Hope Is Right Through Those Doors: A Memoir

It started with a hot, stolen beer at a campout in rural Kentucky. A thirteen year old boy who just wanted to belong. A pat on the back that his brain registered as success. Twenty-six years later, that same boy, now a man with two prison sentences, a broken jaw, a son he barely knew, and a $500 bond that nobody came to pay, found himself sitting on a freezing sidewalk in January with a bag of dirty clothes and nowhere left to go. Hope Is Right Through Those Doors is the raw, honest, and ultimately triumphant memoir of a man who lost everything to addiction and found his way back. From the rural backroads of Bowling Green, Kentucky to the United States Army, from the chaos of crystal meth to the silence of a Kentucky state prison, this is a story that pulls no punches and offers no easy answers. It is a story about what addiction really looks like from the inside, not as a moral failing, but as a force so powerful it can override every human survival instinct, including a broken jaw and near death experience. At the heart of this memoir is a brother named J.J. - a Kentucky State Trooper who drove his little brother to treatment in silence, threw a bag of dirty clothes onto a sidewalk, and said the words that changed everything: "Don't call me or our mom until you do something different." It is a love letter to that brother, who would later be lost on the open road he loved and whose legacy continues in every man whose lights come back on. This is also a story about a twelve year old boy who, when his father finally stopped saying sorry and asked what he could do to make it right, looked up and said: "I just want my dad back." Getting sober at thirty-nine after twenty-six years of addiction, the author rebuilt his life one day at a time through the twelve steps, college courses behind prison walls, and the slow, earned restoration of every relationship the disease had taken. Today he sponsors men through recovery, works with veterans, and carries a simple message to anyone who thinks it is to late: Love God. Love yourself. Love your family. Help someone. Be kind. Trust that it is never too late to do something different. Hope Is Right Through Those Doors is for the man in the jail cell, the veteran who came home a stranger to himself, the father who thinks he has gone too far to come back, and anyone who has ever sat in the dark and wondered if the light was still there. It is.

Pages: 42, Paperback, Independently published