RECOVERY, EMOTION, CLARITY, PICTURES, AND TUNES. NO ANESTHESIA. NO BULLSHIT.
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After four years of silence, I took my body back—at night, on a downtown parkade, dancing without permission or apology. This wasn’t nostalgia. This was recovery in motion. A declaration that joy, movement, and instinct get to live here again. Free as a fucking bird.
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A 12.8-mile photo walk through Bellingham became more than a color study in orange, it became a marker of recovery. Long-distance walking helps regulate my nervous system and acts as somatic exposure therapy, keeping me engaged with the world instead of retreating from it. Thirty days ago I threw away my cannabis, and I’m about to cross the longest stretch I’ve been sober off everything in 24 years. One camera, one focal length, and forward motion. This wasn’t about chasing images. It was about clarity, presence, and recovery in real time.
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I didn’t quit drinking and magically fix my life. I quit drinking and finally saw how overfurnished it was. Sobriety turned the lights on, and what I found was wall-to-wall clutter. Substances, work, relationships, patterns, identities, and coping strategies I had been stepping over for years. Clearing them out wasn’t graceful. It was slow, messy, and sometimes destructive. It destabilized me. It forced me to confront fear, grief, bipolar chemistry, and the cost of space. But in the empty rooms that followed, something unexpected happened. I learned how to breathe again. I learned how to dance again. And for the…
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The Cockroach Doctrine isn’t about resilience. It’s about being unkillable. This isn’t a polished recovery story or a warrior’s arc. It’s a ledger of endings—messy, brutal, deserved, accidental, and life-saving. It’s about crawling back when there’s no applause, no soundtrack, no redemption montage. About surviving in ways that don’t look noble. About relapse, rage, obsession, grief, remorse, and still deciding you’re not finished. Some endings tried to kill me. Some endings saved my life. Every ending left something behind. This blog lives in that space.
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January 2026, was a very transformative and interesting month. I walked 216 miles. Traveled two states. And took a “few” selfies.
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Today wasn’t about fixing anything — it was about feeling everything. I went offline and spent five hours in a grief lodge, moving anger, loss, and decades of trapped emotion through my body. What started as calm chanting turned into a powerful, collective release that cracked me wide open. I screamed, cried, and finally let my anger move for the first time in years. This wasn’t catharsis for show or insight for ego — it was grief, raw and embodied. I’m exhausted, sober, and deeply changed. Grief doesn’t just belong to death. It belongs to everything we lose. And I’m…
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“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” For me, that punch was destabilization. Over the past year — and especially in recent months — my bipolar disorder stopped responding to insight, therapy, distance, routines, and sheer effort. Innocent moments triggered near-death levels of anxiety, sending my nervous system into overdrive while my rational mind watched, powerless. I ran, I processed, I broke things down from every angle, and still the fear came back. What’s left now feels chemical. This isn’t about willpower or meaning anymore — it’s about survival, quality of life, and the hard reality…
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Grief doesn’t disappear when you ignore it, it waits. Inspired by the way buffalo run straight into storms to get through them faster, this is a story about choosing to feel instead of numbing, crying instead of avoiding, and facing loss head-on. From a small, unexpected purchase to years of buried grief finally released, this is what it looks like to stop running away and start moving through.
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For most of my life, I confused love with sacrifice and caretaking with connection. I believed that being useful, reliable, and endlessly patient was the price of intimacy—and I paid it without question. Over time, I lost my identity, my boundaries, and my sense of self. This piece is an honest examination of the patterns I carried into relationships, how they showed up in different forms, and the moment I finally realized I was the cost. This is about accountability, recovery, and choosing myself for the first time.
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A quiet moment on the beach turns into a reckoning with grief, not just for people lost, but for the version of myself that disappeared with sobriety. This is about mourning an old identity, honoring what it gave me, and choosing a truer life without pretending the grief ever fully ends.
Discover more from Tukayote Helianthus: Unkillable
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