Every ending that tried to kill me made me unkillable.
I always come crawling back
You can smash me with your boot.
Spray me with chemical poisons.
Blast me with radioactivity.
Burn my life down.
I come crawling back. Stronger.
La Cucaracha
Ya no puede caminar
Porque no tiene, porque le falta
Una pata para andar
People love a recovery story with a happy ending, one without gruesome details, one with no strife and no pain. One with twelve easy to follow steps to get clean from any addiction.
They want the warrior to hit rock bottom one time, have a single moment of transcendent clarity, and then be sprouted from completely scorched soil—beaming, completely sober, enlightened, and forever healed.
That’s not what happened here. Not even close.
My story is fucking messy. Terrifying. More human. It’s not a warrior story.
It’s a cockroach story.
A scurrying cockroach running from light.
A cockroach doesn’t get an inspirational soundtrack. Nobody claps for a cockroach. People don’t write inspirational quotes about cockroaches. They don’t get framed in photo galleries. They get hated. They get smashed. They get poisoned. They get chased out of sight like something shameful. They are constantly being pursued by extermination.
But cockroaches have a quality I respect more than beauty:
They don’t die easy.
You can step on them and they still crawl away missing pieces.
You can spray them with poison, and they stumble through it like its fog.
You can burn the house to the ground and somehow, they’re still scurrying around after the smoke clears.
That’s the doctrine.
It’s not beautiful. Not uplifting. Not flawless.
Just real and fucking raw.
My life has been a long chain of endings. Some were tragic. Some were necessary. Some were deserved. Some were cruel. Some were the direct consequence of my own choices.
Some were a curb stomp to the jaw and the universe saying, “This version of your life is finished. Today. Right now, this very second. Ready or not, here you go!”
Each ending had its own personality.
Some endings whispered.
Some endings screamed.
Some endings came with police lights and ankle monitors.
Some endings came with silence.
Some endings came with death.
Some endings came with papers and signatures and a new kind of loneliness you can taste in your mouth.
Some endings turned me into a monster of a person nobody, even myself, recognized.
I didn’t just lose people.
I lost identities.
I lost illusions.
I lost addiction after addiction after addiction.
I lost the story I used to tell about myself.
I lost who I thought I was allowed to be.
I lost who everyone else wanted and expected me to be.
I lost things I should never have lost… and I lost things I should have ended years earlier.
I completely lost myself, over, and over, until I didn’t even know who I was anymore.
And still—somehow—I kept crawling back.
Not always stronger. Not always wiser. Not always sober. Sometimes I crawled back way worse. Sometimes I crawled back ashamed and full of self-hatred.
Sometimes I crawled back with my hands shaking and my mind split wide open, blood spurting out of my pink brain.
But somehow, despite every single odd, I crawled back.
That’s the part no one likes to admit: survival doesn’t always look noble. Sometimes survival looks like relapse. Sometimes it looks like violent rage. Sometimes it looks like obsession. Sometimes it looks like making the same mistake again because you’re still learning the lesson. Sometimes it’s another challenging medication regimen.
Sometimes survival looks like being a man beating his fists on the floor, bargaining with every atom in the universe, promising you’ll change for real this time, because you can feel the edge of the ocean bluff under your feet, and it’s starting to crumble.
The cockroach doctrine isn’t about being resilient.
It’s about being unkillable.
I don’t mean unkillable like invincible. I mean unkillable like:
I’ve been ended so many times I stopped fearing endings. There are often times when the endings happened so frequent that they almost become normal.
I’ve watched relationships dissolve like sand slipping through my hands. I’ve watched people vanish into thin air. I’ve watched my own mind deceive and backstab me. I’ve watched my life get smaller and uglier and lonelier because I kept giving my power to the wrong things.
And then I watched it start to get better when I began the process of ending what was killing me.
That’s the plot-twist nobody anticipates.
Some endings tried to kill me.
And some endings saved my life.
That’s what this blog is.
A sequential ledger of everything that ended—and what began in the space afterward.
This is not a blog about perfection.
This is a blog about how nothing lasts.
How every last fucking thing is temporary.
About constant, unrelenting, grief. And finally letting it out.
About permanent consequences and facing remorse without being able to repair what caused it.
About battling my own mind and sometimes feeling like I’m never going to win. Getting punched in the face over and over.
About finding gratitude in everything in my life, even the losses.
About leaving one year behind and walking into the next being free as a bird.
About stepping through the carnage of your own choices and still deciding: I’m not finished.
About writing a manifesto to guide you through the rest of the life you are creating for yourself—and being accountable to it.
You can stomp your boot on me. Bait me with poison. Nuke me. Scare me. Intimidate and shame me.
But I come back anyway.
Every ending that tried to kill me made me unkillable.
And stronger.
