Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Laid Off… That sounds so much better than it really is.

Posted: August 19, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Getting laid, or jerking off, now that sounds at least moderately enjoyable… but being laid off, just blows. In sobriety I’ve now been laid off three times in less than 3 years. This never happened to me when I was out there drinking and drugging. Now mind you there are some details I’m leaving out. Sure, sure, I was told I am actually free to continue to work, but commission only. I don’t think my car payment or ex wife will accept such terms however, and therefore I’ve been looking for work all week long. I’m fortunate in that I do have a good solid ten years of recruiting experience under my belt and I’ve had a few nibbles.

I tell you also, the romantic notion of becoming a soldier continues to haunt my conscience. I have always romanticized the horrors of war. I have studied history, read dozens of books, and know academically how horrendous, monotonous, boring and terrifying war can be. I know the stats of double and triple amputees coming out of Afghanistan, especially those of Infantry, where I imagine myself going, and I know that this time last year we’d seen an increase of IED’s up to about 1000 and that this year that number is already at 1800 or almost double. It also seems they have something more potent taking helicopters out of the sky though nobody is about to admit that publicly. I know all these facts like the back of my hand, and yet I can’t escape the notion that I would love to serve, and to fight. I would love to fly helicopters into battle ultimately.

My record is such, bar fights and dui’s etc, that I don’t qualify for Security Clearance to be a medic or a pilot though, so the recruiter tells me I need a good year of good behavior to earn security clearance and then apply for Helicopter Pilot School. And my brain tells me no, but heart tells me yes. I pray for guidance, and I hear no voices, but when I think of the adventure while sitting in church, it’s like  thinking of the woman who slipped away, my heart pounds, adrenaline flows and chills radiate out from my spine through my bloodstream. I love the idea of it all. The journey.

Andrew Jackson once said “I was born in a storm, and a calm does not suit me.”

I know how he feels. I’m having a hard time getting motivated by mere corporate survival and sales goals as of late. Though I know the math is terrible, the odds dismal my age a huge obstacle, I can’t stop thinking I might be happier if I just followed my heart every once in a while instead of listening to my fact filled brain. I will continue to pray about I suppose.

I go back to Hemingway at war, and though I know I’m no Hemingway, you just can’t deny it would give a powerful subject to a voice I now have a lot of faith in. Also with 5k friends under my real name and about 2k friends under Jared Bryan Smith on facebook I could blog and post videos and picture from the war zone that would be mind blowing. Again, food for thought, just some of the things a grandiose alcoholic considers when his career gets sidelined yet again. We shall see.

-Jared Bryan Smith

 

Crazy weird dreams last night…

Posted: August 6, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Then I wake up to the second time in a week where I’ve had an email in my inbox stating “We need to chat.” So last time it turned out to be a very positive thing for the marketing company I work for but this  one was regarding the book, and damn it if I don’t get nervous as hell when someone leaves something like that. Just seems so ominous. “We need to chat” Sounds like a woman getting ready to give you bad news or something, which i why I haven’t had a woman all year, I’m tired of bad news, haha..

Man those dreams were kicking too. After a very long week, I decided not to do anything at all Friday  night but just relax at home and I ended up falling asleep around 11 or so. Had several days in a row of good workouts, I really can’t under emphasize the importance of exercise in sobriety. I’ve noticed I  even began getting depressed if I don’t work out over a few days in a row. The human body was meant to exercise, for 50k years or whatever we had to to eat, and only in the past 100 or so has man been able to provide a living and be stationary, never moving a muscle. Our brain chemistry requires those endorphins in the blood, and I only wish I’d begun adding exercise to my sobriety earlier, because damn if it doesn’t make me much more happier overall… but I digress, so yeah, I crashed hard and slept deep and came up with some very strange dreams.

