First, Do No Harm: Breaking The Cycle Of Love And Destruction Kindle Edition

What do you do when the person you love most is also the one you cannot save?On September 11, 2001, as the towers fell, Jared Thompson raised his right hand and swore an oath as a U.S. Army combat medic: First, Do No Harm. He spent the next two decades trying to keep it.Then he met Dustin, and everything he thought he knew about love, harm, and the impossible space between them collapsed.Dustin was brilliant, creative, and fully alive: a UX designer with his own dreams, his own humor, his own stubborn hold on the world. He was also living with opioid addiction. What began as an unexpected spark became something Jared had never experienced before, a queer love that was tender, transformative, and utterly real. They were equal partners building something together. But addiction doesn't negotiate, and the opioid crisis doesn't offer clean choices. It offers only impossible ones, the kind where every option causes harm, where the line between loving someone and losing yourself to that love disappears entirely.First, Do No Harm: Breaking the Cycles of Love and Destruction is the story of what happens when the oath you swore and the person you love put you on a collision course with yourself. It is a memoir about queer love in its most honest form: hopeful, loyal, messy, and brave. It is about growing up inside generational patterns of addiction and believing, fiercely, that knowledge and presence and love could break them. And it is about discovering, at great cost, what "doing no harm" actually requires.Jared takes readers from the parade ground at Fort Sam Houston on the morning the world changed, through years of quiet victories and shattering losses, to moments of raw emotional reckoning that refuse easy answers.This is not a story about crime or villains. It is a story about two people who loved each other fully, and what that love demanded of them both.This book is for you if:You've ever felt "othered," and your voice wasn't heard, regardless of how loudly you've been screaming.You have ever loved someone through addiction and felt the ground shift beneath every decision you made.You have searched for a memoir that holds queer love with the same gravity and tenderness it deserves, without reducing it to a footnote.You are a person in recovery, or someone who has lost someone, or someone still in the middle of it, trying to figure out how to stay.You are a healthcare worker, a first responder, or a veteran who understands what it costs to show up for others while quietly carrying your own weight.You are a reader who wants a memoir that does not offer false comfort or tidy resolution, but instead sits beside you in the hardest questions and refuses to look away.If you have ever stood at the intersection of love and harm and realized there was no clean way through, this book was written for you.A Note on ContentThis memoir contains honest portrayals of opioid addiction, grief, loss, and the emotional weight of loving someone through crisis. It also contains moments of profound joy, deep connection, and hard-earned hope. It is written with care for readers who may be navigating similar experiences. If you are struggling, please know that support is available."A powerful, unflinching exploration of love and loss that refuses to look away." — Early Reader ReviewReaders of these books will find a home here: Beautiful Boy by David Sheff, Educated by Tara Westover, In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg, The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara Read more