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Annals of Addiction

Rock Bottom Is Written Afterwards

Every recovery story has a lowest point. Most of them were chosen later, by the person telling it.

Recovery · · 9 min read

He has to hit bottom first. There is nothing you can do until then.

Said to the families of drinkers, by almost everyone, for about eighty years

The hall belongs to a church off a main road in east Bengaluru, and on Thursday evenings it belongs to thirty plastic chairs, a tube light with a flicker nobody has fixed, and a steel flask of tea that is too sweet on principle. Joseph is the speaker tonight. He is fifty-two, nine years sober, and he tells it well, because he has told it perhaps two hundred times.

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