It started with a new Savvy Main Line I read a little while ago.

It took my breath away. A brave woman named Tracy Viola has written a book about a topic Main Liners and others don’t like to talk about.

It hit home not because I have addictions but because I know people who work programs and have for years. They are my heroes. They do the work and it shows. A couple have had slips, and they get up and dust off and start again.

It also hits home for the people whom you just pray will hit their bottom and do the work and live for themselves and their families. But with some of these people people you know that some day you will get a phone call about them.

I had one of those notifications in February, 1998. A friend I had from the time I was 12. He was super nice but always super messed up.

Maybe that doesn’t make any sense to anyone, but that was a childhood friend of mine. He was wild and then he was tame. Burning through drugs and alcohol and going to rehab. It was a pattern that repeated itself until 1998. He was never a best friend or necessarily super close or ever someone I dated. Just a friend who I would see here and there. And then I wouldn’t for a long period of time.

He could be charming. He was bright. Super nice family. His mother was amazing and so nice especially. He dated one of my college friends once. He almost cost me that friendship entirely. Of course I never knew until years later that he had dragged her into that crazy boozy world of his for a while. I never went there because frankly it scared me.

When I was 12 or 13 he gave me the nickname Ducky. Not sure why but I had a Dorothy Hamil haircut then and looked like a boy so he also called me Frank. In retrospect, not very nice probably but he was nice. Just too wild for me to ever truly be comfortable with.

Over the years he would periodically almost burst into my life. I remember when I was in college walking down Morris Avenue, the block between Bryn Mawr train station and Lancaster Avenue with my friend he would soon be dating. He was healthy and happy and at that point sober and clean.

It would not last long.

Then I walked away, like I had done before because it wasn’t my scene and emotionally it was too hard. He was not my best friend or anything other than a long term childhood friend I would occasionally run into and it was always the same pattern. Fine then not fine and a crazy spiral of drugs, alcohol, and paranoia.

Next I saw him around 1997. I had not seen nor heard from him in years. I was at a party at another friend’s house. I was outside around a fire pit thing and I heard someone say “Ducky.”

That would mark the last period of friendship before he died. He was back home after being in rehab again. Hazledon maybe? It was too long ago that I don’t remember.

He was sober and I asked him flat out and told him that I did not have the emotional capacity to be on one of his roller coasters.

For a while he was fine and sober. We would talk on the phone, meet up for dinner once in a while. Life went on.

One day after a while he said he wanted to go into Philadelphia to Friday Saturday Sunday. I said that was a great idea. He said he would drive, just meet him at his place. That was the last time I ever got in a car with him. He had a sports car and decided to drive the Schuylkill Expressway at literally 100 MPH back after dinner. I seriously thought I was going to die. I realized at some point on that hell ride home that he hadn’t had a drink but was completely high on something.

After that I pulled back on the friendship. Work was busy, life went on. He went away for a while and then he was back. Out of his mind on drugs. Crazy phone calls, following me around. It got to the point that I went to the police to talk to them about it in case he escalated.

It was a scary time.

Then it was early 1998. He was completely out of his mind on drugs but I still don’t know what. He wanted to meet up. For some reason I agreed. But I said a public place and a mutual friend would be with us.

I remember when he walked in and sat down with us. He was super thin in a few short weeks, almost gaunt. Total wild drug eyes. Mutual friend and I expressed concern. And in a weird premonition way it just flew out of my mouth that I felt like it would be the last time we saw him alive. He cursed us both out and we left.

It was the last time.

During the next couple of weeks there were a bunch of completely crazy out of his mind spiraling phone calls. The final one ended up being the day he overdosed. He kept calling my office. I kept getting off of the phone. Finally I just said l was done, I was at work, and stop calling. A few hours later he overdosed. A couple of days later they took him off life support.

I still feel guilty that I was sad yet oddly relieved when I heard the news.

I still remember this like it was yesterday.

I have had other friends more successful working their programs who have stayed clean and sober since around that time. Oddly I remember when they told me they were cleaning their lives up. I watched them and it’s hard work sometimes. But they persevere.

So this article in the current Savvy Main Line resonated; struck a chord.