In my dreams my baby sister, invited me to one of her hot 24 year old friends engagement party or something, and I showed up a little too early. I am not that great at new social situations and I found myself self conscious that my pants were too loose and that someone would see my ass crack. So I drifted away from the party into a laundry room, and in the room, there were several items of clothing scattered around the room, and one of them was a slim narrow chicks belt. That wasn’t going to work, but then I saw some shoe laces. I knelt down to get the shoelaces and in that instant, the pretty 24 year old blonde who was to be married, slid into the room. I stood up surprised and embaressed and in another split second another person came in, this was a guy though, of medium frame, with intelligent frantic looking eyes. Cool and collected he seemed, but egotistical with an aire of superiority, no amount of humility could shake from him. He began mocking the girl who was in tears, and she kept saying, you have to leave , you have to go, and he mocked and taunted her, called her stupid, said he was going that he just wanted to come by and say goodbye. So I stepped up closer, and suddenly as only happens in dreams the shoelaces had become a wire coil, like that you would expect to see exiting a washer/dryer or over, and I was stripping it down, listening to the two of theirs drama. They seemed not to notice me after all, I really did not know either of them very well, but had a loyalty to the girl since it was my sisters friend. I began to tense, if things did get ugly, I knew I could take this guy, but I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. God knows I didn’t need any charges 4.5 years sober. He was blackmailing her, he was threatening to make a scene if she didn’t let him stay, and instead of being forceful the poor girl was begging and pleading, she was in love, but she didn’t want her new beau to know about her damaged psycho ex past. He was smiling, threatening her, causing her pain, and she was in tears. I was unraveling the coil that I had originally picked up as shoelaces, which made me think of juvenile prison, where they took your laces to prevent suicide. I had removed several layers of wires by now and I had the core to make a belt, but now I also had a canister of air, seemingly a by product of disentangling the wires, and damn if it didn’t look just like an incideniary grenade suddenly. As their arguing reached a crescendo, I pulled the pin, and they both stopped to look at me, while we waited for the detonation. I dropped it in the middle of us, and the guy walked outside of the room we were in, a smug superior smirk on his face. He began walking up to the crowd of people near the center of the house, making exagarrated movements, trying to draw attention to himself and thus emberass the girl. I looked at the girl in tears, worry etched all over her face. I kicked the dud of a grenade to the side, and I went to go talk to the guy, ask him to leave, escort him to the door. He was now messing with a baby in a carriage, in my dream, literally stealing baby from a candy. And then I thought, wait a minute, who gave candy to that baby anyway. Baby’s can’t eat candy, and right when I put my arm on the guys arm to walk him out, I woke up. I have an overactive imagination.

Then I go to my computer and I have a message from a publisher that says “Jared, we need to chat.” It’s gonna be a long day, especially since he’s in a different time zone. Grrrr.

-Jared Bryan Smith

Gregg Allman – Hepatitis C – Latest CNN Interview

Posted: July 14, 2011 in Uncategorized
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I’m too lazy to go look but I wonder if his albums sell under the huge multimedia Time Warner banner?

He STILL denies having gotten the drug through any kind of drug use, and even adds, “It doesn’t much matter how you got it, you got it.” And this is true, but MUCH more people get Hepatitis C now a days via needles and or sharing straws, which never occured to me while I was out there drinking and drugging, than do by using dirty tattoo needles. Ironically, I just returned from Macon GA and for some reason I believe the bucket story now. That probably is exactly how he got it, and ohhh how disgusting.

It is still humble and cool of him to come out and speak about Hep C, and that he’d gotten a liver transplant of a 29 year old liver, and even more shocking I thought, was that the CNN announcer mentions that he still has Hep C, and that he is living with it. So he was not cured of the virus at all? I wonder if they will try and run him through the new Telaprevir with the higher success rates. I hope so, I hope they can clear him of the virus as they did me, but as Dr. Hutchinson from Duke told me “the young do better than the old.” I wonder what his prognosis is for Interferon with the new drugs, and if the liver transplant makes it impossible to go under Interferon or somehow prevents the full blown chemo like side affects? Still, I may have been a little harsh when I blogged about Gregg before, denying any drug use and stating that he’d gotten it from dirty tattoo needles. In the big scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter how you get it, none of us invented the disease, it matters what you do with it, and if you man up and fight it, quit drinking, and persevere through all the long odds to beat the nasty little beat me down.

