IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ONE MORNING, AFTER MY ALARM had been ringing for twenty-seven minutes, my father blasted into my bedroom, grabbed the clock off the nightstand, opened the window, and hurled it into our front yard. This occurred after numerous attempts to wake me up by song; he’d float into my room in his flannel pajamas, singing “Ya madrassa, ya madrassa,” which means, “School, O school” in Arabic, or, depending on which dictionary you consult, “terrorist training camp.”

Though as an adult waking up hasn’t gotten much easier, on my first morning at the Ledge I was wide awake and at the main lodge in time for coffee. I wanted to get as much caffeine as I could. At seven thirty exactly the kitchen door opened and a bald man with bright eyes and a warm smile emerged, carrying three carafes. He put them down and then checked to make sure the sugar tray was full. I pawed through the pile of mismatched mugs, chose the tallest, and pumped the carafe until my cup was full to the brim, sitting down carefully so I wouldn’t spill.

The night before, I had stayed up late chatting with my roommate, Molly. “I’m not sure I belong here,” she’d said.

Molly was a love addict, too. Tucked into bed, her makeup still thick on her face, she told me about the meth lab she and her boyfriend ran out of their kitchen in Chattanooga. Her instincts were screaming at her to get out of the marriage and the meth, but she couldn’t bear to leave him. The thought of disappointing him was just too much. He couldn’t bear it either, and when she once attempted to leave, he threw himself in front of her moving car, breaking both of his legs and relegating her to be his caretaker. “It’s how I was raised,” she told me. “To please others. You know?”

I did know. “I think you’re in the right place,” I’d said before drifting off to sleep.

As I sat in the lodge lapping up coffee, I looked around at the posters on the walls. There was one with a gnome walking down a long fairy-tale trail. Beneath him was a quote by Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”