Sharing my own experience of addiction and recovery. Writing these posts was an important part of my first few months back in recovery. I found that posting journal entries demanded a level of self-honesty and accountability that I could not achieve through private diaries.
This is a post about what’s been going on in my life recently. Recovery has brought me to a point where I’m prepared to take a leap of faith in a new direction. I’ve been out of work for a very long time, and had resigned myself to winding down my remaining years scraping by […]
The source of my social anxiety fatigue as an introvert is probably not uncommon: I’m an emotional intuitive (an empath). I don’t always act upon my empathy—that requires consciously and intentionally processing what I pick-up and interacting in return with loving kindness. I act on it more now than I did before I entered recovery. […]
I’ve always felt this nostalgia as an aching, a loneliness, and as a desire to flee to a place that doesn’t exist. It is a place of my dreams, a community of love and light and joy and peace, living off the land, self-sufficient, and all sacred paths converge there and there are even agnostics […]
I recently came to the realization that, for a good portion of the last few years, I’ve been steadfast in the activity of ‘not-dying’ as opposed to truly ‘living’. In the fall of 2022, I made a decision to not end my life and instead reached out for help. At the time, I had been […]
In my daily meditation reading, the author talks about how addicts avoid uncomfortable feelings through substance use. They reassure the reader that pain, like all things, will pass, and that all feelings must be experienced and not intellectualized. I agree with most of what the author put forward; however, I never avoided feelings when I […]
I am sharing what I have learned about my own relapse, a nine-year meandering in the desert that ended last April when I returned to the 12-step program and its peer-support meetings. Over the past five months, I’ve spent many hours in deep deliberation, trying to understand why I left recovery in 2014. It is […]
The trauma is not what happens to you; the trauma is what happens inside you….The loss of self is the essence of trauma. The real purpose of addiction treatment, mental health treatment, any kind of healing, is reconnection (with one’s authentic self). ~ Gabor Maté, “How Childhood Trauma Leads to Addiction.” YouTube video: link Both […]
Suffering. We all experience it as a fact of human existence. But what happens to us when we begin to define ourselves by our suffering? Some say that suffering is a choice. For those who actually suffer from mental health challenges, it does not appear to be or feel like any sort of choice. It […]
“Egwene clung to Rand’s arm for two more bridges. He regretted it when she finally let go with a murmured apology and a forced laugh, and not just because it had felt good having her hold onto him that way. It was easier to be brave, he discovered, when someone needed your protection.“ ~ from […]
The Peace of Wild Things 
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