This Isn’t a Cop-Out
I want to tell you something before I get into all of this.
The person who did the things I am about to describe to you is someone I no longer recognize. I have spent a lot of time over the last several years sitting with that, and I do not say it as a cop-out or as a way to dodge accountability. I say it because it is literally, genuinely true. If I passed that version of myself on the street today, I do not think I would know who he was. The way he moved through the world, the things he did to survive, the wreckage he left behind him without even fully understanding what he was doing or why, all of it feels like reading about someone else. Someone I understand deeply, someone I have a lot of compassion for, someone I do not hate anymore. But someone I am not.
This blog has spent the last several months living in the darkness. The damage. The destruction. The ego death. The devastating process of watching everything I built, and everything I thought I was, fall apart completely so that something real could grow in its place. I have not shied away from any of it. That was necessary. You have to walk through the whole house before you understand what needs to be rebuilt.
But something has been shifting. And this post is the beginning of a new chapter in what I write about here.
I am becoming unrecognizable. Not just to the people around me, but to myself. The things that used to define me, the chaos, the addiction, the self-hatred, the volatility, the patterns I ran on autopilot for decades, I barely remember what it felt like to live inside of them. And the things that define me now are so different, so quiet and solid and real, that I sometimes have to stop and just sit with the fact that this is actually my life.
This post is a bridge. One foot still in the devastation, one foot in the new. It is the story of my estrangement from my daughters, and what I had to become to end it.
Let’s begin.
The Unraveling in a Blizzard
I have touched on a lot of things on this blog that fell apart over the years. One thing I have not really dove deep into is the way my relationship with my daughters unraveled, and what led to us being in each other’s lives again.
We went 3.5 years apart. Some of the hardest, most emotionally challenging times of my life. I had to live with the hope that we would reunite, and the painful reality that I might never see them again. I had to sit with those two possibilities in my head, fighting each other, and move my life forward as if the first would happen, and find a way to be okay with myself if the second one became true.
That is not a small thing to ask of yourself. That is years of sitting in the consequences of what you created and deciding what kind of person you are going to be anyway. Without guarantee of reward. Without knowing if any of it will matter in the end. Just doing the work because the work is right, and because the alternative is becoming even less recognizable to yourself than you already are.
December 15, 2021. I got fired from my full-time job at Microsoft after having an anger-filled argument with my supervisor and telling him to fuck off.
I had been working two jobs to make ends meet for almost a full year. Struggling with crippling depression. Trying to parent my 16-year-old daughter. Trying not to mentally collapse through all of it. I had been a Microsoft employee and, when that ended, I leaned harder into my line cook job at a hotel restaurant across town. I shared my vehicle with my daughter, so I walked 7 miles each direction to and from work most days. Seven miles there. Seven miles back. In the dark. In the rain. Because Bellingham.
Somewhere in there, I threw all my medications in the trash. I had convinced myself they weren’t doing a god damned thing and there was no reason to keep taking them. Meanwhile, I had been drinking more and more each day at the restaurant, finishing every single shift with several cocktails before making that long walk home. The meds weren’t working, I told myself. The drinks were.
That is not a story about medication or alcohol. That is a story about a person who had stopped recognizing himself and was doing whatever it took to not feel that.
December 22, 2021, 2AM. I was walking home from the restaurant through the Columbia neighborhood after drinking with the crew for a few hours after closing. That wasn’t enough, so I stopped at a 7-Eleven, bought a big Four Loko, slammed that, and continued walking down through the neighborhood.
Moments later, I found myself face down on the ground. I had fallen very hard. It is still a mystery how I didn’t lose consciousness or sustain a concussion or broken bones. My knees were bloodied. My headphones landed 10 feet away. Disoriented and in severe pain, with the dim awareness that I still had 4.5 miles to go to get home. Luckily my phone had a charge, so I called an Uber and got back to my apartment with holes in my pants and blood running down my leg.
December 22, 2021, during the day. Earlier that same day, I had posted on Facebook: “I love working my second job as a chef. I am the healthiest that I have ever been. My daughters are doing so much better. I have the best group of friends. I am making huge gains with my emotional health (50% less medication).”
I didn’t tell anyone I had been fired from Microsoft. I didn’t mention being off all of my meds completely. I didn’t mention the drinking. The face-plant at 2AM did not make the post.