Still, I’d be happier if he’d use his name to go out and promote free Interferon use with Telaprevir to all, I mean, they shortened the length of time, doubling the odds, but also doubling the cost. Most of us don’t have Rock Star retirement plans. And it’s the kind of thing that with a concentrated government effort, they could eradicate just like polio, instead of just bilking people left and right.

Let me tell you too, if I find out he’s working for Roche or Merck and this was a publicity stunt for some new medication they are charging triple for, and he still couldn’t admit he’d gotten it using needles, then I’ll be just as irritated. Or to find out his rock star royalty got him the transplant liver faster, that would be just as aggravating. On this one it is probably better I don’t do any research. For now, Gregg has my compassion and sympathy and even my thanks for doing this interview, regardless of if it’s connected to his record sales, and/or paid pharma giants, more than likely even if all that was true, his agent just tugged his heart strings and Gregg was just doing what he thought was right.

He’s still one of the baddest musicians ever to walk the planet. I pray his recovery from Hep C and his transplant stays strong and that he’s able to go through the new Interferon treatments with telaprevir and beats it.

-Jared Bryan Smith

Book Review – The Mindful Addict: A Memoir of the Awakening of a Spirit by Tom Catton

Posted: July 9, 2011 in Uncategorized
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In 2004, after my mom had passed away and I was detoxing from all opiates, I read the book “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey. What a colossal piece of shit. What a shame for the publishing industry, that they not only published such garbage, but then, after being called out and discovered to be untruthful, simply slap a few sentences in the beginning of the book, stating something to the effect “A million little pieces is a collection of James Frey’s personal and fictional experiences, blah blah,” instead of having the decency and integrity to take the lying trash they’d already made millions on down, apologize profusely, and walk away with at least an ounce of respect. But they didn’t do that. They continue, to this day to publish this collection of exaggerated, self glorifying, egotistical, atheist view of recovery, in which honesty is not mentioned one time in the entire book, let alone the word humility. I was coming down off a year of opiates, hellish withdrawals, and trying to read that book for hope, and only finding that I couldn’t relate to it at all. Because it was lies. Tom Catton’s book rings true from the very beginning, through out the entire book. Maybe James Frey’s book wouldn’t have bothered me so much, if HONESTY weren’t the VERY FIRST principle of the VERY FIRST step, but it is. Also, I was so blessed to have people in my life who had multiple years of recovery, and the thing that rang true for all those people, as does while reading Tom Catton’s book, is they were ALL very very humble, grateful to be alive, and thus their stories sounded honest to me. Shame on the publishing industry for falling for such easily spotted vanity writing. So it is with a skeptical eye and wary mind that I read any book or memoir on recovery, and this one, I could tell from beginning to end was one of the most humble honest stories of sobriety, life and spirituality in general that I’ve ever read.

For me too, personally, the book held a lot of meaning in synchronicity. His sobriety date was a day or two off my birthday, I haven’t traveled to a ton of places, but the north shore of Oahu is one place I spent about two weeks when I was married, so I recognized a lot of the setting, or I thought I did at least. I was enthralled the entire ride through. Walking in faith, truly LIVING IN THE MOMENT, this book encapsulates the way, my Higher Power, Jesus Christ, asked us to really live, and there in lies another sweet irony, Tom writes as a Buddhist, haha, and yet, written eloquently, spiritual truths, NEVER contradict other spiritual truths, and though when I began reading I had a preconceived notion I might not jive with everything he’d written, I never once found myself offended, or even skeptical or in disbelief. If anything, I only coveted some of those spiritual experiences he writes about that bring tears of joys to his eyes, hoping that I may one day be as blessed as to reach those states in simple meditation. I do believe it’s possible, I just have never been there before. But there again, he’s 30+ years sober and I’m only 4 years or so. He is truly a sage spiritual guide and anybody, Christian, Buddhist or whatever flavor ice cream you prefer can benefit from the mindful pages in this book.

