Biloxi, Mississippi – November 2006 – One year after Hurricane Katrina

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Three days of peace. Then my nervous system woke up on Thursday and said: “Not so fast.”

This is what healing actually looks like when nobody is watching. And a few words for the ones who are.

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To the Critics Who Think They Know Me: Sit Down.

I want to address some of you directly before we go anywhere else.

Some of you think this blog is self-centered. Some of you think my tone is harsh, abrasive, and vulgar. Some of you read my manifesto, saw the boundaries I have drawn around myself and my life, and felt some kind of way about it. Some of you looked at my “I Am Love” page and decided that was arrogance, vanity, or some unhealthy infatuation with myself. Some of you ghosted me instead of just saying what you actually thought. And some of you, despite all of that, keep quietly coming back to read every single word I write. You know who you are. So do I.

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So let me be direct with you, because that is the only way I know how to be.

Yes. This blog is entirely about me. That is not an accident. For most of my life I made everything about everybody else and abandoned myself completely in the process, and it damn near killed me. Focusing entirely on myself is not narcissism. It is survival. It is the thing I was supposed to be doing all along and never did. It is the work. And I am not going to apologize for it or soften it for your comfort.

But since we are here, let us actually talk about narcissism for a second. Because if you are going to be an armchair-therapist and throw that word at me, you should probably know what it actually means.

Here is what Narcissistic Personality Disorder actually is, straight from the DSM-5:

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. To meet the clinical criteria, a person has to show at least five of the following: a grandiose sense of self-importance, preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success or power, a belief that they are special and can only be understood by other special people, a need for excessive admiration, a sense of entitlement, interpersonally exploitative behavior, lack of empathy, envy of others, and arrogant or haughty behavior.

That is what narcissism actually is.

Now let me tell you what this blog actually is.

This blog is written from the heart of a person with deep empathy who spent most of his life giving it away to people who did not deserve it and who used it against him. This blog is written from the heart of a person who was so busy rescuing, performing, contorting, and abandoning himself for other people that he eventually had nothing left. This blog is written from the heart of a person who finally, after 26 months of the hardest work of his life, started putting himself first for the first time ever, and is writing about it openly and honestly.

That is not narcissism. That is the opposite of narcissism.

I have empathy. I have enormous amounts of it. What I have stopped doing is weaponizing my own empathy against myself by handing it to people who were never going to honor it. There is a difference between lacking empathy and choosing carefully where yours goes. A recovering-codependent learning to stop rescuing everyone is not the same as a narcissist who never cared in the first place.

This blog is not an attack on anyone. Not a single post on this entire site is about anyone other than me. My growth. My patterns. My failures. My accountability. My recovery. My life. If I describe a behavior I will no longer tolerate, I am describing my boundary, not indicting you. If I describe a type of person I no longer allow access to my life, I am describing my standard, not putting you on trial.

And here is the part that I want you to sit with for a minute.

If reading this blog makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is not coming from me.

That is yours. That is your shadow, which is the part of yourself you have not looked at yet, the stuff you keep in the dark, the patterns you have not named, the work you have not started.

Carl Jung spent his entire career explaining this: when something in another person triggers a strong reaction in you, especially a reaction that feels like accusation or judgment, the thing that is actually happening is that you are seeing something in them that lives in you, and you are not ready to face it.

Simply put:

If my boundaries feel like an attack, ask yourself why you needed me not to have them.

If my self-focus feels like selfishness, ask yourself why you needed me so focused on you.

If my “I Am Love” page feels like self-centered arrogance, ask yourself what it would mean for you to feel that way about yourself.

I read that page twenty times a day. Every single thing on it is factually, completely, one hundred percent true about how I feel about myself right now. I spent decades hating myself. I spent decades believing I was not enough, not worthy, not lovable unless I was performing and achieving and rescuing and contorting myself into whatever shape the room needed. That page is the direct antidote to all of that poison. It is not arrogance. It is recovery. And as it says right there in my manifesto: “If anything in this manifesto feels personal, it’s not. And what you are seeing in me is simply what you are seeing in yourself. Talk to your therapist about that.”

