This Is What It Actually Looks Like
I Woke Up One Day and Didn’t Recognize Myself. It Was the Best Goddamn Morning of My Life.
I need to tell you something about what healing actually looks like. Not the version people post about. Not the aesthetic. The real thing. The quiet, unglamorous, nobody-is-watching, random-Tuesday version of it. Because I am living it right now and it is nothing like I thought it would be and it is so much better than anything I ever imagined.
I am unrecognizable. And I am just getting started.
But first I have some housekeeping to do.
That Last Post Was Unnecessary as Hell. And It’s the Last One You’re Getting.
My last post was a big, unnecessary explanation I should have never written. A detailed, patient, carefully worded defense of my own existence to people who had already made up their minds. I know better. And now I’m done.
So here it is, clean and final, the last thing I will ever say about this: you had the opportunity to walk alongside me. You blew it. The consequence of that is losing me for good. And I want to be honest with you about something that might sting a little. It doesn’t hurt my feelings. Not even a little. Losing you is a gift I didn’t know I needed until I opened it.
Alan Watts said that when you attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, you cannot avoid giving that person the very same power and control over you. I gave a lot of people a lot of power over me for a very long time. I handed it over voluntarily, over and over, every time I sat down to explain myself. Every time I tried to craft the perfect words that would finally make someone believe what I already knew was true. Every goddamn explanation was me handing the keys over and asking to be driven.
That’s done now.
Explaining myself to people who have already decided the answer is not communication. It’s me trying to fix their thought patterns from the outside. And that doesn’t work. It has never worked in the history of human psychology. The only thought patterns anyone can fix are their own. I know that now because I spent the last year doing exactly that work on myself. I know what it costs. I know what it takes. And I know that nobody can do it for you and nobody can make you do it.
If they were capable of it, they already would have. If they had done this work, they would be secure enough in themselves to understand that me healing has nothing to do with them. My sobriety is not an indictment of their choices. My emotional health is not a criticism of how they live. My growth does not threaten anyone who is genuinely okay with who they are.
The fact that it feels like a threat is information. It’s not information about me.
They had the opportunity to grow alongside me. Some people took it. I am endlessly grateful for them. Others stayed exactly where they were and pointed at me from that spot and called it clarity. That’s their life to live. I genuinely hope they find their way to something better. But I can’t want it for them more than they want it for themselves and I am not going to shrink back down to a size that makes them more comfortable.
Doesn’t matter if we share DNA. Doesn’t matter how long we were friends. It’s my life. My healing. My sobriety. My accountability. My happiness. It only belongs to me.
If my transformation feels personal to you, Carl Jung had some thoughts on that. He said projection makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face. He also said the best work any of us can do is to withdraw the projection of our own shadow onto others. I’d start there. And if that stirs something up in you, please find a qualified, credentialed therapist. I mean that with complete sincerity. The work is worth it. I promise.
I’m moving forward now. You’re welcome to come along if you do the work. If not, I understand.
Either way, I’m going. I am love, and love doesn’t wait around to be believed in.
Nobody Tells You Healing Looks Like a Random Boring-Ass Tuesday
There was going to be a moment. A finish line. Something so visible and so undeniable that nobody could question it. I would arrive somewhere and the people who doubted me would see it and they would have to admit it. I would feel okay all the time. The hard days would just stop. I would become someone unrecognizable in some dramatic, obvious, impossible-to-ignore way and the transformation would speak for itself.
That was the fantasy. And honestly, what a naive, codependent, people-pleasing piece of bullshit it was.
I chased that finish line for a long time. I wanted to be so visibly different that no one could deny it. I wanted the acknowledgment. I wanted to be seen and believed and validated. And I did not understand yet that chasing that was itself one of the old patterns. The need for external confirmation. The belief that my own experience wasn’t real until someone else signed off on it.
That pattern is gone now. I am unrecognizable to it.
Here is what healing actually looks like without it.
This Is What Free Actually Feels Like, and Holy Shit
It looks like waking up on a random weekday with nothing special on the calendar and feeling excited about absolutely nothing in particular. Not excited about a plan. Not excited about a person. Just excited to be alive inside a day that belongs entirely to me. No chest tightening before my eyes are open. No dread inventory running before I’ve had a single thought. Just awake and okay and genuinely glad about it.
That’s the whole fucking miracle some mornings. Just that.
It looks like a completely clean conscience. Every single decision I make now runs through a filter I built for myself out of a year of wreckage and excavation and hard-won clarity. Will this give me stress? Anxiety? Regret? Resentment? Will it light my nervous system on fire the way I used to let things do constantly because I was too afraid to say no or speak up or tell the truth? Is it in integrity with my morals, my values, my ethics, my manifesto? Is it aligned with living my amends? Is it emotionally and chemically sober? Is it honest? Is it actually something I want to do, or am I just filling a slot on my calendar because I can’t stand to be alone with myself?
