People are often surprised when they find out my book is free. It’s Not About Me! — Confessions of a Recovered Outlaw Addict is a full memoir — thirteen years of addiction, homelessness, IV cocaine and heroin, and the twenty-five years of recovery that have followed — and it costs nothing. That surprises people less once they understand why I wrote it in the first place. So let me explain.
Why write it at all?
I did not write this book to tell you how bad things were, although they were bad, and the book is honest about that. I wrote it because of a principle I learned in early recovery and have never seen fail: one person with experience of addiction, speaking honestly to another, can reach places that no professional qualification can.
When I was using, I could out-argue doctors, deflect family, and charm or intimidate almost anyone who tried to help from the outside. What I could not dismiss was the person who had been exactly where I was — who could describe the inside of my own head better than I could, and who was standing in front of me sober, sane and visibly living a life worth having. That person didn’t lecture me. They just told me the truth about themselves, and something in it got through.
The book is my attempt to do that at scale. Not everyone who needs it will sit across a table from me. But a book can travel where I can’t — into a prison cell, a treatment centre, a spare bedroom at 3am where someone is deciding whether tomorrow is worth trying. If the story of how I lost everything and built a life beyond anything I imagined can reach one person in one of those rooms, every hour of writing it was justified.
What the book is not
It is not a recovery manual, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It won’t give you a twelve-step guide to anything; it gives you one man’s truth, told as plainly as I know how. It’s also not a misery memoir. There’s darkness in it, necessarily, but the book is weighted towards the way out, because that’s the part of the story that might actually change something for the person reading it.
The title
The title, It’s Not About Me!, is the joke and the lesson at the centre of the whole thing. Addiction turned me into the most self-absorbed person in any room — my using, my pain, my needs, my story. Recovery taught me, slowly and uncomfortably, that almost nothing was actually about me. Not other people’s behaviour, not the world’s indifference, and eventually — this was the hard part — not even my own recovery, which existed largely because of what others gave me.
The confessions of a recovered outlaw addict are, in the end, confessions of a man learning to be useful. That’s a much better story than the outlaw one, and it’s the one I wanted to tell honestly.
Why free?
Because it was never mine to sell. I got sober because people carried a message to me without sending an invoice. My entire working life — founding Sober Services in 2008, Sober Academy in 2015, co-founding EARS in 2017, and now leading Holina Global — has been built on the same principle: the message gets paid forward or it dies.
There’s also a practical reason. The people who most need this book are often the people least able to buy it. I remember having nothing. I’m not going to put the one thing I have to give a person in that position behind a checkout page.
What readers get
I can’t tell you what you’ll take from it — readers take what they need, and it varies enormously. Families tell me it helped them understand what was happening inside someone they love. People in early recovery tell me it made sobriety look possible rather than punishing. People still using tell me it was the first time they felt accurately described rather than judged. Professionals in the treatment field tell me it reminded them why they do the work.
What I can promise is that it’s honest: the addiction is not glamourised, the recovery is not sugar-coated, and the humour is real, because even the worst years contained absurdity, and pretending otherwise would be a lie by omission.
An invitation
If any of this sounds like it might be for you — or for someone you’re worried about — the ebook is free to download from this site. Take it, read it, pass it on. That’s the whole business model.
Download your free copy of It’s Not About Me! — Confessions of a Recovered Outlaw Addict from this site, and if the book raises questions you’d like to talk through, get in touch. I read every message, and I reply.
Get in touch
I’d love to hear from you
Every message lands with me personally. Whether it’s about your own situation, a loved one, or a professional enquiry — start the conversation. I read everything, and I reply myself.