It really was just a very well written, humble, honest story of recovery, and I recommend everyone pick up a copy. We are blessed to have Tom as an outlet for the Universe’s energy, and I’m truly a better man for having read the book, keeping an open mind, and reading through his wisdom when it comes to our 12 steps, and especially his emphasis on the 11th step. This is something I need to put more work into and it’s funny, because almost every meeting I went to this week talked about the 11th step and then the book I’m reading takes me to his summary of the 12 steps and his writing on it, being mindful, and being in the NOW, was really like God smacking me across the face with the Captain Obvious backhand. As always I hear what I need to hear when I really listen.

If you haven’t already, look up Tom Catton on facebook and go get and read his book, for any level of recovery, it is worth the read.

-Jared Bryan Smith

TheAddictedProject.com Publishes My 1st Interview!!! Thanks Ashley, Josh and friends!!

Posted: July 4, 2011 in Uncategorized
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http://www.theaddictedproject.com/#!articles

Very cool stuff in deed, though I of course am now over-analyzing everything I said, and didn’t say, haha. It is great to have any kind of recognition at all though and I’m very humbled that anyone would take the time at all to interview me for my thoughts on writing, the book and life in general. I’m grateful, humbled and happy all in the same breath.

It’s hard to believe that 5 years ago TO THIS DAY, I was in the process of going from the top floor of the Ritz Carlton, opening the curtains to see the whites in the eye balls of the pilots of the black helicopters literally just outside my window, descending into madness to ultimately land in the looney bin for my VERY first time. I mean, that is fucking incredible. 5 y ears later I’m an author, VP of Sales for a mobile marketing company with 5 direct reports and an incredible family life. 5 years ago my family were trying to get me in one place so they could all three sign me into an insane asylum, today, I’m invited to have BBQ at my uncles and play with the toddlers.

Miracles abound in this program of recovery, in this incredible life in general.

Sunday’s ministry by Andy Stanley was amazing as well, loving kindness, making a difference not making a point, treating all those outside the faith with much faith and grace and a little salt, relates so closely to my view of christianity that it is remarkable. I really want to get my book in his hands at some point as we have seen eye to eye, in actually reading the words of Christ and trying to do what they say, not what organized religion says we should do, but actually acting like good Christians, being kind, turning the cheek, practicing forgiveness. If you didn’t catch this Sunday’s sermon or have never heard an Andy Stanly sermon, do yourself a favor and go check it out, this Sunday’s was one of the best ones I’ve ever seen him tell, and it was filled with loving tolerance of others, as well as being a religion of attraction rather than promotion, which is how we got out from under the thumb of the Romans almost 2000 years ago. He talks about the pharisees being the only ones Jesus was most consistently against, because of all of their rules and their hypocrisy. Even as an just an intellectual non-christian this Sundays was a good lesson for anyone to hear. You can always catch up on his messages via the links below, usually they are a week behind though, so make sure you note the dates. July 3rd is the one that really moved me the most in the last year of going or so and is a valuable lesson for christians and non christians alike!

Sundays was titled : Separation of Church & Hate.

Most rational, prudent expression of living by example I’ve heard in a long time, and definitely worth hearing.

http://www.buckheadchurch.org/messages/download

http://www.buckheadchurch.org/messages

http://www.youtube.com/northpointministries

I’m so grateful for my recovery today. Grateful for Josh and Ashley and everyone at TheAddictedProject.com and I wish them all the best in their Publishing adventures, and am indebted to them if they ever have any writing needs at all.

Happy 4th of July everyone.

Respectfully,

Jared Bryan Smith

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” Mahatma Gandhi

Posted: June 29, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Woke up feeling refreshed and recharged, better than I have in several days. Probably because I worked out a small feud with someone whom I really never had anything against to begin with, but whom I did repeat a nasty rumor I’d heard, thus inciting a grudge that lasted way longer than it should have, and had farther reaching ramifications than I could have ever imagined. We made amends to each other and damn if I don’t feel 10 times better for it for my part.

Reminded me of a christian value that I wish I had followed earlier, because it really did bring an instant peace and calm into my life as soon as we were done talking.

Matthew 18:15 “Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.”

Pretty moving stuff… and just a few sentences later:

Matthew 18:19 “I tell you that if two of you on Earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in Heaven. for where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them.”

