Last year marked my first year in practice as a judicial scrivener. My very first case — fittingly memorable, if not quite what I’d imagined — turned out to be a dispute. For a while I genuinely wondered how work would ever find me, but gradually I had the good fortune to get involved in all kinds of cases, both domestic and international. So much of it was new territory for me, and I’m deeply grateful to my colleagues at the firm who were always there to help. I’m also sincerely thankful to everyone I’ve had the pleasure of meeting through this work. I look forward to continuing to give it everything I’ve got this year. Thank you, as always, for your support.
Now, on to my hobby: movies. I watch films almost every day — on cable TV, playing in the background like a soundtrack to my life. Last year I binged the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in one go, and somewhere along the way I had a startling realization: this story maps uncannily well onto debt restructuring work. Allow me to explain.
At its core, the trilogy is about one question: how do we face our desires? The Ring grants immense power, but it corrupts whoever possesses it. It’s a magnet for ambition, greed, pride, and the desperate need to be recognized. Frodo’s journey, then, is essentially a quest to carry the burden of desire and then let it go.
Swap “the Ring” for “addiction,” and the whole epic suddenly reads like a darkly comedic recovery story. Sure, the official mission is to “save the world” — but the real drama is: how do you keep your distance from something diabolically, magnetically attractive? In debt-relief terms: the saga of a bankruptcy-bound addict trying desperately to get clean.
The Ring is the dangerous drug. The high-stakes gamble. One touch and your pupils dilate, your relationships collapse, and you start insisting — with great confidence — that you can quit whenever you want. Frodo groaning that it’s “so heavy, I can’t bear it” is textbook withdrawal. And that seductive feeling of just holding the Ring making everything seem okay? That’s the addict’s moment of bliss at the slot machine, right there.
Sam, Frodo’s loyal companion, is the devoted enabler — the co-dependent family member who cheers “You can do it, Master!” at every stumble, and eventually offers to carry the addiction himself to spare his friend the suffering. We’ve all met that person.
And then there’s Gollum — a walking, hissing cautionary tale. A creature so thoroughly consumed by his dependence that no trace of his former self remains. Long-term withdrawal has left him… well, Gollum.
The ending, though, is where the story gets truly unsettling. After every imaginable ordeal, Frodo finally reaches the fires of Mount Doom — and cannot throw the Ring in. He fails at the last second. The temptation wins.
And yet the world is saved anyway — because Gollum, the fully-consumed addict who came before him, lunges for the Ring and plunges into the volcano with it.
Read through a recovery lens, this is chilling: you might not be able to quit through willpower alone. Sometimes it takes watching someone further down the road destroy themselves in front of you. Frodo’s victory wasn’t pure heroism. It was, in part, “a guy who hit rock bottom before me accidentally saved my life.”
So there you have it. The Lord of the Rings is, beneath all the elves and epic battles, a timeless story of addiction — a hero’s journey dressed up in chainmail, whose real theme is the deeply human cry of “I can’t stop, but I want to stop!” And perhaps that’s exactly why it resonates so powerfully with audiences around the world, across generations.
