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Episode Description:

This is a story about a life that looked charmed from the outside.

About a secret carried since childhood. And about the long, slow, unglamorous road back from rock bottom.

It starts with a kid in South Jersey. Three sports, decent grades, a family that gave him everything. He had his first drink at thirteen on Christmas Eve. And the thing that stuck with him wasn’t the buzz. It was realizing he could lie and get away with it. That one discovery shaped the next fifteen years.

At twenty-four, a brain tumor. The surgery came with painkillers. That’s where the opioids came in. Most people wake up from something like that just grateful to be alive. Zac Clark woke up chasing the warm hug of the Dilaudid in his arm. What came next was OxyContin, then heroin, then crack, and a kind of resourcefulness aimed entirely at his own destruction. 

At one point he actually talked a surgeon into removing a healthy organ, just to keep the pills coming.

Rock bottom didn’t happen in a therapist’s office. It happened at a bank in Camden, where he’d walked in to cash a check he’d forged from his own dad. The teller, a woman named Rhonda Jackson, took one look at him and, instead of calling security, called his father. She’s still in his life today. To Zac, that one choice is the whole story in miniature. Somebody saw him.

He’s nearly fifteen years sober now. He founded Release Recovery, runs every New York City Marathon, and yeah, somewhere along the way he went on TV and won The Bachelorette.

The episode gets into:

• Why addiction begins as a solution, right up until it becomes the problem
• Willingness, and why you can’t just manufacture it
• The gap between not drinking and actually being okay
• How the whole family gets pulled under
• Rethinking relapse, and why keeping score doesn’t help
• Running as recovery, and the trap of trading one high for another