this isn't one of the ten skies, because staying sober isn't a feeling — it can happen inside any of them. the fog, the ache, the grip, the glass wall: any sky can be the one you're white-knuckling through today. so this page cuts across the whole library instead. it gathers, in one place, everyone on this site whose story runs through addiction — the ones who lived it, relapses included, and the ones who mapped how craving actually works.
two honesty rules. first: nothing here is medical advice, and nobody on this page claims a cure — what they offer is testimony and mechanics. if you're in it right now, real help is a doctor, a meeting, a person — and reaching for that counts as strength on every page of this site. second: everything is checked, same as everywhere here. the relapses are in the stories on purpose, because a page that only showed the clean years would be lying to you.
three years sober when his four-year-old son died. he stayed sober — for the boy's memory, he says — and the grief went into the songs.
got clean in 1967, relapsed a decade later, kept going back. his loop ran thirty years in public — and going back is the part that counts.
survived the raft and the camps — then nearly didn't survive the drinking that followed him home. the night in 1949 it broke is the story.
homeless at 16, drinking, in and out of jail — and the plainest case anywhere that telling the story truthfully is how the loop ends.
walked out of a violent home into the same pattern twice, drinking years included. what got her out was a craft she built herself.
a decade with the most severely addicted people in canada, and one reframe for anyone with a habit they can't stop: not why the addiction — why the pain.
put smokers in a brain scanner and taught them to watch a craving instead of fighting it. curiosity, it turns out, outperforms willpower.
serenity for what can't change, courage for what should, wisdom to tell them apart — the real history of the prayer recovery rooms say every day.