Role Reboot

Opioid Addicts Don’t Need Our Scorn; They Need Our Support

Addiction does not discriminate. My relationship with my hometown is complicated. Like much of the rural Western Maryland, West Virginia, Southern Pennsylvania area, it’s hardly a spearhead of social progressivism: Our neighborhood Moose Lodge denied membership to a black man in the 1990s, and Confederate flags dot the landscape as naturally as the cornfields. It […]

On Loving An Addict

I’ve spent my life waiting for things to change, expecting the worst, counting on crises, and planning for disasters. I watch the cigarette ash beginning to bend, threatening to break apart and scatter on the Persian rug. My body tenses, waiting for it, wanting to stop it. But I force myself to think about the […]