On bewilderment, being used, losing yourself completely, and finding your heart in the wreckage.
I spent months grieving what I lost. Then one Tuesday I sat down at a restaurant, and the grief just… shifted. Into something I didn’t have a word for yet.
It wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t anger. It was bewilderment. A deep, disorienting, almost embarrassing what the actual fuck was I tolerating and why?
And underneath that: how did I lose myself so completely in it?
The Silence Finally Showed Up
For months my internal world was loud. Chaotic. A blender of confusion, longing, hurt, and hope all running at the same time. I was white-knuckling through it, still doing the work, still staying sober, still keeping my boundaries, but it was loud in there. So loud I couldn’t locate myself inside it. So loud I confused the noise for life, and the chaos for connection, and the exhaustion for love.
Then, almost without warning, the noise stopped.
Not because everything was resolved. Not because anyone apologized or showed up or made it right. The noise stopped because I stopped feeding it. Because I walked away from enough things and enough people that the signal-to-noise ratio finally flipped in my favor.
When it got quiet, I could hear myself for the first time.
And what I heard stopped me cold. Because I realized I had been so far gone, so deep inside the noise of other people’s needs and my own fear of losing them, that I hadn’t heard my own voice in longer than I could remember.
I want to be specific about what that quiet actually feels like, because I don’t think people talk about this part enough. For the past several months, every time something shifted positively for me, within a few hours the adrenaline wore off and everything came crashing back. The dysregulation returned, sometimes harder than before. Even good moments couldn’t hold. It was completely reliable and honestly demoralizing.
That crash hasn’t come this time.
No emotional collapse. No nervous system rebound. No intrusive thought spiral. I slept. I woke up clear. I moved through my morning like a person who belonged to themselves again.
Even the memories that have consistently lit up my nervous system throughout this entire process aren’t activating me the same way today. They’re present. They’re just not landing with the same charge they always have.
That’s completely new.
There is a peace and calm here that I have not felt at any point since everything fell apart. Not a fragile calm I’m white-knuckling or waiting to collapse. Something settled. Something stable. I’m not bracing. I’m not waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I’m just here. And I belong here. And after everything I put myself through, after everything I tolerated and excused and called love, that in itself is remarkable.
The People You Trust (Until You See Them Clearly)
Clarity is not gentle. It doesn’t ease you in. It just shows up one day with a flashlight and starts illuminating every corner you haven’t looked at in a while.
I lost another friendship this week. I’ve lost track of how many people are no longer in my life anymore. Someone I spent the evening with last week, thinking I was rekindling a connection that had become more distant over time. This person was a platonic connection I genuinely valued, someone I had known for years, that had introduced me to lots of friends, laughed with, and deeply trusted. And when I sat with the information I had gathered, when I connected the dots I’d been too distracted to connect before, the picture that emerged was gross. That icky awful feeling you get when all of the sudden you can’t trust someone.
Their closeness to several people I had walked away from. The questions they asked that went a little too deep for the level of trust we’d actually built. The access they had to almost all of my plans, my groups, and my whereabouts. The things they mentioned, casually, that made my gut stand up straight.
My gut didn’t whisper. It said: go!
So I went. Quietly. No announcement, no explanation, no invitation for debate. Irish goodbye. Blocked with absolutely no indication from me. They may not even have realized it yet.
It’s done though. Permanently. Another number on my blocked list. I deleted my account on another platform while I was at it, because people were using it to collect information about my activities and interfering with them. Seven plus years of plans, community, connections, and socializing. Gone in about 30 seconds.
I fully expect to run into them at any point and have them start bombarding me with questions and shame, dismissing me, denying things, getting angry and confrontational, making a scene, shifting blame, or whatever emotional garbage they decide to do. I don’t owe them an explanation they can try to argue or manipulate their way out of. Instead, I get to look them square in the eyes, and say, “I need you to leave me alone.”
Standing up to people is as fucking uncomfortable and awkward as it gets. I’m ok with that. It is completely necessary for my safety and wellbeing. Protecting your peace and sanity is never easy. As people say, “It really takes some balls to do that.” Yep. And I got two of them in a skin sack permanently attached to my body. Team Tukayote Testicles, here we go, again!
That said, I felt better immediately after walking and blocking.
That right there told me everything. Because I used to feel like shit when I walked away from people, even people who were hurting me and were not trustworthy. I used to grieve the loss before I even got out the door. I used to talk myself out of my own gut instincts because I was terrified of the emptiness that came with it. I used to unblock people ten minutes later out of guilt and fear of confrontation and hope they didn’t notice, something I have learned to call avoidance.
