“Looking back, I think the reason I kept chasing quick fixes was because, for the briefest moment, the slight reprieve they offered helped me forget how messed up and broken I was. In my heart of hearts, I felt like the slate of my life was so scribbled and dirty, with so many arrests and broken relationships, that it wasn’t even worth trying to clean up. Since I could not be cleansed, fixed, or cured, I simply learned to cope by covering the messy “whiteboard” of my life with pieces of white paper: a fling with a cute girl
boosted my pride, an epic adventure with friends made me excited and confident; sports made me feel tough, while good grades and a nice job boosted my ego. While each distraction helped me to ignore the mess underneath, I never found anything that could erase it. So, I stacked up the distractions until they grew so numerous, they fluttered everywhere throughout the muddled chaos I called my life.”