---

There’s a moment in recovery nobody warns you about. When the lasers fire through the air and it’s impossible to ignore the piercing bright light.

Not the rock bottom. Not the first sober morning. Not even the grief. It’s the moment you realize the thing you’ve been running toward was you the whole time. A version of you that stopped lying, stopped numbing, stopped performing, and started owning every single thing. I didn’t get there in a blink. I crawled. But I got there. And what I found on the other side has been a sacred gift that has truly changed everything in my life.

---

It’s Truly Fucking Amazing

---

---

Aerosmith nailed it in their hit song, Amazing.

I kept the right ones out and let the wrong ones in.

Yeah. I did exactly that. For years.

I numbed everything with alcohol, kratom, cannabis, and countless other drugs. I kept people around who enabled the worst versions of me and pushed away anyone who asked me to look at myself honestly. I called it surviving. It was just slow drowning with better lighting.

There were times in my life when I was goin’ insane, tryna walk through the pain.

I’ve written about the metaphorical bus crash. The psychiatric spiral and hospitalizations. The psychosis. The horrible medication changes. The high-conflict relationships I have had several times. The moment I blew up a relationship I loved in a split second of panic and avoidance and made someone I cared about homeless in the process.

I wasn’t walking through pain. I was letting it drive.

I was so sick and tired of livin’ a lie. I was wishin’ that I would die.

I know what that place feels like. I’ve lived there. I’ve also built elaborate structures of performance and avoidance just to keep the real stuff from surfacing. The masks were exhausting. The patterns were killing me softly and loudly and in every way in between.

With the blink of an eye, you finally see the light.

It wasn’t a blink for me. More like crawling toward a window with busted kneecaps and finally getting close enough to feel the warmth on my face.

But it happened.

The grief lodge. The pier at sunset and a stranger who held me when everything inside me broke open. The IFS sessions where I finally met the parts of me I’d been running from my whole life. The moment I stopped explaining my patterns and started owning them completely.

I’m feeling very free from that business now.

And then recently, one of those moments where everything about some people no longer in my life crystallized in a matter of minutes.

People from my past showed their true colors again in a way I couldn’t miss. A performance I’d seen before so many times, and I just finally had my eyes open wide enough to see it clearly.

They acted predictably, again, and I gave them absolutely nothing, again.

Not a reaction. Not an acknowledgment. Not one second of my energy or attention.

Nothing.

I did what I originally intended to do, which was to have fun being myself. Sober. Present. Unbothered. Enjoyed every moment to the fullest, and without any filters. And when they eventually left me alone, I was still there having fun being myself.

For months I’d been carrying the anxiety of what it would feel like when some people from my past showed up uninvited in my life. My nervous system had been running hot around things I used to enjoy without a second thought. Their mind games carefully designed to keep me off balance, anxious, and second-guessing myself. Inserting themselves into my life in ways that were impossible to ignore.

I almost let it work. There were things I avoided. Places I didn’t go. Plans I changed. All because of the low hum of dread that came with not knowing what their next move was going to be. At times I felt followed and even stalked by some of these people.

This wasn’t my first time dealing with and tolerating these types of people and these behaviors. It wasn’t my first time letting these types of people control my life and imprison me with fear.

Well, that’s fucking over now.

Because I finally saw clearly what I was actually dealing with. Not people processing things with integrity and moving their lives forward in a healthy respectable way. People running games. People being petty and putting on a show they choreographed just for me, and it was a show that I didn’t buy tickets for.

And the moment I saw it for what it was, really saw it, something in my nervous system just… released. The anxiety that had been living in my chest and gut for months went quiet. The hypervigilance dialed down. My body finally got the message my brain had been trying to send for a long time.

These people do not have access to my peace anymore. They do not have access to me and my emotions. That access is now completely and permanently denied.

I wrote in my manifesto that I’m done denying people’s true colors when they show them to me. I don’t care how amazing some people once were to me once. When they show me who they really are, I believe it.

And each time they show me again, I believe that too. Even if they become charming and switch it up, I still believe their harmful versions. And I deny their access because they are truly shitty people, not the people I once imagined they were when they were performing for their personal gain, AKA manipulating me.

Recently, I finally lived those words instead of just writing them.

Access denied. Buh-bye.

Not with anger. Not with drama. Just with complete and total indifference. Which, if you’ve ever dealt with people who desperately want your attention, you know is the most powerful thing you can possibly give them.

Nothing.

I’m done changing my plans. Done shrinking my world. Done avoiding shit. Done playing a game I never agreed to enter. Their mind games only work if I participate. I’m out.

That’s what seeing the light actually looks like. Not a dramatic spiritual awakening. Standing in your own power so completely that someone else’s fucking bullshit just slides right off.

I am removing the fuel, oxygen, and heat from the fucking fire they keep trying to light underneath me.

For good.

But even with all this drama with unpleasant people, please don’t forget:

The light at the end of the tunnel may be you.

This line wrecks me every time.

Because nobody told me that the thing I was running away from for so long, and now I am running toward was just… the real me. A version of me that stopped lying. That stopped numbing. That ended years of shitty toxic patterns. That stopped blaming and started owning. That stayed in integrity and behaved respectfully even when being pushed to his limits. That cut out every person and behavior that wasn’t healthy. That chose sobriety not once but thousands of times, one craving at a time.

I’m not at the end of anything. I’m in the middle of the most important work of my life. But I can see where I’m going now. And for the first time in a long time, I’m not afraid of what I’ll find when I get there. I am finally starting to see who I really am when I am no longer being what everyone else wants me to be, solely for their benefit and pleasure. I am no longer losing myself in the process.

If you’re in the dark right now, desperate and exhausted and out of ideas, I’m saying a prayer for you tonight.

The light at the end of the tunnel may be you.

It was always me.

It can be you too.

---

---