Yes. My tone is harsh and vulgar and unapologetic. This is how I think. This is how I process. This is what keeps me honest and on track. If the profanity bothers you, I genuinely, truly, from the bottom of my heart, do not give a fuck. This blog is not written for you. It is written for me, and for the people who are in the same trenches I have been in, who need to hear someone say the real shit out loud without a filter.

Yes. I am cutting people out of my life. Left and right, as you put it. But here is the thing about the people I have cut: they had to go. Every single one of them. Any amount of chaos, any amount of settling, any amount of changing myself to keep someone comfortable at the cost of my own integrity is people-pleasing codependency, and it is a pattern I have worked too fucking hard to eliminate to let it sneak back in through the side door because I was worried about being liked.

I am completely okay with my small social circle. I am completely okay if it never gets bigger. I could walk this earth alone for the rest of my life and be just fine with it. Because the alternative, filling my life back up with people who require me to be smaller, quieter, softer, or more palatable, is not actually company. It is just a different kind of lonely with more noise in it.

Take me or leave me. I genuinely mean that. Both options are fine.

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And to anyone who keeps returning here not to grow, not to relate, not to find themselves in any of this, but to monitor, to inventory, to look for evidence of something they can use: you will not find what you are looking for. This life is not available to you. Not through the front door. Not through the back. Not through the people around me, not through watching my calendar, not through tailing me, not through trying to intimidate me, not through the silence you thought would pull me back, not through the noise you made when it did not. Every entry point is closed. What you are looking at is a person who does not need your access, your approval, your attention, or your presence to be completely and totally fine. That old me who once did, is fucking gone. GONE GONE.

I’m more than fine without these people. I’m thriving. Watch me…wait, you already are. LOL.

This life is hardened now. And it is mine.

Now. You want to know what I am actually doing with all this hard-won freedom? What it looks like when someone who spent decades in the wreckage finally climbs out, gets to the top of the mountain, and has to figure out what the hell to do with all that open sky?

Keep reading.

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Three Days of Peace. No, Really. Three Whole Fucking Days.

Three days.

Three full, consecutive, uninterrupted days without a single alarm going off in my body. No chest tightness. No sinking gut. No shallow breathing. No racing heartbeat. No jolts of dread out of nowhere. No hypervigilance. No looking out for triggers or danger everywhere I went.

Three days of actual, genuine, boring, beautiful, life-giving peace.

Not performed peace. Not white-knuckled peace. Not “I’m fine” with a clenched jaw and a tight stomach peace. Not the kind of peace where you’re holding your breath waiting for it to evaporate.

Real peace. Quiet. Settled. Mine.

I have been chasing that feeling my entire adult life. Through substances that promised to deliver it and only stole it further. Through performances and personas and people-pleasing and rescuing and all the other bullshit I used to do to try to manufacture a feeling of safety in a nervous system that had no idea what safety actually felt like.

And there it was. Three full days of it. Just sitting there in my body like it belonged there.

Which it does. It fucking does.

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I Bled For This View. Every Drop Was Worth It.

I have been doing the hardest work of my life for the past 26 months, since I went dry. And 60 days ago from every single substance that had ever been handed to me and that I had picked up and used to avoid feeling my own feelings. I did the identity work. I faced the ego death that came with it, which was one of the most violent and disorienting experiences I have ever been through, and I have been through some shit. I started learning what my actual values are instead of performing the values that would make people like me. I started figuring out who I actually am underneath all the armor and the chaos and the conditioning.

I climbed a mountain.

Not a metaphorical little hill. A full, brutal, vertical fucking mountain. The kind where you cannot see the top for most of the climb and you are not even sure there is a top and your legs are burning and you keep slipping and sometimes you fall backward and lose ground you already covered and you have to start that section over again.

And then one day, not dramatically, not in a single cinematic moment, but gradually and then all at once, I got to the top.

And the view from up here is something else entirely.

I can see everything. The whole landscape. Where I came from. The paths I took that were wrong turns. The paths I took that looked like wrong turns but were actually the only way to get here. The people I left behind at base camp who could not or would not make the climb. The ones who tried to pull me back down. The ones who are still down there, doing the same loops in the same valleys they have always done.

