Jared Bryan Smith

I was born into an alcoholic family and saw its ravaging waste early. My earliest memories are of my father drinking Budweiser. I would have been 5 or 6, his band partying at the house, beer cans and cigarettes everywhere. The arguments intensified, the DUIs piled up, and by the time I was 10 he was drinking vodka straight from the bottle and steadily losing his mind. When my mother finally tried to leave, he stalked us and threatened to kill her and my three siblings. Eventually he took his own life with a .357. I swore I would never become that man.

Then I found LSD, marijuana, The Grateful Dead, and drinking. I was hooked from the start, and a 17-year spree followed. I tried to look like a success story: I built and ran recruiting companies, representing Fortune 500 clients like Time Warner, GE, and Home Depot, all while in active addiction. But I was a dressed-up garbage can, and by the end I was living in an abandoned shack off Coleman Road in Roswell, GA, just outside of Atlanta. It finished the way it had to. I lost my mind entirely: a jump from a bridge, full-blown paranoid schizophrenic symptoms, psych wards, jail cells. My father had looked me in the eye a few months before his death and told me AA didn't work. So I didn't have much hope. But I didn't have much choice: it was AA or suicide, and I refused to put my son through what I had suffered.

In 2006, I began in earnest. And a miracle took place: the obsession to drink and drug was removed through the 12 Steps of AA. Then came the next fight. My liver was failing. A brief dabble with needles had given me Hepatitis C, and with no insurance, interferon treatment costing thousands of dollars per shot offered a 50/50 chance at saving my life. Miracles abound. This book is the story of that struggle, begun around age 30, to break the cycle of alcoholism, addiction, and anguish for good.

It was the stories in the back of the Big Book that reached me, the personal stories, the ones that pierced through the veil of delusions I was still holding onto. In "Acceptance Was the Answer," a man describes being so far gone he thought they'd come to lock his wife away, and then the asylum doors shut on him, to his utter shock. I read that in the DeKalb County Crisis Center and the floor dropped out from under me: this is happening to me, right now. I had also thought myself a unique kind of drug addict, successful, connected, with access to the best stuff in the world. Then I read that same man's story and was humbled. He was a doctor. He didn't just have access, he could write himself prescriptions for the strongest drugs on the planet. My terminal uniqueness didn't survive that page.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous was nearly titled The Way Out, and for me, the way out was becoming the man I was always meant to be. In sobriety I found real success in the construction tech industry, the kind of financial security I could never hold onto while drinking, and founded books4free, a platform giving the world's great books away free to anyone who wants to read them. Today I live on the beach in Saint Pete Beach, Florida, where I deep sea fish and play guitar live around town, an instrument I picked up during the COVID lockdowns. Nineteen years sober, twenty this Christmas Eve.

After nearly twenty years in the rooms, I've heard so many miraculous stories that I believe this: every recovered alcoholic has a story, maybe a book, the world needs. That's why books4free aims to be the easiest place on the planet for alcoholics to publish. Send you story, or even the idea to us @ books4free and we'll help you, coach you, edit your manuscript, and build your cover. You never know who your story might keep sober one more day. After I published mine, I heard from so many people suffering through Hep C treatment, and there is nothing like sharing the light God's given you with someone still in the dark. Tell your story to the world. Email us today.

I write under a pen name in keeping with the spirit of anonymity our traditions ask of us. You can find my profile on Facebook & X.