Last Saturday, my husband went out of town and left me at home by myself – my first weekend night alone in years. Ten years ago, I would have pounced on my cellphone the moment the coast was clear and dialed one of my dealers and disappeared into a thick cloud of crack smoke.

Instead, I plopped down on the couch in my living room with a cup of mint tea and a pile of newspapers and magazines. At the top of the pile was the New York Post with its big headlines and celebrity pictures. The big story was that Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, had finally surrendered and was going to rehab after yet another video emerged in which he was said to be smoking crack.

I thought what I always think when I see in the news or hear about someone famous checking into rehab: thank God. Maybe now they don't have to lose everything. Maybe now they don't have to die. Maybe this is where they get off the plummeting elevator.

Often, it's not. In my case, it took two rehabs, a few psych wards, hundreds of meetings, a small army of sober men and women, and dozens of relapses for me to finally stop – and I'm not unique. Often that first meeting, or first stint in rehab, or first admission of powerlessness over drugs and alcohol – it's just the beginning of long, slow, painful journey toward sobriety.

Later that evening, I see lights flicker across the street in the apartment of our new neighbor – a young, twenty-something kid – rail-thin, tall, long-haired, with little to no furniture. He's moving through the place at light speed: lighting candles, taking off his leather jacket, turning on the lights, turning them off again, putting his jacket back on, lighting a cigarette, yelling at something that slipped from his hands. He's all edge and angle, in motion and going nowhere. He is, I can tell from here, high, but on what, I don't know. The jagged movements and jutting chin, the-tornado-through-the-apartment fury – it reminds me of crack addicts I've seen, and the crack addict I was. The kid moved in less than a month before, and he's behaved like this almost every night since.

Half and hour later, I look up from the papers again and notice all the lights in the kid's place are off, but he's lit candles and lined them up along the open windows, where they are flickering madly. I watch them for a while and then see a shadow dash around the room. The lights blast on and there he is: coat off, hair wild, yelling into his kitchen drawer.

I want to find two large pieces of paper and write in magic marker STOP and LET ME HELP YOU and press it to my own window until he sees. But then I think of all the people over the many years who told me to stop and begged me to let them help. Nothing they said mattered. Nothing they did could make me willing to change.

My guess is that it was no different for all the people who counseled Rob Ford – family, political advisors, friends, the press. Addicts like him, like me, don't budge from their ways until some invisible but crucial threshold of pain has been crossed. Where that threshold is no one can predict, least of all the addict. It is as specific to him or her – and as invisible to the eye – as the pattern on a snowflake.

There are people I know who stopped the first time they humiliated themselves at dinner. There are people I know who accepted help the first or second time it was offered. Maybe the kid across the street is one of those people; or maybe he's like me and Rob Ford – people for whom it takes a lot longer. Maybe he’ll have many more years of yelling in drawers, alone in an apartment that must be costing someone – likely not him – a lot of money. Maybe that someone will stop paying and maybe he still won't stop.

I don't know what Rob Ford felt like when he finally let go, gave up his job and found help. I do know that when I did, I felt simultaneously horrified and relieved, because the worst had happened, but the worst was also over.

This week, the papers report that Rob says he is enjoying rehab. I'm not surprised. When I went to rehab the first time, in the midst of the anguish and humiliation, there was, too, a giddy thrill: telling the truth about something I had hidden and lied about for most of my adult life was powerful liberation. For lonely and long-lying addicts like I was, early recovery is a heady time. I hope Ford wallows in it – his new community and his new freedom – and that he takes his time and that he's had enough of the old life.

At 11:30, I start shutting down the apartment before going to bed. I take one last look at the kid across the street – he is perched awkwardly on a stool, hunched over a laptop, shaking his head wildly. Again, I want to get through to him, walk across the street and buzz his buzzer, try and convince him to come to a meeting. I could describe every last thing I lost, detail every humiliating moment I endured. I could tell him about Rob Ford. Maybe he would hear himself in these stories and be spooked; maybe this is all it would take to for him to want to change.

But I know better than to chase after high addicts. What I know is that he will have to crash and he will have to suffer. All of us who are sober today had to fall down – often many times and before anguished eyes. We had to hit the ground hard enough to be willing to stand up. And for all that pain, we were the lucky ones. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cory Monteith and everyone who dies each day from alcoholism and addiction remind us just how lethal this disease is.

I hope the kid across the street is one of the lucky ones, that whatever suffering he must go through happens soon – and that no one else gets hurt. And when that happens, I hope that he, like Rob Ford, finds help. In the meantime, I know the lights will continue to flash off and on in his apartment and candles will flicker in his windows. What I can't know is from what height he will need to fall and whether he'll survive the crash.