And I can see what is ahead. Not with perfect clarity, nobody has that. But with the kind of clarity that only comes from altitude. From finally being above the fog.

That is where I live now. Up here. In the clear air. With the view I pushed so hard to earn.

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Thursday. My Brain Manufactured a Crisis Before I Even Had Coffee.

So. Thursday.

I went to bed Wednesday night feeling the end of my third consecutive day of peace in my body. Genuinely feeling it. Not just thinking it. My nervous system was quiet, my mind was quiet, and I fell asleep without running any scenarios or bracing for anything.

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I woke up Thursday and my emotional mind had apparently spent the entire night in a panic room, building a full case for a worst-case scenario that had zero grounding in reality. Not one single fact supported it. It was a “what if,” a completely fabricated, astronomically unlikely, logically dismantled-in-four-sentences “what if,” and my emotional mind had constructed an entire courtroom around it while I was sleeping.

And my body believed every word of it.

Tight chest. Racing heart. That sinking gut feeling that hits in waves, like someone keeps punching you from the inside. Shaky. Shallow breathing. Full hypervigilance, looking out for danger everywhere, waiting for something terrible that was simply not coming. My nervous system went from zero to full red alert in the time it took me to wake up.

Twelve hours of that.

That is a long fucking time to be on fire for no reason.

And here is the wild part. Here is the part that I keep coming back to, because it tells me so much about where I actually am versus where I used to be:

When I finally sat down and looked at the fear directly, when I actually examined it with my rational brain instead of drowning in the feeling of it, it collapsed. Completely. Instantly. It had no legs. I walked through it point by point and every single point fell apart. The thing I had spent twelve hours being terrified of was not happening, had no real mechanism by which it could happen, and was directly contradicted by everything I actually knew to be true.

Four sentences. That is all it took to dismantle a twelve hour panic.

I am not mad about Thursday. I am not ashamed of it. I am not going to beat myself up for spending twelve hours in unnecessary dread. That kind of self-punishment is old behavior and I do not do that anymore.

But I am paying attention to it. Because Thursday is data. Thursday is my nervous system showing me exactly where it still is, and it is not where my rational mind is. Not even close.

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The Gap Is Real. The Gap Also Means I Moved.

Here is the most honest thing I can tell you about where I am right now:

My mind is flying. My nervous system is still learning it has wings.

I spent the majority of my life with my nervous system running the whole operation. Constant fight-or-flight. Adrenaline and anxiety and hypervigilance as a baseline state, not as an emergency response. My body spent so long treating every day like a potential disaster that it stopped knowing how to do anything else. And my rational mind, the part of me that can actually think and reason and see things clearly, that part spent years trying to navigate using emotions as its only instrument. Trying to think with feelings. Trying to logic its way through panic. Trying to make good decisions from inside a body that was always, always bracing for impact.

And then I did the work. I got sober. I got into regular intensive therapy and deep Internal Family Systems work. I started actually feeling my feelings instead of chemically incinerating them. I started learning what my nervous system even is and why it operates the way it does and what it actually needs from me. Slowly, imperfectly, with a lot of setbacks, I started learning how to regulate.

And my rational mind? Once it stopped being hijacked by a dysregulated nervous system every single day? It took off. Fast.

That part of me has processed so much. The losses. The patterns. The grief. The identity death. The accountability. All of it. My rational mind has looked at all of it, made its peace with all of it, and has already moved so far forward that it is now thinking about things I have not allowed myself to think about in months. Things that have nothing to do with grief or pain or loss. Things that are purely about living my actual life as a healthy, whole person who has needs and desires and a future in front of him. Not running toward anything out of loneliness or fear. Not a rebound, not a chase for validation, not a performance for anyone else’s benefit. The actual opposite of all that, just getting my own needs met, fully on my own terms, because I am a person and I get to have needs.

That is how far ahead my rational mind already is.

My nervous system, meanwhile, is still occasionally waking up at 7AM on a Thursday and deciding it needs to run a full trauma drill.

