost, powerless, degraded, insane. I want you, dear reader, to love and admire Rayya, and I want you to love and admire me. I want you to see us as beautiful and undefeatable. I want this to be the most inspiring book of the year. I want this to be a thoughtful book about death and dying, written by a wise and spiritual woman who accepts the reality of mortality with a sense of compassionate detachment. I want this to be a tale of two courageous and amazing souls who faced down death with a sense of creativity and wild adventure, and who did enough living in the last months of Rayya’s life to resonate love across the cosmos for a thousand more lifetimes. I want to tell you that our bond was never broken—not even by the ravages of cancer, or by mortality. I want to forget how things actually went down.”

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“How quickly the dragon of addiction began to roar through Rayya’s blood—demanding what it always demands: more, more, more. Soon Rayya went from needing one morphine pill a day to two pills a day to three a day, to one pill every hour, to two pills every hour, to clusters of pills at a time—until, within a matter of a few weeks, she was yelling into the phone to her doctors, “This shit doesn’t fucking work on me! You gotta give me something stronger, or I swear to fucking God I will go out there on Fourteenth Street and find something stronger and shoot it right into my fucking veins—and don’t think I don’t know how!” So then they gave her methadone. And then they gave her fentanyl patches (“something stronger,” to be sure), which worked beautifully until they didn’t—until her addict’s brain became resistant to the powers of even this most formidable and dangerous of drugs. That’s when Rayya had the inspired idea to add a bit of cocaine to the mix, “to give me a little bump and help me stay awake”—and she bought her first gram of coke in nearly twenty years and put it right up her nose, to tremendous and obvious relief. Was that when she officially lost her sobriety and sanity? Or was it the next night—when she shot the remainder of the cocaine into her arm (“better than the nose, as always,” she said) and then chased it with a few morphine pills, then downed a handful of muscle relaxants just for good measure, and then informed me as she was nodding off into oblivion that “a hole just opened up through our bedroom ceiling and my ancestors are rolling in, four layers deep”? Was that the moment of relapse? Or had it started long before the cancer even appeared? Had she fallen off the wagon many years earlier, when she decided to start drinking and hide it from everyone? Or had she begun sliding back into addiction when she had stopped going to twelve-step meetings because she got annoyed with all those “rigid bitches” in the rooms, and because she didn’t want to work a program anymore? Or had her decline begun even before then, when she stopped letting people know how much emotional pain she was in, and decided to keep her suffering a secret from those who loved her? Or was it all of that combined? Does an avalanche happen suddenly, or does it begin with the first flake of snow that sticks to the edge of the mountain?”

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“I can’t even tell you when my love addiction got triggered with Rayya, or when I collapsed into the utter abandonment of self that is codependency in its most deadly and life-destroying form. I can’t name the exact moment when I made her into my higher power, or when I surrendered all my will and agency to her, or when I decided that it was my job in life to serve her every desire—no matter how much it cost me, physically, emotionally, or financially.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“Did I completely lose my mind that night in the spring of 2017 when she commanded me to give her some cash so she could buy that first gram of cocaine—and I did it, without hesitation? (In my weak defense, she had looked me straight in the eyes and told me, “This is the exact amount of cocaine that will last me until I die, trust me. I’m just gonna need a tiny amount of coke each day, to keep me from falling asleep in my soup because of the opioids. Trust me, I know how to do this. It’s better if we only risk buying it once—that’s why we’re getting such a large amount.”) Or was I a total goner a few days later, when she told me to go to the ATM again and get more money so she could buy more cocaine (an eight ball this time), and I did it? Or was it the morning I walked down to a “harm reduction” agency in Chinatown and registered myself with the City of New York as an active intravenous drug user so I could get clean needles for Rayya—because I was determined to keep her safe and free from infection, even as she was dying of cancer and shooting cocaine and opioids into the veins of her feet, her hands, her neck? And also because I wanted her to see what a good girl I was, what a loving and accepting girl, what a generous girl? Or did I abandon myself completely the first time I suggested that perhaps she was becoming addicted to the cocaine, and she told me I was a “needy fucking crybaby” who needed to “back the fuck off from talking about shit you don’t even fucking understand,” and I stuck around after that for more abuse? Or was it when she and I (who had never once had an argument, in seventeen years of friendship and love) suddenly started fighting every day, as I begged her to look at me again like she used to, to touch me like she used to, to speak to me the way she used to? Was it when I started sobbing, ‘Where did you go, where did our love go?’” Was it when I started hiding in the bathroom at night, weeping on the floor (again with the crying on the bathroom floor!) while she hid in another bathroom, grinding down her cocaine into a finer and finer powder?”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“When you are in the grip of addiction, or when you are severely impacted by someone else’s addiction, eventually nothing works—not even the things that don’t seem obviously related to the addictive substance or behavior. Losing the lease to our apartment and getting my bank account hacked had nothing to do with the fact that Rayya was drugged out of her mind, or that I was lost in a dense fog of codependency—but these are also the kinds of things that happen when your life is falling apart: suddenly it’s raining hammers. Everything unravels. You sprain your ankle, your car breaks down, your dog dies. You can’t handle anything. And that’s when the madness really sets in, because it seems like the world itself is a machine of pain that has turned its full force against you.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“I know the voice of God the way a blind, mewling, newborn kitten knows the smell of its mother. The voice said this: If you have arrived at a point in your life where you are seriously considering murdering yourself or another human being, there is a strong possibility that you have reached the end of your power. I stopped walking. I listened harder. I leaned into the sound of God, offering me wisdom and guidance. That being the case, continued the voice, perhaps it’s time you called somebody and asked for help.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“Child, you keep demanding impossible promises from those who cannot even take care of themselves. But what joy have you ever derived from being so dependent and unassured, so needy, lost, and afraid? You keep saying you want to count on somebody— but I say stop counting. You keep telling me you crave security because the world frightens you. But the world, my love, is what you are.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“Someone else said: “Guess what? A lot of drug addicts and alcoholics in recovery get cancer, or other terrible diseases, and they all have to figure out how to manage their pain while also staying sober in their program. Rayya is not the first addict who ever went through this, and she won’t be the last. She’s not terminally unique, so don’t let her trick you into thinking she’s some kind of special case. Every addict thinks they’re a special goddamn case. But there’s nothing special about her. She’s just an addict with cancer—like many, many others before her. If Rayya wants to die clean and with dignity, she needs to get humble, go back to the rooms, and work with a sponsor to find a pain management plan that will allow her to stay in her sobriety—but are we even sure she wants that? And if she doesn’t want that, there’s nothing you can do to make things better except maybe get the hell out of there.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“Still another person said: “Rayya could very well die now behind a locked door as a degraded and angry junkie. That would be a very sad end for her. But there’s only one thing that could make that death even sadder—and that would be if you were sitting on the floor right next to her, also behind that locked door, trapped in that nightmare with her. That would be really tragic, because now we’re talking about two destroyed lives, instead of just one. Don’t let it happen.”

