My Peaceful Soul is the true story of my life. The story of a kid from Queens with big dreams, a broken heart, and a need to belong. I start out from my earliest memories of young childhood to build the foundation of how I became a sick, suffering, desperate drug addict that eventually found recovery, redemption, and most importantly a calm, peaceful soul.
This is a graphic memoir. In it I tell the detailed story of how my addiction took me to the depths of depravity and desperation. Within the 112,780 words are some of the most graphic depictions of addiction, withdrawal and recovery. I bare my soul in this book. The stories of my childhood and adolescence can at times be extremely funny while also being terribly heartbreaking and always brutally honest. I hide nothing as I take the reader from my addiction through my process of recovery. To me, recovery is a lifelong process. This is not a story about pretty rainbows, flowers and a joyful life once I get sober, in fact, it's the opposite of that. It's about learning how to live through extremely painful life circumstances without the numbing effect of drugs.
I tell the truth about recovery because I want the world to understand how hard it is to recover from addiction. I want the world to know that recovery happens and people like me can become productive members of society, regardless of what we've done in our past. When we recover, it's not just from addiction, we recover from the self-imposed guilt and shame that addiction causes. We recover from how the world saw us and what society believes about us.