Well that parable to me, sums up the magic of an AA meeting perfectly. For years I would try to get sober all by myself and never get more than 2 weeks, tops, and then my very first half ass try into AA, where two or more people are trying to accomplish the same goal, and lo and behold I was able to stay sober for a month… and that was without getting a sponsor or working any steps… The forgiveness thing, for me anyway, is more in the Masters / Phd realm of AA, as my anger, once up is really hard to get back down… but I don’t have to think my way into right action, I have to act my way into right thinking, and the act of forgiveness, humility and an open conversation with my brother in sobriety, brought about the forgiveness I wouldn’t have thought possible.

And even if you must discount the religious mumbo jumbo, I found science to back the claims as well, the positive affects of forgiveness transcend even religion, and stab deep into the heart of science as well.

“Dr. Robert Enright from the University of Wisconsin–Madison founded the International Forgiveness Institute and is considered the initiator of forgiveness studies. He developed a 20-Step Process Model of Forgiveness.[4] Recent work has focused on what kind of person is more likely to be forgiving. A longitudinal study showed that people who were generally more neurotic, angry and hostile in life were less likely to forgive another person even after a long time had passed. Specifically, these people were more likely to still avoid their transgressor and want to enact revenge upon them two and a half years after the transgression.[5]

Studies show that people who forgive are happier and healthier than those who hold resentments.[6] The first study to look at how forgiveness improves physical health discovered that when people think about forgiving an offender it leads to improved functioning in their cardiovascular and nervous systems.[7] Another study at the University of Wisconsin found the more forgiving people were, the less they suffered from a wide range of illnesses. The less forgiving people reported a greater number of health problems.” 

I am glad it is behind me, once and for all, I truly wish my brother in arms, traveler on Earth with the same disease of addiction as me, the best sobriety has to offer.

Jared Bryan Smith

“Flight of the seabirds, scattered like lost words Wheel to the storm and fly Fare thee well now Let your life proceed by its own design.”

Posted: June 25, 2011 in Uncategorized
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“Nothing to tell now
Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine”

By John Perry Barlow with Bob Weir
Recorded on Ace (Warner Brothers, 1972)
Cora, Wyoming February, 1972

I go months and months without thinking about certain things, including the grateful dead, and then in a wave and a rush, I’ll remember how much I love the music and how much the words can mean to me.

When I wrote the Robert Hunter quote from the song yesterday, it brought back all the thoughts of my divorce, losing my son as a full time father, and the loss of so many loves throughout the last 15 years. Today I woke up with Cassidy running through my mind. God those words are beautiful, so fucking poetic, just humming them brings back such memories. For me, this song brings back my mama’s passing, and the eternity of all life. The hawk I saw circling our limo as we drove to her funeral. Good music can be so personal, it can mean so many things.

Being a christian I believe death is only another passing moment. We will all get there, how we lived, who we helped, who we treated well, who we forgave, is all there is. If christianity didn’t exist we should invent it as the best way of living. I have reawakened to my faith in the last year or so and it’s amazing what I find reading through the pages of the new testament.

How much of the book is there, that we simply do not do? Fasting for instance. In all my life I’ve never known a christian that fasted. It’s prominent, it’s there, it’s in the words and yet I’ve never ever heard the first sermon on it. Also forgiveness. Real forgiveness. Turning the other cheek when someone maliciously, childishly attacks you. I know so many christian values that are spoken about, but barely ever practiced. I guess because it is hard to do.

But for me, in sobriety ever year I learn a little more spiritually and learn that the things I learn are generally good for me. Obedience to God and to spiritual principles that he continually shows me almost always has it’s own inherent rewards. Usually first though, it’s hard as hell to begin a new behavior.

