A literary memoir exploring the cyclical nature of addiction, psychosis, and the myth of linear recovery.
In Progress
“Transient” chronicles the architecture of collapse and the fragile scaffolding of rebuilding with unflinching precision. This literary memoir maps the territory between high-functioning professional life and methamphetamine-induced psychosis, revealing how quickly the distance between those worlds can collapse.
The first sign was the wire cutter. I found it three days after Kyle left, tucked behind the router on the first floor. It wasn’t mine—I was certain of that. My tools lived in a clear organizer in my home office, each one accounted for, each one in its place. This was different: a multi-purpose tool with worn rubber grips and suspicious scratches along its edge.
I held it up to the afternoon light streaming through the living room window, the weight of it in my hand suddenly heavy with meaning. Kyle had admitted to identity theft so casually over breakfast, like he was sharing a fun fact. “Everyone does it,” he’d said, shoveling cereal into his mouth. “It’s not that hard once you know how.” Now, staring at this tool that hadn’t existed in my apartment before him, possibilities began to spiral.
The router. He’d had access to the router.
I logged into the admin panel, the interface as familiar to me as the back of my hand. I’d configured hundreds like it in my IT career. But this time, each setting felt like a potential trap. Default passwords unchanged? Amateur mistake. Port forwarding rules? Could be backdoors. Guest network? It might as well have been a welcome mat for intruders.
Sleep was the first casualty of my paranoia. I had always prided myself on my ability to outlast others—pulling all-nighters in college, staying up for days at a time without breaking down like the people around me. I saw it as proof of my resilience, maybe even my superiority. But at some point during those five-to-ten-day stretches without rest, even I wasn’t immune. The glow of LED status lights on my modem seemed to pulse in time with my thoughts, as if watching me. The router’s soft hum grew louder, filling the silence of my apartment. Every creak in the walls felt deliberate. Each sound—taps, cracks, whispers of the wind—became part of an intricate conspiracy, confirming my worst fears. My isolation became an echo chamber, amplifying every suspicion into certainty.
The irony wasn’t lost on me: the expertise that had built my career was now feeding my fears. Knowledge wasn’t protection—it was a lens that magnified every shadow into a potential threat. Each technical solution revealed new vulnerabilities, each security measure exposed another weak point. My understanding of systems, once a source of pride, became the mortar for walls of paranoia built brick by brick.
The digital world became a minefield. Familiar porn sites, once neutral spaces of escape, began to feel like traps. Their suggested content seemed to shift, pushing videos with age-gap themes that I swore hadn’t been there before. In my paranoid state, this felt deliberate—a calculated test, designed by law enforcement to entrap me. Every thumbnail became suspect, every click a potential act of self-destruction. I started seeing patterns in the suggestions, convinced they were curated specifically for me, a digital mousetrap baited with my fears.
The thought of digital evidence consumed me. External hard drives, filled with nothing but legal downloads, began to feel like ticking time bombs. What if someone had remotely accessed them? What if something had been planted without my knowledge? The possibility of being framed, of having my devices turned into weapons against me, was a shadow that followed me everywhere.
One night, the paranoia reached its breaking point. Convinced my external drives had been compromised, I knew I couldn’t keep them. But throwing them in my apartment dumpster felt reckless—too easy to trace. The thought of investigators combing through my trash, finding them, and using them as evidence against me was unbearable. I needed a more secure solution.
I emptied large plastic Tide Pod containers, filled them with liquid, spoiled food, and leftover chili to make the contents irretrievable. The smell of spoiled food and chili clung to my hands as I worked, my heart racing as though I were destroying contraband instead of harmless files. The absurdity didn’t matter—this was life or death, at least in my mind. I sealed the drives inside, buried them deep in trash bags, and drove miles away to a Target, where I disposed of them in a public garbage can.
The paranoia wasn’t content staying in the digital realm. Like a virus jumping species, it mutated, spreading from my devices to the physical world around me. The apartment complex’s surveillance cameras, which I’d barely noticed before, now felt like watching eyes. Their red recording lights blinked at me through my windows, their lenses tracking my movements. I started taking different routes to my car, weaving between buildings, testing to see if they could follow me.
Even the parking lot felt different. Unfamiliar cars became suspicious. Were they surveillance vehicles? Was someone sitting inside them, documenting my patterns? I caught myself studying license plates, convinced that if I looked hard enough, I’d find proof that they belonged to law enforcement. Every new face became a possible observer, every parked car a potential threat.
The rental car I’d been holding onto didn’t help. The dark gray Ford Fusion sat in my parking spot, a constant reminder of my mounting paranoia. Someone had accessed it while I slept. They had to have. The dealer exploiting children, the one I was convinced was orchestrating my downfall—this was their move. Plant evidence. Create victims. Frame me. Every time I looked out my second-floor window, the weight of these imagined crimes pressed against my chest, suffocating and undeniable.
Using a unique narrative architecture built on fluctuating states of awareness, “Transient” dismantles conventional addiction narratives. The memoir reveals how institutional responses to addiction often create more damage than the substances themselves, challenging the sanitized redemption arcs that dominate recovery literature.
This work isn’t about triumphing over adversity—it’s about navigating the permanent alterations to identity, pleasure, and perception that remain long after sobriety begins. It’s about the unsettling truth that sometimes what we lose in recovery is the most visceral experience of being alive we’ve ever known.
“Transient” is currently in final revisions, with portions available for review by interested agents and publishers.