This is why you can’t really believe anything people post on social media. It’s almost always skewed. Everybody’s in there building a highlight reel over a foundation that’s actively crumbling. I was master-class at this. I had been performing “fine” for so long that I had started to believe it myself, at least in the daylight hours. At night, the body kept the score and put me on the pavement.
December 25, 2021, 3PM. It had been snowing all day. I had gone out for a snowy walk with a friend earlier that day and made snow angels on the WWU campus, which, in retrospect, was genuinely one of the sweeter moments of that whole ugly stretch of time. That night I was working a shift at the hotel restaurant, and we were feeding travelers who were stuck at the hotel as the weather deteriorated outside. By the end of my shift, the storm had gotten so bad it wasn’t safe to drive home. The hotel gave all of us rooms and put us up for the evening. Then my supervisor informed me that the morning crew wasn’t going to be able to make it in, and I would need to be up and ready to cook breakfast at 5:30AM.
So what did I do?
I stayed up most of the night drinking after the biggest dinner slam I had ever experienced.
I made food at 3AM in the kitchen and jammed to Sinatra while the blizzard raged outside. I was sous-vide cooking a New York Strip roast. I was having what I would have described at the time as a great night. I slept through my alarm and was woken up at 6AM by the other cook knocking on my door. I threw my chef clothes back on, still wearing them from the night before, and ran to the kitchen and began figuring out breakfast service completely on the fly, because I had never actually cooked breakfast at this restaurant before.
After breakfast and lunch service were done, we had to immediately begin prep for the dinner shift. I had already been working for 8 hours straight. And there was nobody coming to the hotel or leaving it. It was just me and the other cook, running the entire show, while hundreds of stranded passengers were stuck at the hotel and needed to be fed.
We did another big dinner shift that night, December 26th, and I finally went to bed at 2AM after drinking more. Still off my meds. I had now worked 18 solid hours after only a few hours of sleep the night before.
Back up at 5:30AM. Breakfast. Prep. Dinner. More alcohol.
December 27th. Same thing. Three full 18-hour days in the kitchen, wearing the same clothes the entire time, stranded at a hotel, drinking every night, no medications anywhere in my body. I fed somewhere around 300 people over those three days. The kitchen did not fail. Nobody went hungry.
I told myself that what I was doing was heroic. I felt invincible. This was going to be the greatest line-cook story of all time. I had saved the restaurant’s ass for three full days during one of the worst winter storms I had ever experienced in Bellingham. I was a hero.
And I was really fucking manic.
I knew it. I had been denying it with everything I had because I felt so fucking good. And here is the thing about mania when you have been living in the pits of depression for months: you do not want it to end. That lift feels like a gift. Like relief. Like finally, this is what other people feel like all the time. The world is wide open and you are at the center of it and everything is possible and you have more energy than you know what to do with, and god, why would you ever want to come back down from that?
Because it ends. It always ends. And every single time it has ended for me, it has been a fucking disaster of unimaginable proportions. The higher the high, the more devastating the fall. Every time, without exception. I knew that. And I still let it run.
The Breaking Point
I Was in Deep Shit
December 28, 2021, 10AM. I finished up the last of my back-to-back shifts at the hotel. The relief crew had finally been able to make it in. I had my shift meal for breakfast and went home.
I knew I was in deep shit with my mental health. Really deep shit. I still had an open wound on my knee from the face-plant on December 22nd that was barely healing. I had slept maybe 6 hours total in three days and had somehow had the energy to run multiple 18-hour kitchen shifts. I was extremely irritable, the kind of irritable where everything feels like sandpaper and the smallest thing is enough to combust. I had been fighting with my daughters for several weeks and had been threatening both of them with really unreasonable financial ultimatums, the kind of thing that only makes sense when you are in a state of complete dysregulation and calling it “setting boundaries.” I had been off my medications for two weeks. I had been drinking like a fish. And I was thinking about suicide constantly, even though I was simultaneously feeling like I could take on the entire world.
That is what a mixed state looks like sometimes. The euphoria and the death wish, living right next to each other, taking turns at the wheel. If you have never experienced it, I genuinely do not know how to explain it in a way that fully lands. You feel both things completely. Neither one cancels the other out. It is one of the more disorienting and dangerous places a person can find themselves.
A few hours after getting home, I made the decision to check myself in.
