EXORCIZING THE DEMONS; FINDING A WAY OUT OF THE RAINSam, where were you when I needed a kindred spirit like myself to travel the damaged and broken parts of my soul?This is my biography, too. A change here and there; an earlier time, forty years; but it's mine as well as it is Sam's. No Ritalin for me. No drugs to help a disorder that didn't exist. Just a psychiatrist, twice a week, who could never, not ever, know my secrets.Tyler Reedus performs an exorcism of sorts. Through Sam, he allows us to see what it is like to have ADHD at a time when there was a supposed quick and easy cure. And the side effects of that magic pill? Easy fix. Another pill. And then another, for each side effect. Been there. Done that. And Sam is unable to verbalize what is happening to his mental state because the doctor always knows best. Sam's ADHD is his worst enemy, his most horrifying nightmare, come true.We are given that rare opportunity to actually feel, to know, what is happening inside Sam. His story is told eloquently, believably and honestly by the person who knows Sam best. We see first-hand, the middle and high school horrors that Sam faces. And we see his attempt to embrace faith in the church as a means of coping.Alas, again, he is left with empty and all encompassing failure. Sam must find his own way, and once he begins to understand that the little round pills are not helping, or worse, making his nightmare of a life much more so, he makes a conscious decision to stop taking them. And thus more consequences are heaped on his shoulders.Ultimately, Sam himself must find his own way back. And this journey is the most difficult, and the most costly in that he loses his greatest gift; that of childhood, of chances missed, and of what might have been.This is a tour de force in literature, with the writer baring his bruised and damaged soul as a way to leave his demons behind. Eloquent and heartbreaking, it leaves the reader with hope that Sam has taken his only chance for survival. Maybe that's the best hope we have.As John Greenleaf Whittier said:"For of all sad words of tongue and pen,The saddest are these, "It might have been."