Taking a year off of dating, which was suggested by minister Andy Stanley for a year, long after my sponsor had suggested it for several years, is finally starting to sound like it might have some actual validity. I’ve made nothing but messes of every single relationship I’ve ever been in in my entire life. As the 12 and 12 states and I was moved by the very first time I ever read:

“The primary fact that we fail to recognize  is our total inability to form a true partnership with another human being. Our egomania digs two disastrous pitfalls. (THIS IS THE BEST PART) Either we insist upon dominating the people we know, or we depend upon them far too much. If we lean too heavily on people, they will sooner or later fail us, for they are human, too, and cannot possibly meet our incessant demands. In this way our insecurity grows and festers. When we habitually try to manipulate others to your own willful desires, they revolt, and resist us heavily. Then we develop hurt feelings, a sense of persecution, and a desire to retaliate. As we redouble our efforts at control, and continue to fail, our suffering becomes acute and constant. We have not once sought to be one in a family, to be friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society. Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap or to hide underneath it. The is self centered behavior blocked a partnership relation with any of those about us. Of true brotherhood we had small comprehension.”

page 53 – The 12 Steps and 12 Traditions

Wow, what precision. How can they have mapped us out so effectively?

I guess the only fix is the 12 steps, time and layers of the onion.

-Jared Bryan Smith

 

 

“You told me goodbye, How was I to know, You didn’t mean goodbye, You meant please don’t let me go.” – Robert Hunter (Grateful Dead)

Posted: June 24, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Woke up thinking about work again, it’s been an amazing few months with our software going into almost every major nightclub and dozens of great restaurants throughout Atlanta, and I’ve hired three sales folks, and I’m just amped still. We release on iphone very soon, and the anticipation to see how everything all works is palpable.

Staying busy has kept me emotionally stronger than I think I would have otherwise been with all the damn goodbyes this year. Starting with the one at the beginning of the  year that still stings most prominently no matter how much i wish it didn’t, it’s like my professional life had to make a trade with my personal life or something.

I still feel good sobriety wise though. Had an ear infection in the beginning of the week and my hearing is only about 50% of what it usually is, but it finally seems like its getting better. That’s always scary in sobriety, in our heads its never just an ear infection, I was positive I was going deaf. But 100 bucks for a drs appt and some antibiotics and it seems to be going back to normal.

Visited my sister for her birthday and got to hold the new baby, and she is gorgeous. They are so happy with their perfect little family. I remember those days, when my now 15 year old son was first born, every breath is magic, and they smell so good. My son still smells sweet to me. My cousin has two kids as well and me and the older one, who is 3, played angry birds and ant smashers on my phone until he killed the battery. There was a hyper dog running around as well. How is it the people who already have 2 kids, working on three, also have a hyper dog running around, and just don’t even seem annoyed by any of it? I guess when you’re happy those things don’t irritate you, and they are all very happy in their new families.

I guess I’m just lonely, but hey thats the brakes, nobody ever promised me anything in sobriety except for work, and a daily reprieve. I didn’t wake up with an obsession to drink and drug and somedays that is all the victory you’re going to get.

Still no word on the addicted project interview but I’m definitely looking forward to seeing that in print.

Tomorrow evening, 8 pm, telling my story at the 8111 clubhouse for those in the know! Hope to see you there!

– Jared Bryan Smith

Heart Warming Review of Hippopotamus Sea: My Viral Sobriety

Posted: June 16, 2011 in Uncategorized
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As most alcoholics, I am often childish, oversensitive, and grandiose.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if writing this book was even a good idea, and I constantly worry about the harm I’ve done in being so brutally honest about my life, and especially in my sobriety, but ultimately I always come back to if I’m honest,  I have nothing to fear. Even with that knowledge, I am often saddened by the misunderstandings I may have inadvertently caused, or complications my gut level honesty may have arisen. A friend of mine has a bumper sticker that reads “First do no harm.” Which is the beginning of the Hippocratic Oath, which Doctors take, but I take it personally almost every time I read it. I really never intended on ever hurting anyone, especially anyone I loved. But a lot of unexpected, uncharted things happen when you write a book, or when you write in general. It is not for the faint of heart. You open up a vein and bleed into a keyboard, then wait as everyone dissects and examines the blood telling you just what’s wrong with it all, just what blood borne diseases your carrying around and how it affects them somehow, who choose to read it. It is often times more pain that I would have imagined it would be. I’m not good at criticism, constructive or otherwise.