I sat down and wrote a two-page document to hand to the ER intake people. It covered my mental health history, my medications, my drug and alcohol use, the situations going on in my life, and a specific note that I did not consent to electroconvulsive therapy. I took a nap. Gathered up some clothing. Drove myself to PeaceHealth St. Joseph Hospital, pulled into the parking lot, smoked a joint in my Jeep, and walked myself in around 3PM.
I want to sit here for just a second and acknowledge that even in the middle of complete freefall, some part of me knew. Some part of me drove to that hospital. That part mattered, even if I did not understand it yet.
December 28, 2021, around 11PM. I was brought up to SECU to wait for a bed in One Central, the psych ward at the hospital. I was admitted to the unit sometime shortly after. I was in deep psychosis at that point. Very unstable. In a mixed depressive-manic state, very irritable, very angry. I was in really bad shape.
Sometime between December 29th and New Year’s Eve, I had a phone call with my youngest daughter. I do not remember the exact details of what was said. What I know is that at some point I exploded in anger, told her I wished she had never been born, and threw the phone on the ground hard enough to shatter it into pieces.
Moments later, I walked up to the nurse and said, “I am here voluntarily, and I would like to leave.”
She said, “Just a moment, I will get right back to you about that.”
An hour or two passed. She came back toward me in the hallway with a clipboard and two large security guards flanking her. The clipboard had court paperwork on it. I had been involuntarily committed by the State of Washington. The paperwork outlined my legal rights, set a hearing date, and assigned me a public defender.
I was now property of the state. I had lost all rights to control any part of my treatment. They could force any medication or procedure on me without my consent, and I had zero say in any of it.
So what did I do? I exploded. Yelled and screamed at them. Called them names. Stomped up and down the hallway. Lost my absolute shit completely.
They gave me a choice: stop what I was doing, or go to seclusion and be restrained and sedated.
I stopped.
But the damage I had done was nowhere close to finished. And the consequences that were coming were going to follow me for the next 3.5 years of my life.
The Hard Hitting Note in the Empty Bedroom
January 5, 2022. I was stabilized on medication and discharged from the hospital.
I came home expecting to find my daughter. Instead, I found a note. It was written on the back of a pencil-sketch of a painting my daughter made for me as a child. The painting that bears the signature of her name tattooed on my forearm.
The note said many things. But the part that hit me the hardest and that I will never forget was two words: “Get help.”
The bedroom where my 16-year-old daughter had been living with me was empty. She was gone. I had no idea where she was. Her phone number didn’t work anymore. And I had to sit with that heaviness, starting that day, and going forward for the next 3.5 years.
I done fucked up good this time.
Let me be clear about what that moment actually was. That was not a fight. That was not a rough patch. That was a child who had watched me destroy myself for long enough that she made the decision that the safest thing she could do was leave. She was right. That note was an act of self-preservation from a person I had been failing, repeatedly, for years. And the fact that it said “get help” instead of something much uglier says more about who she is than anything I could write.
So what did I do? I took off on a very impulsive trip to Portland with a woman I barely even knew. I continued drinking.
I kept on partying night after night, using all kinds of drugs in the process. I took another drunken fall and busted open the wound that had just healed on my knee.
I rebounded straight into a new relationship with a different woman three weeks later.
Because that is what you do when you cannot sit with what you have done. You run. You fill every available space with noise and people and substances so that the silence cannot get to you. Because the silence is where the reckoning lives, and I was not ready for it.
The reckoning was coming anyway.
I Didn’t Learn My Lesson
I Did It All Again, Of Course
November 26, 2023. Twenty-three months into the estrangement from my daughters, I was in the hospital again.
This time I arrived drunk, on mushrooms, kratom, and weed. I had been feeling mentally unwell for about a month before that day and had not told a single person. Had not asked for help. Had not given anyone even a glimpse of what was happening inside me. I had been isolating and declining and keeping all of it locked down with the particular kind of pride that only a person deep in active addiction and mental illness can manage. The pride of performing okayness so well that even you almost believe it.