With her girl-next-door face and bouncy personality, it’s hard to picture Wayne mom Tracy Viola as the duplicitous, defiant, drug-addicted teen in her new memoir, Pretty Wrecked.

But maybe that’s the point of this tell-all: looks (and smarts) can be deceptive. Heck, they help you deceive. You can be pretty – and pretty wrecked for years – but you can only fool yourself for so long.

Sooner or later, you’ll crash and burn.

Tracy hit bottom seven months after her Agnes Irwin graduation when, strung out and shivering with nowhere to sleep, she crawled inside an empty Toyota parked behind the Devon Acme.

Every May, Tracy Otley Viola, Class of ’95, stands in front of Agnes Irwin’s graduating class and talks about her years of out-of-control addiction and her recovery journey. With no teachers or staff in the room, she’s raw and she’s real. Why pretty is up?

“I sat in your seat and I listened to these speakers and I was high as shit,” she tells them. “And I know a few of you are high right now.”

It’s a cautionary tale that never gets old, she says.

She cries every time.

A year ago, Tracy decided to share her reckless youth and road to recovery in a book of frank “confessions.”

“I wanted to make it real and scary and entertaining with tangible lessons,” she says.

Pretty Wrecked opens with a string of adolescent traumas that preceded Tracy’s addiction: a flawed, alcoholic father, an abusive stepfather and the abrupt loss of her childhood home.

~ Caroline O’Halloran/ Savvy Main Line

I don’t know Tracy Viola. But I respect her madly, and she is one of those people who are like human heroes for surviving. Many others are not so lucky.

There was another friend a bunch of us had years ago we lost. A brilliant career in New York. He could never admit that he had a problem. And it was booze and not sure what else. He would get utterly nasty if you suggested there might be a problem.

Sometimes when he got wasted he would threaten to kill himself. One of those times, another friend had me sit on the phone with him until other friends could get there. That was the last night I sat on the phone and listened to his wasted abuse since that was always part of a wasted phone call with with him. I had promised I would keep him distracted and alive on the phone until others got there and I kept that promise. But then I told our one friend that sadly I was done. What I said exactly was that I was worth more as a friend than being a verbal punching bag of a wasted human being.

A couple or few months later I got a phone call from this same friend who wanted to save our friend that night. Our friend was dead. He “fell” off of his balcony in Chelsea. We will never know if he deliberately killed himself or lost his balance while wasted and went over. It actually doesn’t matter because it was a waste of a life and however it happened, the final event hurt a lot of people, including his family.

I know a couple of people now that I hope read this Tracy Viola’s story. One I am afraid will not make it through not because they don’t try to stay sober, but because they can never seem to stay sober because in the end it’s either too much work or simply the underlying issues that cause self medication are too great and in and of themselves may be too hard to cope with in the end.

Another person is one I don’t quite know what to think of at this point because they are someone who has had this similar roller coaster life pattern, but they don’t ever have any problems, everyone else has problems. They are much like my once friend down to the sometimes unpleasant conversations who went over his balcony, and because of that to an extent I am pulling away. Been there, done that, threw away the T-shirt and my life matters more to me than that.

Personal accountability is a big part of successful sobriety programs according to friends who work them, and that means that you have to own issues and also try to make amends. Being abusive and kind of mean occasionally towards those who care, isn’t part of any successful program or life relationship or friendship is it?

With one person recently after many years of watching them spiral, I actually garnered the courage and said essentially can they do something and try to change because I was afraid of what would happen. It went over like a fart in church. Sadly I hope they figure it out, but realistically I don’t see it happening because those of us who care have all of the issues at the end of the day, not them.

Addiction is a powerful thing. So powerful. I count my blessings. And it’s hard to walk away from people when you care about them. But sometimes we have to at least for a time because they can’t or won’t do it themselves and we stop being friends and instead morph into enablers making excuses for the abuse that they heap on us, others, and ultimately themselves. And God that is easier said than done. But really who are we helping if we just say that it’s OK?

Tracy Viola is one of these people who matter. We are lucky she is paying it forward and telling her story. To her I say a simple thank you. She is a hero.

Sleep well readers.