By the time I was 7 or 8 years old, I was keenly aware of my father’s drug use. He didn’t snort pills in front of me yet—he saved that for my teen years—but he talked about pills freely, and I knew he took them. And by the time I became an adult, everyone in my nuclear family—and plenty in my extended family—was struggling to cope with the impacts of violence, incarceration, and addiction.
I grew up
