David Sheff Quotes

Why does it help to read others' stories? It is not only that misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company. Others' experiences did help with my emotional struggle ...

I tried everything I could to prevent my son's fall into meth addiction. It would have been no easier to have seen him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a meth addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in Third Eye Blind, said that meth makes you feel "bright and shiny." It also makes you paranoid, delusional, destructive, and self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again.

Ha Jin writes: 'Some great men and women are fortified and redeemed through their suffering, and they even seek sadness instead of happiness, just as Van Gogh asserted, 'Sorrow is better than joy,' and Balzac declared, 'Suffering is one's teacher.' But these dicta are suitable only for extraordinary souls, for the select few. For ordinary people like us, too much suffering can only make us meaner, crazier, pettier, and more wretched

Sometimes I am all right. Is this what they call letting go? I have let go, if letting go means I am all right sometimes.

I am becoming used to an overwhelming, grinding mixture of anger and worry ...

That's when it struck me that I can't take my life as long as I can still laugh.

This is the way that misery does love company: People are relieved to learn that they are not alone in their suffering, that they are part of something larger, in this case, a societal plague [drugs]
an epidemic of children, an epidemic of families.

We deny the severity of our loved one's problem not because we are naive, but because we can't know.

In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain wrote, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." He was quoting a Neil Young song about Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When I was twenty-four, I interviewed John Lennon. I asked him about this sentiment, one that pervades rock and roll. He took strong, outraged exception to it. "It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out, " he said. "I worship people who survive. I'll take the living and the healthy.

Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying

How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?

Once and for all, people must understand that addiction is a disease. It's critical if we're going to effectively prevent and treat addiction. Accepting that addiction is an illness will transform our approach to public policy, research, insurance, and criminality; it will change how we feel about addicts, and how they feel about themselves. There's another essential reason why we must understand that addiction is an illness and not just bad behavior: We punish bad behavior. We treat illness.

It's an incontrovertible fact that many--more than half of all children--will try [drugs]. For some of those, drugs will have no major negative impact on their lives. For others, however, the outcome will be catastrophic.

But here's the rub of addiction. By its nature, people afflicted are unable to do what, from the outside, appears to be a simple solution - don't drink. Don't use drugs. In exchange for that one small sacrifice, you will be given a gift that other terminally ill people would give anything for: life.

Wherever you be, wherever you may, seek the truth, strive for the beautiful, achieve the good.

I know there is no point in haranguing him because he will just shut down, but I want to cover every angle.

I would miss having Nic in my life. I would miss his funny phone messages and his humor, the stories, our talks, our walks, watching movies with him, dinners together, and the transcendent feeling between us that is love.
I would miss all of it.
I miss it now.
And here it sinks in: I don't have it now. I have not had it whenever Nic has been on drugs.
Nic is absent, only his shell remains. I have been afraid - terrified - to lose Nic, but I have lost him.

An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.

Fortunately I have a son, my beautiful boy
Unfortunately he is a drug addict.
Fortunately he is in recovery.
Unfortunately he relapses.
Fortunately he is in recovery again.
Unfortunately he relapses.
Fortunately he is not dead.

The seventh and eighth grade were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I have ever known, what the writers of the bible meant when they used the words hell and pit...It was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn't...It was springtime, for Hitler, in Germany.

Anne Lamott

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

Even as all the experts kindly tell the parents of addicts, 'You didn't cause it,' I have not let myself off the hook. I often feel as if I completely failed my son. In admitting this, I am not looking for sympathy or absolution, but instead stating a truth that will be recognized by most parents who have been through this.

I'm not sure if I know any 'functional' families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don't have a full range of problems.

How innocent we are of our mistakes and how we responsible we are for them.

Only girls wear tights. - Nic responds, "Uh,uh. Superman wears tights.

Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything ... I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate ... It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs ...

Our children live or die with or without us. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It is a devastating realization, but also liberating. I finally chose life for myself.