Addiction, Choice, and the Almost Path

I just binged all of Nurse Jackie. I’ve been dreaming about the episodes all weekend.

Years ago, when it first aired, I watched a season and stopped. I’d always been kind of obsessed with addiction — or really, the human parts of it. What causes people to become addicted. Where the line is. How people end up there…

Nurse Jackie is about a talented, passionate nurse and a mother saving lives every day in the ER, while relentlessly destroying her own and leading a double life. Watching her choose herself again and again, in the worst possible way, was hard. Watching her children absorb it as a parent was worse.

But the show has always resonated with me personally, even before I was a parent, because my brother was an addict.

He died 15 years ago, at almost exactly the same time my career took off — when my company entered hyper-growth, when I was promoted, when I finally felt financially and emotionally independent, and when my mental health was improving after years of panic attacks, and crippling anxiety.

That timing has always stayed with me. That odd overlap. One life ending just as another version of mine was starting. I’m not even sure what to call that, but it’s always stuck with me.

What has also stuck, is gratitude. Gratitude that I didn’t choose that path. Grateful that even though we had the same family, and “same” lives growing up, we couldn’t be more different. I coped with life in other ways. My coping skills, while far from perfect, looked very different — acting, singing, dancing, learning, proving I was capable, overworking, yes — but still moving forward.

I came closer to that path than I’ve ever really talked about. In my mid-20s, just before I left for NYC and stepped into startups, I dated someone who turned out to be an addict. After months of staying out all night, in a very toxic relationship, one day, at home with my roommates, I found a receipt and realized he’d stolen all the money from my checking account.

Mind you, I was working in retail and making no money at all, but I was so freaked out that I bolted from the relationship immediately. Not thoughtfully…just out of survival. It had nothing to do with the money.

I suddenly understood what that life would actually entail. That could not be my life. It was not the life I saw for myself. This was a rock bottom that moved me forward.

What all of this stirred up for me over the last year pretty unexpectedly, is a feeling I recognize well.

It’s come back recently while coaching, while thinking about whether I want to return to tech or take an in-house role again. On paper, the reasons were practical: money, people, collaboration, structure, the loneliness of running a business as an extrovert. But that’s not the whole truth.

The deeper one is that I started to feel too small. Too contained. Deeply afraid I would squander this next half of my life, or maybe it’s even less—after all, my brother died, and I nearly died a few years ago, so I know how precious life is.

I realized I’ve been playing it safe in a way that was starting to feel like self-abandonment, and fear of rejection. A lot like I felt like that time in my 20s when I was working retail and performing professionally with no money in Connecticut as a new graduate, dating that person.

There was a familiar—albeit slightly panicked voice that said “Sarah, you’re capable of much more…you want to DO much more, and Mia and Mari need to see you do it.”

Could I have ended up somewhere else at my brother’s age? I don’t really know. But I do know I was close at different points, at least close to giving up and accepting very little. There were years where I stayed small before I finally chose to expect more of myself and take some risks.

And maybe that’s why this show has stuck with me so much — because I know how thin the line is between growth and complacency…or much worse. Between choosing yourself in a brave way, and slowly opting out of your own life.

To me, there’s nothing worse than the feeling of being trapped inside your own potential.

As I make my own career transition, I’m completely freaked out, and yet, it feels very right…and far better than the alternative.