![]() ![]() ![]() It's a harrowing portrait-but not one without hope. As we watch Nic plunge into the mental and physical depths of drug addiction, he paints a picture for us of a person at odds with his past, with his family, with his substances, and with himself. In a voice that is raw and honest, Nic spares no detail in telling us the compelling, heartbreaking, and true story of his relapse and the road to recovery. ![]() It took a violent relapse one summer in California to convince him otherwise. Even so, he felt like he would always be able to quit and put his life together whenever he needed to. In the years that followed, he would regularly smoke pot, do cocaine and Ecstasy, and develop addictions to crystal meth and heroin. Nic Sheff was drunk for the first time at age eleven. This New York Times bestselling memoir of a young man’s addiction to methamphetamine tells a raw, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful tale of the road from relapse to recovery. I love his honesty.The story that inspired the major motion picture Beautiful Boy featuring Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet. It gets better quicker when we don’t hide what we’re going through, but reach out to others, whether it’s family, friends, counselors…. I’ve also learned that we shouldn’t try to go it alone. What I’ve learned is that as bad as things get, they will get better. Which reminds me of the John Lennon song Nic quotes in his other memoir, We All Fall Down: Hold on, it’s going to be all right. From my own life I’ve learned that as bad as things get if I hold on, the depression or fear lifts. But it’s also true that suicide and drugs can seem like solutions to problems that can never get better, but that’s because it can be impossible to see hope when we feel that bad. Life is hard and sometimes it’s more than hard and seems unbearable. It’s why some people do kill themselves and why some use drugs. ![]() But still I understand the desire to escape pain. He says that one of the things that saved him was seeing a person try to kill herself. It breaks my heart to know that Nic considered suicide at some points in his life. If we do, we can see the strawberries and taste them. We can spend all our time worrying about those or look in front of us, which is the present. We all live like that – tigers above, tigers below, and a mouse gnawing. He reaches out and plucks a strawberry and pops it into his mouth. He looks down at the waiting tigers, and then up at the tigers above and, below them, a mouse gnawing at the vine. Then he looks directly in front of him and sees a bush with beautiful red strawberries. He hears a noise and looks up and sees a mouse gnawing at the vine to which he clings. He looks down and sees that there are tigers waiting below him, too. The tigers are coming, so he grabs onto a vine and climbs over the edge, holding on. A man is in the forest when he comes across a group of tigers, who begin chasing him. He told a Buddhist story he learned that’s helped me in my life. I’ve been working on a book about a man named Jarvis Masters, who’s a death-row prisoner in California, who became a Buddhist. At that young age, he discovered truths that the greatest writers and philosophers taught. I think he must have been only in his early 20s. ![]()
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