And here’s the thing I’m finally clear-eyed enough to say out loud: every single person I have walked away from was taking more than they were giving. Every single one. No exceptions. Not in the normal, imperfect, human way where things ebb and flow. I mean systematically. I mean I was a resource to them they mined for gold. Emotional support they never returned. Money that disappeared. Information gathered covertly and quietly passed along to people that didn’t have their own access to it. Enabling, caretaking, rescuing, showing up for people who wouldn’t cross the street for me. I did all of it with an open hand and a wide open heart and called it love. Truth is, I was being used. I have been getting used for most of my life.
It wasn’t love they were offering back. It was them seeking access.
I am done being used. Done being manipulated, lied to, extorted, and managed. Done being the person people come to when they need something and disappear from when they don’t. I see it clearly now and I cannot unsee it. That clarity isn’t bitterness. It’s just information I wasn’t able to receive before, when I was too afraid of losing people to look at what they were actually doing.
I am eliminating mental poisons. I’m listening to the things that don’t feel right and I’m changing them until they do. Even if it means creating more emptiness in my social circle. Even if it means I have virtually nobody left that I can fully trust.
It has become quite peaceful not living in other people’s chaos. The emptiness doesn’t scare me anymore.
Because I finally figured out what was actually in it.
I Found Him (Sobbing in a Restaurant)
I was sitting at a restaurant having breakfast a few days later. Not doing anything profound. Just existing. And something inside me shifted, and I started sobbing, right there. I would take a bite, tears would roll down my face dripping onto my plate, I would wipe them off, take another bite, rinse-and-repeat until I left. Then it continued driving home, dictating them into my phone, pulling the thoughts out into a text record before they disappeared. They were important and I didn’t want them to disappear.
It wasn’t a breakdown this time. It wasn’t nervous system dysregulation. It was a pile of realizations hitting me all at once, the kind that have no business arriving at the same time but do anyway.
I had been looking for something my entire life. Trying to fill a void that I now realize I was creating myself, by pouring everything I had outward, giving and giving and calling it love when it was actually fear. Fear of being alone. Fear of being abandoned and rejected. Fear of being unlovable and losing the love I had. Fear that if I stopped performing and rescuing and enabling and making people smile, they’d leave.
They left anyway. They have all run for the hills, like a tsunami was flooding in behind them.
And in the wreckage of all that leaving, I finally found him. Tukayote.
He has been waiting my whole life to be seen and loved by me.
He’s me. The version of me that was always there, buried under the performing and the patterns and the people-pleasing. And he’s not damaged or fragile or anything that needs fixing. He’s just been waiting.
He was there the whole time I was white-knuckling through chaos. There when I was sitting alone at breakfast, just existing, not performing for anyone.
I am never abandoning him again.
Not for anyone or anything. Not for connection. Not for belonging. Not for love that costs me myself.
What I Got Wrong About Love for 42 Years
Here’s what I got wrong for 42 years: I thought love was something I gave away to other people. I thought my capacity to love was the thing that made me valuable. So I poured it out. All of it. Into anyone who would take it. And I called that generosity. I called it being a lover, a giver, a volunteer, a friend, a public servant, a good person.
What I was giving away wasn’t love.
It was fear in a love costume. Fear of rejection. Fear of not being chosen. Fear of not being seen. Fear of the fucking void.
I gave away so much to everyone to put smiles on their faces and lost myself doing it. I thought I was being love. I was actually being desperate. There’s a difference, and it took me 42 years and a complete identity collapse to see it.
Real love, the kind I found in that restaurant and driving home crying into my phone, doesn’t leave when you stop performing. It doesn’t require an audience. It doesn’t depend on whether anyone else shows up for you.
I am love. I have always been love.
The difference now is that I’m keeping some for myself. Not hoarding it, not shutting down, not closing off. I still have a big fucking heart and I still share it generously, even when I get devastated. But it stays in my rib cage now. I share it. I don’t give it away.
The void I have had my entire life is not a void anymore.
It’s full. It’s full of me.
What the Fuck Was I Tolerating
I want to be honest about something: peace is disorienting when you’re not used to it.
I’m looking back at what I was tolerating and I genuinely cannot believe it. Not with self-judgment, just with bewilderment. How did I do that? Why did I do that for so long? How did I lose myself so completely inside it and call it normal?
