Russell Brand - Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

To Laura Kate Brand, for bringing me home

Here in our glistening citadel of limitless reflecting screens we live on the outside. Today we may awaken and instantly and unthinkingly reach for the phone, its glow reaching our eyes before the light of dawn, its bulletins dart into our minds before even a moment of acknowledgement of this unbending and unending fact: you are going to die.

You and your children and everyone you love is hurtling toward the boneyard, I know you know. We all know but because it yields so few likes on Facebook, we purr on in blinkered compliance, filling our days with temporary fixes. A coffee here, an eBay purchase there, a half-hearted wank or a flirt. Some glinting twitch of pleasure, like a silvery stitch on a cadaver, to tide you over. And youre probably too clever to repose in God, or to pick up some dusty book where the poetry creaks with loathing for women, or gays or someone. Maybe if quantum physics could come up with some force, or web, or string or something that tethers the mystery to something solid, something measurable, youd think again but until then theres nothing but an empty grave and a blank tombstone, chisel poised. So no ones going to blame you if you perch on a carousel of destructive relationships and unfulfilling work, whirling round, never still, never truly looking within, never really going home.

Because I had the gift of desperation because I fucked my life up so royally, I had no option but to seek and accept help. Since being relieved of the more obvious manifestations of my incessant drives and appetites, I have paced backwards like a flunky leaving the Queen through a series of less obvious, and not lethal, but still bloody uncomfortable addictions. I believe that what the 12 Steps and their encompassing philosophy, which I will lay out for you in these pages, will provide is nothing less than a solution to the dissatisfaction of living, and dying, to anyone with the balls to do the work. And it is work. Indeed it is a personal rebirth and the journey entails all manner of uncomfortable confrontations with who you truly are. Be honest, have you ever sat down and inventoried all of the things that bug you: the childhood skirmishes; seething stings of patricidal rage; your fury with the government or traffic or global warming or racism, or Apple for continually changing their chargers? When are you planning to become the person you were born to be? To recover your connection to an intended path? On holiday? When the kids leave school? When you get a pay rise? Tick-tock, tick-tock, chisel poised.

I am not writing this book because I think Im better than you. I know Im worse. I have spasmed and spluttered through life motored by unconscious drives, temporally fixing in a way so crude and ineffectual that the phenomenon is conveniently observable. The condition in extreme is identifiable but the less obvious version of addiction is still painful, and arguably worse, because we simply adapt to living in pain and never countenance the beautiful truth: there is a solution.

We adapt to the misery of an unloving home, of unfulfilling work. Of empty friendships and lacquered alienation. The 12 Step program, which has saved my life, will change the life of anyone who embraces it. I have seen it work many times with people with addiction issues of every hue: drugs, sex, relationships, food, work, smoking, alcohol, technology, pornography, hoarding, gambling, everything. Because the instinct that drives the compulsion is universal. It is an attempt to solve the problem of disconnection, alienation and tepid despair, because the problem is ultimately being human in an environment that is curiously ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that entails. We are all on the addiction scale.

Those of us born with clear-cut and blatant substance addiction are in many ways the lucky ones. We alcoholics and junkies have minimized our mystery to tiny cycles of craving and fulfilment. Our pattern is easier to observe and therefore, with commitment and help, easier to resolve.

If your personal pattern happens to be the addiction equivalent of the long form con-trick, as opposed to a short grift, it can take ages to know just what your problem is. If youre addicted to bad relationships, bad food, abusive bosses, conflict or pornography, it can take a lifetime to spot the problem, and apparently a lifetime is all we have. This book is not just about extremists like me. No, this is a book about you.

Do you have that sense that something is missing? A feeling in your gut that youre not good enough? That if you tick off some action, whether its eating a Twix, buying some shoes, smoking a joint or getting a good job, you will feel better? If you do, its hardly surprising because I believe we live in an age of addiction where addictive thinking has become almost totally immersive. It is the mode of our culture. Consumerism is stimulus and response as a design for life. The very idea that you can somehow make your life alright by attaining primitive material goals whether its getting the ideal relationship, the ideal job, a beautiful Berber rug or forty quids worth of smack the underlying idea, if I could just get X, Y, Z, I would be okay, is consistent and it is quite wrong.

Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the need for food, sex, relaxation or status, become prioritized to the point of destructiveness. It is exacerbated by a culture that understandably exploits this mechanic as its a damn good way to sell Mars bars and Toyotas. In my own blessedly garish addiction each addictive pursuit has been an act of peculiar faith that the action will solve a problem.

In this book we will discuss, with me doing most of the talking, how we can overcome our destructive and oppressive habits, be liberated from tyrannical thinking and move from the invisible inner prison of addiction to a new freedom in the present.

What makes me qualified for such a task? A task which, in a different lexicon, might be called achieving peace, mindfulness, personal fulfilment, or yet more grandly enlightenment, nirvana or Christ-consciousness? Certainly not some personal, ethical high ground. My authority comes not from a steep and certain mountain top of po-faced righteousness. This manual for Self-Realization comes not from the mountain but from the mud. Being human is a me too business. We are all in the mud together. My qualification is that I am more addicted, more narcissistic, more driven by lust and the need for power and recognition. Every single pleasure-giving thing thats come my way from the cradle in Grays to the Hollywood chaise longue has been grabbed and guzzled and fondled and fucked and smoked and sucked and for what? Ashes.

Do you sometimes question whether you even have the option or right to be happy? The churning blank march of metropolitan life feels like the droning confirmation that joy is not an option. Escalators like conveyor belts to a mass grave, grey streets like a yard. Thank God, Ive not (yet!!) been to prison but when I think about the levels of categorization from worst to least awful, I ponder freedom in general. Worst being locked alone in a solitary cell in a category A, maximum security prison to less awful, with increasing tidbits of liberty through categories B and C, with privileges like a kitchen job or a library job (if The Shawshank Redemption is to be believed), down to an open prison where inmates can cycle into town for a few hours. How much further along this scale of freedom is the life of a man or woman in a drab flat, imprisoned by drug addiction, surviving on benefits, or anyone trapped in a job they hate, or a kid at a school theyd rather swerve, all living with twisted and anxious guts? Or my life? Or your life? Im not saying that its worse to have a job in London that you hate than to be a jolly C-cat prisoner, skipping off to the workshop twirling a spanner; Im saying that we are all in prisons of varying categories.