That day, I was suicidal. I locked myself in my apartment, put a note on the door that said “Come back with a warrant,” and sent texts to every person in my contacts list telling them I hated them, I didn’t want them in my life, and all kinds of other terrible things. I believed everyone was out to get me. I believed the cops who were outside my door for most of that day wanted to arrest me and put me in jail. I drank a full bottle of mezcal that day, and a six-pack of 9% ABV ciders, on top of the mushrooms and kratom and weed I had already taken. I was being destructive to everyone who loved me, again. Drunk, delusional, and psychotic, again. Manic, again. Refusing help from everyone, again.
At some point I passed out in my bed and unknowingly left my front door unlocked.
My long-term partner at the time found me passed out, got me aroused enough to get into her car, and drove me to the hospital where I arrived in severe psychiatric crisis. I was immediately changed into scrubs, which is standard protocol for psychiatric hospitalization, and put on a stretcher in the hallway under suicide watch. There were eyes on me from that moment forward.
In my deep psychosis, I was absolutely certain that everyone at the hospital was wrong, and that they, like the cops, were out to get me. So when I decided I was done with the stretcher, I took off my shirt, got up, and ran for the door, only to find three security guards already waiting for me. I began to posture myself to fight them off.
Two syringes of sedative hit both of my arms simultaneously, one from each side.
I was put back on the stretcher and wheeled down the hallway to seclusion, sedated but not even close to done fighting. I flipped off every person I passed on the way down the hall and yelled profanities the entire time. When I got to the room and saw the bed with the anchor points and the restraints, I was told I could calm down and cooperate or they would strap me to the bed. By that point enough of the sedative had kicked in that I made the wise decision to stop fighting.
I was sent to SECU to sober up and wait for further treatment. And somehow, it still blows my mind, they let me go home the next morning.
November 27, 2023. I came home. My second partner, who I had been dating for about a month, looked at me and said, “I can no longer be in a romantic relationship with you, and can only be your friend.” She ended it. Rightfully so. Completely rightfully so. She ended our friendship several months later, rightfully so as well. I had hurt her emotionally. Our 6-year close friendship, turned romance, turned friendship was permanently over.
November 28, 2023. I posted to social media a heavily edited, sanitized version of what had happened on the 26th and wrote: “I am out now, stable, sober, and most importantly safe.”
And in the weeks that followed, I began drinking again. I also told myself, never again am I going to do this to myself and to people I love. And I meant it. Both things were true at the same time. That is addiction. That is what it looks like from the inside: the intention is completely real, and the disease is also completely real, and they exist in the same body simultaneously until something finally gives.
January 13, 2024
Early January 4, 2024, I had another alcohol related fall walking home from drinking at Aslan. This time in the middle of an intersection with people watching me. Embarassing. I busted open my knee again that night, the same way as the other two falls.
January 12, 2024. I had a beer at Aslan with my long-term partner and didn’t know it was my last drink.
January 13, 2024. My first day of sobriety from alcohol. I realized at the end of the day I hadn’t drank. I decided to try it again the next day. I have never had another drink since that day. And I have not had another psychotic, manic, suicidal psychiatric crisis since either.
Those two things are not a coincidence.
I have been completely sober from everything since January 6, 2026 and stopped using cannabis that day after 15 years of using.
I stopped using Kava on November 14, 2025 after 1.5 years of using.
I stopped using kratom on October 12, 2024 after three years of using.
I stopped using hallucinogens on September 5, 2024 after 2.5 years of using.
I stopped smoking cigarettes on January 16, 2024 after 22 years of using.
I stopped using alcohol on January 13, 2024 after 23 years of using.
I used inhalants for the last time on February 8, 2023 after 21 years of intermittent using.
I used ketamine for the first and last time on February 8, 2023.
I am going to fast forward, and then rewind. I am getting to a bigger point.
Four Years. Two Hospitalizations.
Two Completely Different Men.
December 14, 2025. I was struggling with my emotions. Sober. Coherent. Not manic, not depressed. But feeling the real and substantial weight of some recent situations in my life, and finding myself becoming passively suicidal. Not wanting to die. Not making plans. Simply not caring whether I was alive or not. If a bus ran me over, oh well. The absence of a desire to live is its own kind of crisis, even when it is quiet.
I recognized it immediately as a mental health destabilization. And I proactively packed my bags and drove myself to the VA hospital and checked myself in.
When I walked in, I could advocate for myself. Clearly and completely. I told them what was going on in my life. I told them what I needed their help with. I told them what I did and didn’t want from their treatment. I was stable on my medications and had been taking them exactly as prescribed, every single day, for over two years. I didn’t need a medication change. I just needed a safe place to land for a few days while I got my feet back under me.