I was smoking weed five times a day last year just to get through. Not recreationally. Medically. Five plus grams a day. Because I had surrounded myself with so much stress, so much chaos, so many toxic patters in myself and others, so many people and dynamics that cost me everything I had, that I needed something to dull the edges just to function. I thought the discomfort in my body was akathisia, a side-effect of my medication. Went through a very difficult medication change to address this, and it didn’t go away. FUCK.
Boredom used to be absolute hell. Downtime felt dangerous. Stillness meant my thoughts could catch me and show me what I was actually living with. The shit I have been feeling in my body and mind for years was like living in a fucking nightmare, except I was awake the entire time.
Now I’m 58 days clean from cannabis, and EVERYTHING else. Every day I wake up is a new record for sobriety as an adult. This week I rested for the first time in months. Actually rested. Multiple naps. No nightmares. I twisted my ankle on a hike Monday and my body basically forced me to slow down, and instead of fighting it the way I used to fight everything, I let it. I laid around. I was bored. And the boredom was restorative in a way I haven’t felt in years.
That question, how did I tolerate all of that for so long, doesn’t have a single answer. It has 42 years of answers. It has fear of abandonment and fear of rejection and a desperate need to be loved by people who were incapable of loving me the way I needed and deserved. It has patterns I inherited before I was old enough to know I was inheriting them. It has a version of me who genuinely believed that if he just gave enough, performed enough, rescued enough, he would finally be safe.
And people knew it. Not always consciously. But they found me anyway. Some people specifically targeted and ensnared me. The ones who needed rescuing. The ones who needed a caretaker. The ones who needed someone to absorb their chaos and keep showing up. The ones who borrowed money and borrowed time and borrowed emotional energy and called it friendship and called it love. I was useful to them. Endlessly, exhaustingly useful. And I mistook being needed for being valued, and being depended on for being loved, and that confusion cost me years of my life and more of myself than I can fully account for.
I’m not angry about it. I’m bewildered by it. There is a difference. Anger would mean I think I was a victim. Bewilderment means I know I was a willing participant in my own depletion, and I’m finally, finally done.
Done. Done.
But I’m not trying to solve all of that right now. I’m just sitting with the bewilderment, letting it be information rather than indictment.
They Run From This Version of Me. Good.
I am not the same person who was living in those patterns.
I know this not because someone told me. I know it because I can feel it in my body. If I were to have a conversation with someone from my old life, which I don’t want, they wouldn’t even be able to comprehend the words coming out of my mouth now. Not the changes. Not the boundaries. Not the person standing in front of them. I am unrecognizable compared to who I used to be. I speak a completely different emotional language now. A language it feels like almost nobody in this culture filled with toxic patterns understands.
And I have the receipts to prove it.
Statistically, and I am dead serious about this, 98% of people ghost me when I share anything from this blog. When I share any of my writings, I completely expect to lose the person I shared it with now. It is almost a daily occurrence.
Here is a verbatim example from a “friend” who I hadn’t heard from in probably 9 months who just “recently noticed” that something was different. Despite not hearing from them for almost a year, they were suddenly “worried” about me. Which is a whole different subject in itself and I won’t get started on that in this piece,
Them: “Hey Tukayote, I noticed you aren’t on social media anymore, I’m worried about you, are you ok buddy?”
Me: “Hey (friend), good to hear from you. Thanks for reaching out. I am actually doing well. Been going through some big changes in my life and doing a lot of work on myself. Rather than trying to explain it all in text, I have been writing about it on my blog and here is a link to what happened when I disappeared from the internet that will help you catch up on things: https://tukayote.com/2026/01/21/i-burned-bridges-on-purpose/
I’m looking forward to chatting with you and catching up soon. ❤️”
Complete silence since.
I told someone else that statistic last week before I sent them the link. A person who I really truly believed would “get me” because I understood them to be on a similar journey. They said, “oh, I definitely wouldn’t do that.”
Nine days of crickets. Ghosted. Right on schedule.
Almost everyone in my own family doesn’t check in anymore. I have cancelled a yearly tradition, I started after my divorce, to visit some of the most important people I have had in my life from childhood through today. The only surviving blood I have outside of my sister and daughters. I have cancelled this, not out of spite, but because it’s a setting that is centered around people numbing themselves with cigarettes, alcohol, and weed. Nobody there seems to give a shit about my sobriety, let alone the identity death I have been living through, or the enormous mental health work I am doing every single god damned day. Why am I going to drop a few grand to go sit in sobriety with people for week while they numb in front of me the entire time? Why am I going to go feel very out of place and alone all day long, surrounded by “loved ones?”
