Everyone's Medicating Something.
The hidden addictions of good church people, and the honesty that heals us.
A book for the achiever, the wine mom, the volunteer, the answer woman, the man in the phone light, the pastor especially, and the reader who has never once thought of themselves as any of those and would like to keep it that way. Written from the inside, by a former pastor who ran the survival program at the highest level and now spends his days helping other people stop.
The first thing I did most Sunday mornings was throw up.
Not every Sunday. But enough of them that it stopped surprising me. I would wake up with my mind already racing, get in the shower, and somewhere between the shampoo and the hot water running out, my body would just start rejecting the day. Dry heaves, mostly. Sometimes more than that.
And then I would keep getting ready. That is the part I want you to see. I did not call anyone. I did not sit down on the edge of the bed and ask myself what was happening to me. I toweled off, got dressed, and went over my sermon, because service started at nine, and service is coming whether you are ready or not.
Jamie could hear me in there. We have been married since I was nineteen, and in all those years of Sunday mornings, I do not remember either of us ever saying a word about it. Not once. I think we both just filed it under the cost of doing ministry. It was part of the process.
Sit with that for a second. A man throwing up before work every week, and the two people who knew about it both decided it was normal.
I was the pastor, by the way. I probably should have mentioned that.
From Chapter One·The Best-Dressed Addict in the Room
A book about the ordinary machinery of hiding.
Everyone's Medicating Something is a book about the ordinary machinery of hiding, and the specific way that machinery runs inside good church people who have never once seen themselves as addicts of anything.
It is a book about work that started as ambition and became somewhere to hide. About phones that went from tools to medications in a season nobody could point at. About the wine that started at Christmas and became the reward for surviving Tuesday. About the ministry that swallowed the man who thought he was building it. About the respectable dosages that never quite qualify as a problem, until one afternoon they do.
It is also a book about what happens next, if you let it. Because the medication was never the actual problem. The loneliness underneath it was. And the prescription that heals the loneliness is old, embarrassing in its simplicity, and available to every reader on the day they read the book.
The Condition
Why we all medicate. Three chapters that make the case that the achiever, the wine mom, the volunteer, and the pastor are all doing the same thing, wearing different clothes. Ends with the cycle: pain, reach, relief, shame, deeper pain, bigger reach.
The Medicine Cabinet
What we reach for. Three chapters cataloguing the medications, sorted by how respectable they are. The respectable ones, the secret ones, and the spiritual ones. The spiritual ones do the most damage precisely because nobody names them as medications.
The Pharmacy
Why church is the hardest place to tell the truth. Two chapters on how the room built to heal us became a room built to hide us, and what it costs the person in the pew to keep the performance running.
The Treatment
The prescription we forgot. Seven chapters and an epilogue on what actually heals. Safe people. The most honest room in the building. A church where nobody has to pretend. The new cabinet. And the door, still open.
The book is forthcoming. When there is a date, you will be the first to know.
Enter your email below to receive the sample chapter in full, and to hear from Drew the moment there is a publication date, a preorder link, and a launch. That is what the list is for. No sequence, no weekly email, no marketing. Two or three sends in total, on the calendar of the book.
We'll send the chapter today and the release date the moment there is one. Nothing else, and nobody at your church will know you asked.
No sequence·No newsletter·Two or three sends on the calendar of the book
He is not writing about people who medicate. He is one of them.
Drew spent more than twenty years in ministry, most of them hiding. He is a former pastor, a certified Enneagram guide, and the host of the Loving Leverage podcast. He wrote this book from the inside, several years into learning what it takes to stop.
The book ends by pointing readers to Awake Collective, so a certain number of you are on this page because someone who read a galley or an early copy told you to read it. That is exactly the way this book will find the people who need it.
If you are that person, the friend who was told, the family member who is not sure whether to be worried, the pastor who was handed the manuscript and cannot yet say what to do with it, the door at /people is open to you now, before the book publishes. You do not have to wait.