December 16, 2025. Two days later, I had journaled over 30 pages and processed the heavy feelings that had brought me in. I approached my care team and said: “I am here voluntarily. I would like to leave. Here is why. Here is my plan for when I get home. Here is my plan on how I going to ensure my safety. Here is my plan for follow-up care.”
And unlike the last time I had said “I want to leave” in a psychiatric unit, when the State of Washington immediately had me involuntarily committed, my doctor looked at me and said: “I agree that it would be in your best interest to return home. We will get you discharged in a few hours.”
Two hospitalizations. Four years apart. Same disease. Completely different human beings showing up to manage it.
It is worth naming clearly: I have Bipolar I disorder. Hospitalizations will happen for me from time to time, even when I do everything exactly right. That is the nature of this disease. What changed was not the presence of the illness. The illness is the illness. What changed was who showed up to deal with it. Instead of arriving in psychosis and intoxicated, I showed up clear-headed, sober, and able to advocate for what I needed. Instead of two syringes of sedative hitting my shoulders, I participated in my own treatment plan. Instead of being committed involuntarily and losing my rights, I walked out two days later feeling genuinely better, not even needing a medication change. I manage my psychiatric shit now instead of it managing me.
That is what becoming unrecognizable looks like from the inside. Not that things stopped being hard. But that the person who shows up to hard things is someone else entirely.
The Parts of Me I Discovered That Actually Turned the Ship
Let me rewind to October 2023. Before the absolutely insane manic episode in November. Before the hospital run, before the partner who rightfully walked out, before all of it.
That October, I had started doing Internal Family Systems therapy. I could feel almost immediately that it was going to change something fundamental. I was still stuck in a lot of my patterns. Still carrying deep wounds from decades of trauma. Still drinking. But I was doing something different in how I was approaching my mental health. I was trying a new form of therapy and I was actually showing up for it, consistently, every single time. I did not stop. Not through the November episode. Not through anything. I have been doing IFS from that day forward, and it has completely turned my life around in ways I am still discovering.
IFS introduced me to the parts of myself I had been fighting or ignoring or trying to drink into silence my entire life. It taught me that those parts were not my enemies. That they were scared. That they had been doing what they thought they had to do to keep me alive. And that the work was not to destroy them or suppress them but to actually sit down with them, understand them, and let them rest. That is where the real change started. Not in the dramatic hospitalizations. Not in the cold turkey sobriety. In the slow, consistent, unglamorous weekly work of learning to know myself for real.
Writing E-mails Into the Void
From January 5, 2022, through November 26, 2024, I had been sending my daughters regular emails with updates on me and what I was doing to work on myself. I never got a single response in that entire time. Almost two years of writing into a void. I didn’t even know if they were receiving them. They could have been blocking my email address entirely for all I knew.
I kept writing anyway. Because that was the point. Amends are not about getting a response. Amends are about demonstrating that you are doing something different. Consistently. Over time. Without requiring the other person to acknowledge it or reward you for it. If I was only writing those emails because I expected something back, they would not have been amends. They would have been manipulation with better manners.
Then, on November 26, 2024, there was a reply in my inbox.
It didn’t say much. But it said this:
“I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving and I’m glad to hear that your healing journey has been going very well for you! Feel open to sending us updates/emails when you would like, it does give comfort to her and I. We wish you peace and wellness through the holiday.”
I read it probably fifteen times. I sat with it. I did not immediately fire back a response. I let it be what it was: a small, careful opening from two people who had every reason never to open the door again, and who chose to anyway.
I sent more updates in the weeks that followed. Didn’t hear back. That was okay. I kept going.
On February 1, 2025, I sent them this letter. I am including it in full because these words are the most important thing I have ever written, and they belong in this post exactly as they were sent.
“Hello Ladies,
I was asked recently what is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. And there are two things that came to mind instantly, and I want to share them with you.