I haven’t told them yet. I don’t need to explain myself and give them an entry point to emotional backlash, bargaining, shame, or whatever they use to feel better about themselves and make me the problem. They will figure it out when I am not there this summer. When I disappear just like they did. I didn’t know when I said goodbye to them last year, that it was final.
So that’s another Irish goodbye. Another quiet exit from something that used to feel like it was mine. Another fucking loss to add to the plate of people and places that were once special and dear to my heart.
People run away screaming from this version of me. The honest one. The boundaried one. The one who stopped performing and started actually speaking. They liked the old me better, because it kept them comfortable with themselves. The one who absorbed everything, asked for nothing, gave everything, and smiled while he was quietly disappearing into the void. That guy was easy to be around. That guy never made anyone uncomfortable by having needs or language for them.
This guy does. And I’m keeping him anyway.
The ones who stay are the ones worth keeping. The ones who can’t handle the depth, the honesty, the self-awareness, the emotional language, they were never really here for me. They were here for what I gave them. And when I stopped giving it away for free, there was nothing left for them to stay for.
I used to find that devastating. Now I find it clarifying.
The Most Important Thing Anyone Has Ever Said to Me
And I am proud of myself in a way I have never been and never knew how to be.
I need to sit with that for a second because it deserves more than a passing sentence.
I have never said those words to myself. Not once. Not in 42 years of surviving things that would have taken other people out. Not after getting sober. Not after the hardest moments of my life. There was always a voice that said it wasn’t enough, that I hadn’t earned it, that I should be doing more or better or differently. That voice sounded a lot like the people who were supposed to say it first and never did.
My mother never genuinely told me she was proud of me. She said the actual words many times and it was always followed with “but” or her telling me some way I should improve or do things better. The bar was always raised, and I could never reach it. The words meant absolutely nothing and often were completely devastating.
My father never had the opportnity to. He was taken from me before my brain was even fully developed. We had barely began to know each other after years of parental alienation and isolation via my mother. He had just came back into my life when his alcoholism ultimately killed him. I believe he was proud of me even though he never really got to tell me. I know he would be SO FUCKING PROUD of me today if he were still walking this earth alongside me. I can be at peace with that and it still deeply hurts.
The people I loved most, the ones whose voices would have meant absolutely everything to me, never gave me that. And so I spent four decades trying to numb that void, and perform my way into earning it from people who didn’t have it to give. Rescuing them, enabling them, making myself useful and small and endlessly available, hoping that someday someone would look at me and say, I see you. You are enough. I am proud of you.
Outside of my sister, daughters, therapists, a few very close friends, and my healer, nobody else did.
And one Tuesday, sitting alone with myself after months of the hardest work I have ever done, I said it for the first time. Out loud. Into the air. To nobody and to everything.
I started crying before I finished the sentence.
And all the lights that lead us there are blinding
There are many things that I would
Like to say to you
But I don’t know how
Not sad crying. The other kind. The kind that comes when something true finally lands after a very long time of waiting. The kind that comes when a little kid inside you, who has been holding his breath for decades, finally exhales.
Tukayote, you are doing so much to be proud of. I am so fucking proud of you.
I said it out loud. I meant it. And it was the most important thing anyone has ever said to me, because I was finally the one saying it, and I was finally the one who needed to hear it.
That’s new. That’s real. And nobody can take it away from me, because I’m not waiting for anyone else to give it to me anymore.
Love Is the Only Way Forward
I am not who I was.
I don’t numb out. I don’t bargain. I don’t perform. I don’t cling to broken connections just to avoid the silence. I don’t smoke weed five times a day to survive my own life. I don’t override my body’s signals and push through when everything in me is asking to stop.
I feel every feeling, cry every tear, and keep walking. Sober, clear-eyed, bruised, and more myself than I have ever been in my entire life.
I am love now.
Not as a destination I’m trying to reach. As the ground I’m standing on.
It’s the only thing nobody can take. The only thing that protects me without hardening me. The only way forward that makes any sense.
I love myself so much now that I won’t hurt myself by engaging with people who want to use me. And I love them, from wherever they are, enough to let them go without a fight.
Irish goodbye. Block. Delete. Done.
Not with bitterness. With love.
That’s new too.
