It is 10 years since I used drugs or drank alcohol and my life has improved immeasurably. I have a job, a house, a cat, good friendships and generally a bright outlook.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the significant positive changes in a person's life after overcoming addiction.
In this quote, Russell Brand expresses how his life has transformed positively since he stopped using drugs and drinking alcohol. It highlights the benefits of overcoming addiction, including stability in personal and professional aspects, which contribute to a more hopeful and fulfilling life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming difficulties and addiction.
Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it's just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet.
Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'.
I've never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I've not been on other drugs as well. It's just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that's just life. I don't think of it as, "Ah, this is mental illness," more as, "Today, life makes me feel very sad." I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I'm able to utilize that.
I know that's the sort of thing people say and I really hate it when people say the sort of things people say. I always think, 'You don't mean that, you just think it sounds good.
Im happy to be a part of the conversation, if more young people are talking about fracking instead of twerking were heading in the right direction. The people that govern us dont want an active population who are politically engaged, they want passive consumers distracted by the spectacle of which I accept I am a part.
When I was poor and I complained about inequality they said I was bitter. Now I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm starting to think they just don't want to talk about inequality.
Economic, social, and other kinds of regional cooperation are not possible so long as there is apartheid. Therefore, it seems the duty of all mankind to destroy it.
What I possess I would gladly retain. Change amuses the mind, yet scarcely profits.
In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer I later married - we became an interracial couple.
I think the fossil fuel industry is genuinely freaked out by the combination of the price collapse, the divestment movement, and that fact that renewable energy is getting so cheap so fast.
Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world.
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again!
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