First, the loss of both of my parents. I have spent a great amount of time in the past three years processing the grief, anger, loss, sadness, sorrow, misunderstandings, denial, and other emotions surrounding my parents’ deaths. It has been a lot of hard work and helped me learn a lot about myself and my attachment issues. I was very insecurely attached to my parents because of the ways they raised me and things they did. My mother was very controlling and parented from a place of shame, anger, and mental games. She abused me in almost every way a person could. My dad had anger issues as well and was an extreme alcoholic and substance addict. He abused me physically and emotionally. Despite the abuse I endured, and the C-PTSD that I have as a result, I still miss them and wish that they too could heal their wounds and show up as the parents I never ever had.
Second, and equally as devastating, has been our estrangement since my nervous breakdown three-plus years ago. Almost every therapy session I do, I talk about you two and how much I regret the things I said, the things I did, and the things you witnessed when I was your parent figure. I was emotionally and physically abusive. I was headed down a path of alcoholism and substance addiction. I was creating C-PTSD for you both. I was out of control, out of touch, and living my life from a place of hating myself. When you hate yourself, you simply cannot truly love someone else. And when we had the last phone call from the hospital and I spewed hate all over you, it was a mirror of just how much I hated myself. It was never really about you two. It was about my loss of love and compassion for myself. Every time I had a “meltdown” or “rage” that involved you or that you witnessed, it was never about the other person. It was about my hatred of myself and loss of any care or concern for my own well-being. I am sorry for the trauma I caused in my choices. I will never do it again.
Today, I live differently. I think differently. I move through this world and my life from a place of gratitude for what I have, acceptance for my losses and shortcomings, and without shaming myself. I am still sober from alcohol and working through a longer-term plan to stop cannabis. I don’t use kratom or smoke cigarettes anymore. I want to be clean, because I love my body. I love my brain. I love myself and I don’t want to do things that hurt me. And not just substances that hurt me. I am redefining my relationships with friends, family, food, and hobbies. I am not allowing negative and toxic people into my life and I am no longer spreading negativity and toxicity in how I interact with other people. I am putting up boundaries around everything in my life because I have spent the last three years cleaning out the toxic mess I made in my first twenty years of adulthood, and I am not going to let anything near me that can hurt me or cause me harm. Instead of filling my schedule with things to do, I am avoiding things that give me anxiety or that wear me down. I am finding peace in resting, relaxing, and enjoying a simpler and less chaotic life. I have type 2 diabetes right now and I am dramatically changing everything I put into my mouth so that my body and brain are as healthy as they can be.
And speaking of boundaries. The last thing I did before you went no-contact with me was send a letter of boundaries that caused irreparable harm and damage to our trust and our relationship. I regret sending it. I regret keeping the therapist who recommended it. I am sorry for the pain it caused and something like that will never happen again. I would rather talk, discuss our differences, and find ways to work together. I only have one real boundary with both of you today, and that is I will not tolerate any head games, maliciousness, or intentional harm from you. I have this boundary with anyone in my life now, and I don’t believe it will ever be a problem for you two. You are two of the sweetest ladies that I know.
I have learned over the past three years of work and self-discovery that I rarely used to ask for my needs and wants in life. I would not share them, then I would build resentment because I wasn’t getting my needs met, and it would cause anger and strife. I don’t function in that capacity any longer. I ask for what I need and I share the things I want in my life. I want a relationship with both of you again. It will take time and a lot of trust needs to be reestablished for us to move forward.
Part of my wants from you is to know more about you and what has happened in your life over the past three years. Aside from you graduating high school, I have no idea about anything. I don’t even know if you live in Whatcom County. I don’t know if either of you pursued anything in college. I don’t know if you are healthy or not. I don’t know if you are housed. I don’t know if you are safe, fed, watered, bathed, loved, respected. I live in a complete void of information about my two daughters and it is the one thing that still causes me a great amount of anxiety. I have never stopped worrying about you and wishing for nothing but the best for you. I want you both to share your life story with me again. I want to know where I can be a part of your life, how I can support you through whatever situation you may be in, when I am going to see you again, what I should do if we bump into each other unexpectedly, what you expect from me, what you want me to share, and most importantly, I want to be accountable for anything and everything I have ever done to you that has hurt you. If there is something I am not considering or that you feel is unaddressed, I want to address it completely and entirely. I don’t want anything between us and I want to own and tear down every wall I have built between us.
I love you both. I want nothing but the very best for you both. I accept that rebuilding relationships takes time and that you may or may not be willing to do any part of it. I am infinitely patient and understanding. I have nothing but compassion for your pain and suffering. I just want you to be well and okay. I want healing on all levels for all of us.
