“The Struggle” is a true story of a young man and his struggle with drug addiction and alcoholism. This story really takes you into the mind of an addict. See how he went from “being young and having fun” to a world of crime and desperation.

The story behind the story:

I wrote his book about 2-3 years after I got clean and sober. To understand why I wrote this book, I must first explain a couple of things about 12-step programs.

12-step meetings are heavily focused on helping alcoholics/addicts. In fact, it is said that if you want to stay clean and sober, you must help others achieve sobriety. By helping others, you are really just ensuring your own sobriety.
Now, there are many different ways of helping other addicts and alcoholics, but one of the most common ways is by sharing your life story at a meeting. I learned this early on in sobriety and shared my story at meetings whenever someone asked me to speak. Whenever I spoke at a meeting, I would always have people come to me afterward and tell me how powerful my message was. But, after one meeting, in particular, an older gentleman said to me, “You should write a book! You’re going to help so many people.” That was the day the seed, which grew into this book, was planted.

Over the coming weeks, I kept thinking back to what that guy said. I wanted to help as many people as possible. I knew that writing a book would allow me to help many more people, even people I would never meet. However, I had never written a book before, and to be honest, I didn’t even read books that often. However, after talking about the idea with one of my uncles, he said to me, “Well, they say that you should write what you know.” That was the water that fed the seed which grew into this book.

I went home that night and thought about what my uncle said. I mean, what do I know better than my own life story? What do I know better than addiction/alcoholism and recovery? I decided right then and there to get to work, so I turned on my computer and wrote chapter one.

The next day, I wrote chapter two and then chapter three the day after that. The 12-step program taught me to live one day at a time, so that’s how I wrote my book: one chapter at a time. I continued to write a chapter a day until the book was complete.

When I was done writing the book, I ran it through the spell checker and sent the manuscript to get self-published. I didn’t know much about writing back then, so I thought the spell checker would catch all my mistakes; ironically, I was mistaken. I apologize to anyone who has read this version of my story, as I know there are numerous errors in the book. Honestly, I was pretty embarrassed when people pointed them out to me.

Even though there were many errors in the book, I still received a lot of positive feedback. So, I decided to leave it as it was and told myself I would eventually get around to fixing them. I just didn’t realize it was going to take 10 years for me to do that. This is how my newest version of the book “The Struggle: 10 Years Later” came to be.

***This title is no longer available***

If you are looking for the newer, updated version of this book, please click HERE