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“Rayya had delivered a perfect death blow—because she, of all people, knew just how to kill me. She knew exactly where my deepest insecurities were hidden. She knew I’d received messages since childhood that my “emotional bullshit” was too much trouble for anyone to deal with. She knew I was terrified that I would always drive away the people I loved by being too needy, too clingy. She knew I’d spent most of my life trying to show people only the “good parts” of me because I was sure that if they saw the pain and fear and need that lurked below the surface, they would find me repulsive and reject me. She had in fact witnessed the most unlovable parts of me, and had once seemed to love them. But now she was telling the truth: I was disgusting, and she hated me. And it was with that wicked, blistering sentence—“I wish we’d never gotten together”—that Rayya had taken the last bits of my broken heart and ground them beneath the heel of her motorcycle boot, pulverizing me into grains even finer than cocaine. Grinding me down until there was nothing left of me. And that was exactly what she’d meant to do to me—for daring to confront her.”

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“Here’s the thing about withdrawal, from any drug, substance, person, or behavior: The reason it’s so excruciating is that not only do you have to feel the pain of losing access to that thing you desire more than anything else, but you also have to feel the pain of every other loss you have ever experienced along your life’s journey. All the previous failures, all the previous crashes, all the previous disappointments. It’s like a twenty-car pileup of failures on an icy highway, and there’s no way to get away from it. Worst of all, withdrawal forces you to feel your original suffering again—the deepest childhood grief or ancestral wound that started you out on this journey of addiction in the first place. And who wants to feel that?”

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“Addiction serves a purpose. It is medication for an aching soul, relief for a pained body, and escape from an impossible mind. Addiction is a pretty good survival strategy when all your other strategies for living have failed. As Rayya used to tell me, “I needed every gram of heroin I ever took back in the day, or I would have never made it out of my childhood alive. I could not have survived without my buffer of drugs.”

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“Attentive readers may remember that I had started attending twelve-step meetings when Rayya was on cocaine and my world was falling down around my ears. You may also remember that I’d hated every minute of those meeting—although I did take some notes. You may not be surprised to learn, then, that I had stopped attending those meetings as soon as I could—which in my case meant: as soon as Rayya stopped using cocaine and started being nice to me again. Because all my problems were solved after that, right? I mean, why should I have to attend a recovery program designed to support people whose lives are affected by the addictions of others if my “other” wasn’t acting out in her addiction anymore? And why should I have to attend meetings for sex and love addiction when I was actually getting love again, from someone I was devoted to? Anyhow, I’m way smarter than most people, and I had quickly breezed through all the literature—so I figured that I basically understood all the principles of these programs and had learned all I needed to learn. Obviously. So I had walked out of the rooms of recovery in late October of 2017 like, Thanks for all the information, everyone—I’m all set now! Nice meeting you! I’ll take it from here! Except that I wasn’t all set, because I have never been “all set.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“What if everything in Earth School is working exactly the way it’s supposed to be working, in other words—by teaching us things we can learn in no other way? What if everything (and everyone) that we label as “difficult” or “an obstacle” or even “dysfunctional” is in fact a deliberately designed construct meant to awaken us to our true natures—a divine crowbar, you might say, that is sent by the cosmos to knock down the doors of our ignorance, demolish our illusions, and give us the opportunity to move past our fears, find our innate courage, propagate wisdom, and help us to remember that we are of God? Of course we cannot know if this is how fate works, because none of us know how fate works. But in my life, I have certainly found that the Earth School model is a useful thought exercise during times of darkness, pain, and betrayal—for it takes me out of a victim mentality and offers up a worldview that feels far more empowering and fascinating than the limiting, anguished cry of “Why me?” A more fruitful question than “Why me?” could be “How might this terrible situation be perfectly designed to help me to evolve?”