The gap between those two things is the most disorienting place I have ever lived. And also, weirdly, one of the most hopeful. Because the gap means I got somewhere. You cannot have a gap between where you were and where you are unless you have actually moved.

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The Eye of the Hurricane. Except the Storm Is Already Over.

If you have not already figured this out about me, I think in metaphors and analogies. It is how I understand the world. I have been trying to find the right one for this particular experience, and this is the one I keep coming back to:

The eye of the hurricane. Except the storm is already done. There is no second wall of weather. There is no more coming. The meteorologists all agree. The forecast is clear skies, indefinitely.

But standing in the eye, looking at all the wreckage around you, the debris and the broken shit and the damage that is going to take real time to clean up, it is genuinely hard to believe there is not another storm coming. Because look at all this evidence of storms. Look at how much got destroyed. Look at how long it was raining.

The evidence of past storms is not evidence of future storms.

That is the sentence I come back to when my nervous system starts generating ghost weather. When the Thursday drills happen. When my body insists on bracing for an impact that is not coming.

The rubble is real. The damage happened. Years and years of it. And some of it is still sitting there waiting to be cleaned up because you cannot undo decades of destruction in a few months. But the rubble is not a forecast. It is just what is left to do. And I can do it. I am doing it. Every single day.

The sky is clear. The sun is out. I know how to fly now.

I just have to keep reminding my nervous system that this is what peace feels like, and that peace is not a trap.

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Friday. My Body Finally Exhaled for the First Time in Five Years.

My alarm went off at 8:15AM for something I had planned to do. I snoozed it. It went off again at 8:24AM and I turned it off completely and said out loud, to nobody: I am going to sleep until I wake up.

I woke up at 10AM.

I have not slept until 10AM in five years. Five years of my body snapping awake in some level of alert, ready to monitor and manage whatever was coming next. Five years of sleep as an interrupted, braced, insufficient thing instead of an actual rest.

Friday I slept until 10AM and my body just exhaled.

I had plans that night. I cancelled them. Not out of fear, not out of hiding, but because I knew with complete clarity that going would cost me more than it would give me right now. My body needed something different. I could feel it. And for maybe the first time in my life, I actually listened to that instead of overriding it and white-knuckling my way through something I was not ready for.

So I stayed home. Yin yoga music on the speaker. Low-key dinner at a neighborhood spot by myself, just me and some good food and no agenda. Came home, cleaned up some things I had been meaning to get to, worked on some writing. Did absolutely nothing of consequence and felt zero guilt about it. Not one ounce. Whatever it cost to cancel, whatever I missed, whatever. My body needed the quiet more than I needed to be somewhere.

In the past, an empty calendar meant danger. It meant I was alone and unwanted and forgotten. It meant I needed to find something, someone, anywhere to plug the hole that the silence opened up. An empty Friday night was practically a crisis.

Friday I had an empty calendar and I turned it into the most nourishing thing I could have given myself.

That is new. That is so new I am still getting used to the feeling of it.

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I Know How to Fly.
Watch Me.

Here is what I am learning about what it actually means to be okay:

It is not linear. It does not stay in one place once you find it. Some days you wake up and everything is aligned and the peace is just there, solid and real and yours. And some days your emotional mind wakes up before you do and has already been busy, and you spend half the day unwinding something that was never even real to begin with.

Both of those days are part of flying.

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I know how to fly now. That is not arrogance. That is not premature confidence. That is just the truth of what 26 months of brutal, honest, alcohol-free, fully present work has built in me. I have earned this. I have the altitude. I have the view. I have the skills.

But I am still going to hit turbulence. Thursdays are going to happen. My nervous system is going to keep running its drills until it finally, fully understands that the war is over. And when the turbulence hits, when my chest gets tight and the ghost weather rolls in and my body starts bracing for a storm that is not coming, I do not spiral. I do not crash. I do not start over from zero.

I just keep flapping my wings. Use a little extra energy. Adjust the angle. Stay in the air.

I am not going to fall to the ground.

I know how to fly.

And the view from up here is worth every single thing it took to get here.

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