Dad”
I sent several more updates on my life and things I was doing over the following weeks.
On March 26, 2025, my daughters asked to have a video call with me.
On May 26, 2025, we reunited in person.
We have been healing together ever since.
What It Cost.
What It Built.
Who I Became.
Starting IFS was the beginning of the reunification and the end of the estrangement. Getting sober from alcohol and kratom were massive parts of it. And the work I continue to do every single day is how I am going to keep this relationship healthy and alive until the day I die.
I never want to go 3.5 years without seeing my daughters again. I never want to miss out on special moments in their lives the way I had to miss so many.
I watched my youngest daughter graduate high school on YouTube, sitting alone in my apartment. I was not there to tell her how proud I was of her in that moment.
Today, I am.
I get to see them every week. I get to hold them through their challenges and celebrate their wins right alongside them. We are extremely open and honest with each other, and our relationship has become the first relationship in my life where I started actively breaking my patterns of avoidance and codependency in real time. It has shown me, in the most tangible and personal way possible, what it actually feels like to be open with your emotions. The benefits of healthy boundaries. The benefits of sobriety. The benefits of healthy interdependence. What it feels like to have a relationship that is not built on walking on eggshells or managing someone else’s instability, which for a long time meant managing mine.
And ultimately, it led me to seeing all of my toxic patterns and how they were showing up in every other relationship in my life too. Which led to my identity death. Which led to the months of hard, gutting, necessary work I have been doing to rebuild myself as someone who genuinely loves himself, stopped hating himself, ended his patterns, and became completely sober from everything, not just alcohol. That work has led me to pursuing emotional sobriety as the next step in my recovery journey.
I was not a good dad for most of their lives. Today, I am showing up as the best father they could have ever wished for. And they are showing up as emotionally intelligent, incredibly loving daughters who do the hard work too. We talk about heavy things with each other. We do not avoid the hard conversations. We cry together. We laugh together. We talk about the shit from the past and we talk about how we live our lives together today, in the present, building something new.
I am grateful for the terrible events of my life that led to this. I am genuinely grateful for the estrangement. It gave us the distance and the space we all needed to become the people we needed to become, so that we could eventually find our way back to each other. If none of what I wrote above had ever happened, I would not be where I am today, and neither would they. I don’t love the cliche “everything happens for a reason,” but I do believe there is a lesson to be learned in everything that happens. It is our choice to learn the lesson and not make the mistake again, or we can continue our paths of destruction until there is nothing left.
Fucking Unrecognizable
The self-hatred I named in the letter to my daughters was not just a chapter that closed with our estrangement. It was the engine under the hood of everything. It drove every pattern I ran, every relationship I damaged, every crisis I created. That same driver kept showing up. It continued until I lost my most recent partnership, for the same reason and in the same way. The circumstances were different. The root was identical.
I have spent the months since doing the hardest, most deliberate, most sustained work of my entire life to get to something real. Not performed wellness. Not highlight-reel recovery. Actual, honest-to-god self-love. The kind that does not require anyone else to reflect it back to you. The kind that you carry quietly into rooms, that changes how you make decisions, that makes it genuinely easy to choose not to do the thing that would hurt you or someone else.
I let go of the hatred and the shame. I walked away from both of them and I have not looked back. Not once. I live every moment, and make every single decision, from a place of love for myself. If something I am thinking about doing feels like it is going to cause harm to me or to someone else, I don’t do it. It is really that simple now, and for most of my life, it was anything but.
I live in integrity with myself. I choose the right thing even when nobody is watching. I keep my fucking conscience clean. I maintain my dignity. And I am moving into a version of my life and this blog that is less about what I survived and more about who I became.
The damage was real. The devastation was real. The ego death was real and necessary and I will not pretend it was anything other than what it was. But I have walked through the whole house now. I know what was there. I know what I burned down and what I chose to rebuild and what I walked away from for good.
What comes next is different. What comes next is a person you might not recognize from the one I have been describing in these pages.
What comes next is the point.
This is the what making amends actually is.
It isn’t writing letters.
It is living life differently in a way that doesn’t destroy yourself or other people.
It is about being sober and clean.
It is about never repeating harmful patterns again.
It is about becoming unrecognizable from the person you once were.
I am love now.