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“What is the overgiver getting out of this obviously imbalanced arrangement? Or at least, what do they think they’re getting? Because nobody overgives for no reason—even if those reasons are deeply hidden or disguised as acts of pure altruism. So what is the payoff, exactly? In my case, the payoff has always been love—or at least, the desperate hope of love. And how far am I willing to go—how much will I extend myself, exhaust myself, burn myself out, or manipulate, seduce, soothe, manage, and control others—in order to get my own hidden needs and hungers met? Are you kidding me? To earn love? I will give up everything I have. I will overgive myself right to the edge of annihilation. But only always.”

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“I have caused tremendous harm to myself and others through my decades of sex and love addiction. I have inserted myself into other people’s relationships, and I have broken up families. I have lied to myself and others. I have hurt people whom I promised to cherish. I have crossed boundaries with friends; I have run away from people who cared about me and toward people who didn’t. I have cheated on people and allowed myself to be cheated upon. I have tried to buy love with money; I have triangulated, strategized, and manipulated. I have seduced people and discarded them, just as often as I have been seduced and discarded. I have committed and accepted shameful objectification. I have used other people’s bodies as drugs (both sedatives and stimulants). I have treated my own body with terrible disrespect—and I have never been able to stop. The closest I’ve ever come to suicide is because of my sex and love addiction, and also the closest I’ve ever come to murder.”

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“My problem is what’s officially called a “process addiction,” as opposed to “substance addiction,” which was Rayya’s downfall. Process addictions are characterized by extreme compulsivity around certain behaviors—gambling, shopping, hoarding, eating, sex, control, obsession, gaming, skin picking, etc. Put simply: Rayya was addicted to drugs; I am addicted to people. Although I do believe that Rayya was a love addict, as well. In fact, many folks in the rooms of recovery surmise that love addiction is at the bottom of all the other addictions. Our famished yearning for love is the great yawning chasm that we keep trying to fill with other things—with drugs, alcohol, food, money, sex, cigarettes, gambling, gaming, success, perfectionism, workaholism, internet addiction, you name it. Of all the human desires, the need to feel loved is the most fundamental. When unmet or perverted at a tender age, that need can warp our brains into making dangerous and even insane decisions for the rest of our lives.”

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“From what I now understand, given the latest neurological research, people like me—people with process addictions—have nervous systems that don’t work quite right. Many of us, having experienced at a young age what are officially referred to as “consistent disruptions of safety,” have trouble regulating our own emotions, taking care of ourselves, telling fantasy from reality, understanding the concept of boundaries, knowing whom to trust, and distinguishing our feelings from other people’s feelings. As a result, we can end up with an attachment style that is sometimes referred to as “disordered-disoriented”—which describes my romantic history perfectly.”

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“Over the years, I’ve used plenty of alcohol and drugs (both legal and illegal) in order to get numb or high—but not nearly at the level that I have used people. I don’t actually need alcohol and drugs to alter my consciousness, because the pharmacy built right into my brain churns out enormous amounts of dopamine as a reward for the experience of sexuality, physical closeness, and emotional arousal—and at a rate that is esti mated to be ten times higher than that of a so-called normal person. And it’s not only dopamine that my brain overproduces when I’m infatuated with someone; it’s also adrenaline, oxytocin, serotonin, and norepinephrine. When combined in a powerful rush, these hormones fill me with an almost godlike sense of euphoria, removing my ability to feel pain or calculate risk, warping my perception of reality, and taking away my desire for sleep, food, and fulfillment of other basic life-supporting needs. Other people might experience pleasurable sensations from romance, fantasy, or sex; I get wasted.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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“Like all addicts, then, I have suffered—and I have been the cause of suffering in others. Like all addicts, I have kept secrets. Like all addicts, I have lived a double life. Like all addicts, I have always kept a hidden stash of supply to keep me from jonesing. (In my case, “supply” would be potential love interests, with whom I was constantly flirting, texting, temperature checking, and testing the waters—in case I needed them someday.) And there is nothing cute or harmless about flirtation when I engage in it. I’ve heard it said before that drug addicts steal people’s money, but love addicts steal people’s time, energy, and emotional attention—which is even worse, because those thefts hurt people at the level of their heart, at the deepest core of their being. Those thefts leave wounds that may never heal—deep wounds to all involved.”

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Book:All the Way to the River
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