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Success — On the afternoon of Jan. 28, 1992, Andrew Zimmern walked into a coffee shop on Manhattan’s Lower West Side. He could have come from anywhere—from the building he’d been squatting in for most of the past year, from any of the subway stations where he lurked to lift purses and tourists’ jewelry, from any of the urban caves he went to dry out or come down.
What the then-30-year-old stepped into was a roomful of friends—“20 of my nearest and dearest,” he says now—who ushered him in, told him again how much they loved him, put a one-way ticket in his hand and sent him 1,200 miles west to Minnesota.
“It was not my first attempt at getting sober,” he says. “I was a terrible alcoholic. I was a heroin addict. I was an everything addict. And for a long time, my addiction dominated my life and devastated the people around me whom I loved the most.”
The full story over at Success.
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Jeff Vrabel 
September 30th, 2015 at 9:15 am
That was interesting to read, thanks! 😉
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September 30th, 2015 at 4:32 pm
This is wonderful! As a former addict myself, I too, was a user or people and a taker of things, with a huge motivations but little to no self esteem. It is SO easy to fall into the pattern of taking this or that to get this or that done – to give yourself an illusion of productivity and the blinders of assumed accomplishment. And recovery from this is painful and terrifying. This is a huge inspiration to me and I have even more respect for this man than I did before. And although it seems like it is so bad and we are in so deep – we can come back from the meth or heroin or whatever it is that holds us and be better than before.
(I left this same comment on the original article)
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October 1st, 2015 at 9:16 am
Thanks for reading, Hannah, and glad you’re inspired. I didn’t know much about his story either, and it was really inspiring.
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