Proud. 

Imagine being so beholden to alcoholism that you can work a marketing job without acing yourself. Imagine getting so drunk that you drive your car into a wall. This wreck smashes one of the bones in your arm so badly that, to this day, you have a metal plate screwing its pieces together. The wrist on your other arm is also broken. 

After coming out of the anesthesia from your surgeries you’re allowed the marginal pleasure of learning you didn’t kill anyone. But immediately after this you’re swept off the table where normal people live, down onto the floor of the world. In rehab, the stigma of having failed at life pushes the baited hook of your addiction all the way into your mouth, all day, every day. For months, you learn to live with that hook in your mouth, slowly—slowly—coming to realize that the slightest swerve from a tightly defined vector of recovery will sink that hook, make its line snap taut and haul your body into a darkened corner that no one ever leaves. 

Imagine putting one foot in front of the other for months on end. Imagine forcing yourself not to hope for anything except one more day without drinking alcohol. Imagine the fear of having to go back into a world where advertising sells beer by envisioning it as an unstoppable silver freight train, barreling past the crystal clear streams of the Rocky Mountains, down Fifth avenue and straight into your mouth.  

Imagine strapping those spurs onto your calves that linemen use to climb power poles. Imagine driving in piton after piton and ascending a leg of the table whose edge you drove off. Imagine getting to the top by a superhuman feat of endurance. Now imagine that that’s just the start of the struggle. That baited hook is always right there, swinging back and forth at the edge of your vision. Imagine that the best you can hope for, for the rest of your time on Earth, is to have this thing making its lazy arcs on the horizon of your life. Imagine that every time you get angry, every time you feel stupid, every time you want a reward for doing something unpleasant—it’s right there next to you, bobbing at head-height. 

Imagine starting to live again. Imagine getting really good at making jokes. Imagine taking that talent you always had for being the center of attention, for being quick on the draw, and taking it apart. Learning the limits of talent and the usefulness of craft. Imagine making a joke no one thought was funny and the pleasure of knowing how to fix it. 

Imagine getting married.  

Now imagine that you get your old job back. You work it like a farmer before steampower. You do a pointless and trivial job as well as you can, not because you love it or because you believe in it, but because it is an anchor of your sobriety. All day, every day you work on the problem of selling different teenagers the same old acne cream. Imagine coming home to your family. When you sit down to dinner, you see your wife and kids lined up around the table like little Norman Rockwells and—in that moment where all your anchors are right there in front of you and are pulling in unison—the baited hook is as far away as it is possible for it to be. 

But now imagine you’re Rob. 

You don’t get your old job back. Instead, you force yourself into a occupation where every time you do your job, there is a bar in your line of sight. A job where, if you fail and are publically humiliated for being boring, you are in the same room as shelf upon shelf of alcohol. A job where, even when you succeed, there’s an endless line of half-drunk gladhanders who would love nothing more than to buy you a drink. 

Imagine threading that needle, night after night. 

Now imagine that someone gives you the chance to tell your story. Imagine that someone wants to pay you actual money you can spend on your kids in exchange for a book that says: “Crippling alcoholism isn’t a terminal disease!”. Imagine that they want to buy advertisements on busses to promote that message. Imagine that your big, grateful face is beamed into millions of houses as you say this to talk-show hosts. Imagine that you’ve been given the chance to make the tenacious fight for an ordinary life seem like just enough. 

What would you do? 

I would hire skywriters out of my own pocket to sell this book.