I spent one New Year's Eve in bed with no money, withdrawing, while my body started taking itself apart. I was freezing. I was exhausted, and I couldn't hold still at the same time. I was depressed. I was ashamed of myself, and anxious, and there was no way to get comfortable anywhere in myself. Somewhere outside, people were setting off fireworks, and I could hear every one of them. Then it was midnight, then it was a new year, and nothing about me had changed.
There were a lot of nights like that one, spread out over a lot of years. It wasn't all drinking, either. There was a long stretch of using in there too, and the nights came out about the same no matter what was in me.
That wasn't the night. There wasn't one night.
Two marriages ended. I was glad about the first one at the time, and it hurt anyway. The second ended painfully, and I was disappointed in both of us.
My father and I broke something. I damaged my relationships with my kids. Friendships went, and money went.
And I relapsed. More than once. So, I can't give anybody a number. There isn't a clean one to have.
It worked. It shut the noise off, it felt good doing it, and my body got used to running at that setting and started asking for it back. That's part of why it kept happening, and it doesn't take away from what I did to people.
The wreck was a wreck. But underneath it there was a want, and the want was older than any of it. I have been aching for something my whole life. Not for a drink. Not for any of the rest of it either. For peace, for quiet in my own head, for some higher way of being awake in an ordinary day. That ache was running the whole time I was drinking and using. I was just answering it at the only door that opened fast. There was always my Higher Self calling me to outlive this. My Higher Self is God. That's what I believe was going on.
Something in me kept growing until I could hear that call and do something with it, and all of it was going on while I was still using. The man who eventually walked out of that life was being built inside the man who was still living it.
A lobster grows until the shell it's wearing no longer fits. The new one is already there underneath, formed and waiting, before anything comes off.
None of that got anybody their years back.
I loved those people. I loved them the whole time, and it's the least useful of the true things I own. The people I was married to, my kids, my father, my friends, none of them got the inside of me. They got what I did and what I didn't do. That's what they have to go on, and they're right to go on it. I'm not owed anything for the half nobody could see.
The version of me going through that was just a scared child, and he's still with me. I just don't let him decide what I do with my life path.
So, I turned back toward the man I couldn't stand being alone with and decided he was allowed to exist. Then I did it again. Then I did it again. Badly, with long gaps in it, through the relapses, for years. I accepted myself and strived to become better. That was the practice. Somewhere in there I got better at hearing what had been calling the whole time. Not louder on His end. Better on mine.
Being in my own head turned out to be the good part. I can be all the way inside a task and watch myself do it from just outside it at the same time. Almost astral projection with my eyes open and during a task. Feelings come through with more color. Things connect that most people keep in separate drawers. And I keep enough of myself in there to look at all of it and use it. Sobriety didn't hand me any of that. It gave me a clearer way to live with what was already in here.
So here's what's in my house right now. I take my prescriptions on schedule. I drink coffee. I use cannabis. I vape nicotine. I have the ordinary assortment of habits and small vices a person picks up. That's my arrangement, and it isn't a rule for anybody else.
Addiction and dependence are two different things. When I was using, I had both of them at once, and I could feel the difference from the inside. My body needed it to keep running at a steady level. And I kept going back long after I knew what it was doing to my life.
I'm not a loud distress alarm going off all the time now. I used to walk into a room broadcasting, and people answered it whether or not they could have said what they were answering. Now I get better conversations. I get warmer responses. People smile at me more.
Other things came with it. I'm more patient than I was. I'm more relaxed. I'm more careful about who I spend my time around. I can build something, keep it going, and plan past the end of the week, which I could not do before. I still have ordinary bad days. Some mornings I feel surprisingly young and some I feel old.
Rache Brand told me during a recent call, in the middle of an aura reading, that I'm very organized. Organized wasn't a word I could honestly use about myself for a long time. I had to grow to fit my own shoes.
I wasn't always organized, and there are still parts of my life that are a mess. I take my time with things now. I make a plan. I update and follow my calendar. The seemingly boring habits and routine have become healthier and more sustainable. I don't always finish everything on my to-do list (See The Docket Does Not End), but now I have solid plans to stay busy. The long list that keeps growing is intentional.
Here are the things I've done in just the past few days to show you just how busy I am:
- Put a new Field Note on the site Wednesday, and wrote the one you are reading now across Thursday and Friday.
- Added a weekly website and Substack health analysis using Claude skills.
- Shipped twenty updates to my site in three days.
- The Grey Beyond: Took flights from a ship with no real shape to something you can actually fly. A throttle. Working panels. Guided flight. Five scales and a gearbox. A map of everything. A planet on the screen underneath you. Silence when you are still. Leaving a world without crashing it.
- Renamed the tarot room to The Mirror, and made it so you can keep your reading instead of watching it disappear.
- Rebuilt the site navigation so it groups itself and explains what it is.
- Moved the writing to the top of the homepage, ahead of everything promotional.
- Gave The Soup its own name on the page and straightened out its list.
- Cut a trailer for No Wrong Place.
- Created a cover for my book that I'm working on, The Gospel of the Grey.
- Took Steady, the teleprompter and recording studio I built, from version 0.7 to 0.16. Playback that works. A play line you can drag. Arm before you record. A pause that actually pauses. Punch-in. A soundboard with as many pads as I want. My own sound folders. A timeline that stays where I put it. Thirty-seven saves, and I rewrote the manual five times to keep up with it.
- Shipped the first commercial build of Trail Mix, and fixed a bug that made a full database look empty.
- Recorded my first podcast episode. Recorded it again the next day because the first one was not it. Mixed two versions, one with beds only and one with music under the read. Made the cover art in three sizes and wrote the outline.
- Recorded that episode on Steady. I built the thing, and then I used it.
I could not have done any of that loaded. But the list is not a receipt for my worth. It is what became possible when I stopped treating myself like somebody I had to escape. Self-acceptance wasn't the prize waiting for me once I had fixed myself. It was the path I kept returning to while I changed. I could accept the man I was and still ask him to become better.
I had to grow to fit my own shoes. They finally feel like the ones I was meant to wear, but I'm still breaking them in.
After a lobster molts, the new shell is already there, but it's still soft, and the animal stays vulnerable until it hardens.
I'm in the soft part.
From The Grey Zone
Everything lives here. The Field Notes, The Soup, the books, the rooms. https://thegreyzone.xyz
Tip the Kitchen
There's a tip jar in the kitchen if this one was worth something. https://ko-fi.com/mastergreygray
Take what's useful. Leave what isn't.