Essays on stopping, and what comes after.
July 14, 2026 · 5 min read
I knew smoking was expensive the way everyone knows: vaguely, in a fog of rounding-down. Then I put my own numbers into a calculator, and the fog turned into a number with wheels.
July 10, 2026 · 6 min read
The checking. The re-reading of old messages. The 2 a.m. urge to send just one text. If it feels like addiction, that's because — at the level of brain circuitry — it more or less is.
July 6, 2026 · 5 min read
I used to think a craving was a siege — hours of white-knuckle resistance. Then someone made me time one. Peak to fade: under four minutes. The siege was a wave, and waves can be surfed.
July 1, 2026 · 7 min read
There's a whole category of drinker the recovery literature barely addresses: no crashed cars, no interventions, just a nightly glass or three that grew roots — and a creeping sense that 'fine' isn't the same as 'good.'
June 25, 2026 · 7 min read
The internet version: abstain from everything fun for 24 hours, reset your brain like a router. The neuroscience version is slower, less Instagrammable, and much better news.
June 18, 2026 · 6 min read
The most dangerous moment in recovery isn't the slip. It's the ninety minutes after the slip, when a single mistake gets reframed as total failure — and total failure feels like permission.
June 11, 2026 · 7 min read
We treat quitting as a character test: the strong succeed, the weak relapse. The research says something much less romantic and much more useful — the people who succeed mostly stopped needing willpower at all.
June 4, 2026 · 6 min read
Everyone tells you the first three days are the hardest. Nobody tells you what they actually feel like from the inside — so here it is, hour by hour, without the motivational poster gloss.