Occasionally I get a note that makes it all worth while though. A week or so  ago I heard from a friend that had cleared Hepatitis C as an early responder, and that was definitely one of those days. He had read my book, and so that was definitely uplifting, but this review that a perfect stranger left on the blog wall yesterday, is absolutely the best one I’ve received in a long time.

“I have read three books on recovery in the last 2 months. The other 2 by well known authors.

YOUR BOOK spoke to me.. The other 2 seemed like a lot of dribble.

After all their words maybe, just maybe… in the very end did they say anything  to me.

YOUR book touched my mind and my soul   from the very first sentence..

Thank you and please keep writing !! Your amazing.

cc golem ”

Thanks so much CC! I really do appreciate it. For all I’ve lost in writing this book, knowing that a few people have been moved by the story is enough to solidify leaving the book up.

In the process of self publishing I’ve learned a lot about the mechanics of the publishing industry. I am tormented by the thought of taking it all down and just walking away from it all. I think I am probably not the first writer to have these thoughts. I wonder if it’s a good idea for me to control the entire process. I know there are parts of the process that could be handled better by others. For instance, I feel bad pimping my own pain. Having a literary agent would help with that. I feel terrible publicizing the book title on my own in different forums, and after just a few negative comments from overposting, I stopped all together. Then I get bitter at the lack of commercial success, and wonder how many women I’ve known just in the last year who’ve been pushed away by the content or their misunderstanding of what it means to be cured of Hep C, and I wonder, should I just take it all down?

And then I get a decent review, and I remember, that I didn’t write it for glory, or vanity, but to help other struggling alcoholics, or better yet, specifically people facing the daunting challenged of Hepatitis C. There are more options than 4 years ago when I went through it, the pain and duration of Interferon has been cut in half using Telaprevir or Boceprevir Telaprevir, but of course as the pharmaceutical industry is apt to do, since it’s half the time, it’s twice the cost, and most of us suffering from Hepatitis C, weren’t exactly on the tail end of financial windfalls, so the odds can still seem insurmountable, I’m sure. But at every corner in my journey of sobriety, God was there, every step of the way, I knew what the right thing to do was, and I was rewarded every time I took the next right step. Today, at 4.5 years sober the next right thing is just leaving the book and the blog up, regardless of personal pain or loneliness it may cause.

The occasional reader finds inspiration and that must be why God so compelled me to write it.

Thanks again CC, I appreciate the kind words more than you know. Please do me a huge favor and leave the reviews on Smashwords as well, which the link can be found under the picture of the book. I have a ton of good ones on Amazon but Smashwords is a bit bare for reviews. Thanks again so much!

– Jared Bryan Smith

theaddictedproject.com – Just finished my interview!!

Posted: June 10, 2011 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , ,
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Fun stuff.

Very proud to be on theaddictedproject.com and to be their featured author.

It was a long week, and I was a bit tired and discombobulated, but I think it went over pretty well, we shall see I suppose.

Great questions though.

Writing about personal relationships has definitely been the most taxing and challenging aspect of both the book and the blog and something I never thought of before launching with either. A certain sadness and melancholy arises just thinking over miscommunications, and misunderstandings, but that is what happens when you put your stream of consciousness on display for the world to see. It becomes a target of attack and it’s challenging to learn how to deal with criticism and or people with hurt feelings, especially when you never intended to hurt anyone… ever.

I hope I was able to convey that in the interview. I’m still just learning how to be me, just like all of us sick alcoholics trying to get better. All I have is today, and every day is a journey, and a challenge….

Wow…. and just like that it’s all worth while…. phone call from a friend who just cleared the virus using Interferon… just like that it’s all worth while. He’s read the book, and he’s now well on his way to being Hep C free. It’s all good.

Life is good, and miracles are abound in the program of AA. Where else could a drunk like me find friends, lol.

So sweet, I don’t know how long before the interview will be up on theaddictedproject.com but surely not too long so keep coming back and if you see it before me poke me on facebook or something… you can poke the publisher  too and he’ll notify me… 😉 thanks yall, have a great weekend.

-Jared Bryan Smith

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