That last one used to wreck me. I spent years saying yes to things I had zero genuine interest in just to be around people, just to form any kind of connection, just to not have to sit in the quiet with myself. I walked away from the Wild Buffalo. I walked away from a social platform I had spent years on, doing activities I was never actually passionate about, chasing connections that never once turned into anything real or lasting or healthy. I was terrified of my own company and I dressed it up as being social. I was busy and hollow and I mistook one for the other for a very long time.
That’s over. That guy is so unrecognizable to me now I almost can’t believe he was real.
And the pattern I am most proud of breaking, the one that caused more damage than almost anything else, is avoidance. Not speaking up. Swallowing my struggles instead of naming them. Staying quiet about my wants and my needs and my boundaries and my consent around how things escalated because I was convinced that saying the true thing out loud would make people leave. Performing okayness while falling apart completely on the inside. That pattern is gone. I don’t do that shit anymore. Not once. Not even close.
If the answer to any question in that filter points toward a problem, I simply choose not to do it. My conscience will remain clean. Period. Forever. Non-negotiable.
It looks like being free in ways I forgot were possible. I can stay out late. I can blow up my whole evening on a whim. I can do nothing at all and feel zero guilt about it. On Tuesday a cute woman gave me a cute look and I flirted back and felt completely alive doing it. Wednesday, same thing, different woman. Harmless. Safe. Fun. No agenda, no spiral, no wreckage afterward. Just a human being enjoying being alive in a body in the world.
That used to be impossible for me. Now it’s just Tuesday and Wednesday.
It looks like cockroach energy. I am not going to dress this up. I got demolished. My identity collapsed five days after my relationship ended when I finally saw clearly every toxic pattern I had been running on. A twenty-five year career ended. I lost almost everyone at once. I have been living with treatment resistant depression my entire adult life. And I am still here, more alive than I have been in years, thriving in ways that should not be statistically possible given what I walked through to get here. You cannot kill this. I have tried every which way to destroy myself and I am still standing, still growing, still choosing, still free. Unstoppable. Undeniable. Cockroach energy forever.
Nobody is waiting for me to account for my time. Nobody needs a report. And the person who used to demand that report most viciously was me. That asshole is gone.
Alan Watts said the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. He also said that unless you can live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. He said there is no other reality than present reality, so that even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly. I have that tattooed on my hand. You only live once. Not as a slogan for doing stupid shit. As a genuine commitment to not wasting the finite and completely unknown number of heartbeats I have left on things that haven’t happened yet, on fears that live only in my head, on grief over people who chose to stay stuck.
I told a new friend recently: if we are worrying about death, or anything really, the present moment is flying past us and we are missing out on what we actually have right now. I am not going to waste my life on shit that hasn’t happened. Living in the now. To the fullest. Tomorrow is never guaranteed.
That’s not a philosophy anymore. It’s just how I live. It’s what love looks like when it finally stops apologizing for itself.
What I Told the People at the Clinic and Holy Shit Did It Feel Good to Say
I hadn’t seen the staff at my VNS clinic in about a year. They love me. They accept me unconditionally. And when I walked in today they saw the same guy. Same beard. Same glasses. Same style. Same haircut. Everything on the outside exactly the same, minus almost thirty pounds I lost through taking care of my body, finally, out of genuine love for it rather than punishment or neglect.
They had no idea what had happened inside. That’s the thing about this kind of transformation. It doesn’t come with a neon sign. From the outside I look like the same Tukayote who walked in a year ago. Which, when I really sit with it, explains a lot about why people who are biased and insecure in their own stuff are still seeing what they think they’re seeing. They can’t see inside. They never could. They are looking at the same beard and the same glasses and running their same tired story and calling it perception. They have no idea they’re looking at someone completely unrecognizable.
But the people at the clinic asked how I was doing and I got to give them the real answer for the first time in my life.
The last year was fucking wild.
I left my IT career for good. My relationship exploded. Five days after the break I lost my entire identity when I finally saw clearly all the toxic patterns I had been living in. My whole life collapsed. I lost almost everyone. And I know how that sounds.
It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Besides the VNS implant. Both of them gave me my life back.
And then I got the news I had been quietly dreading for months. My portion of the research trial ends later this year and I had been carrying this low-grade terror that the implant was going to go dark and I would have to have surgery to remove the thing that helped save my life. Instead I found out today it has somewhere between five and seven years of battery life remaining. And when it eventually runs out, the replacement surgery is minor. Not the thing I feared. Not even close.
I stood there for a second and just let that land.
And then I thought: with the skills and the resources and the community I have now, combined with sobriety and not living a toxic, stressful, soul-crushing life anymore, I may not even need it by the time the battery runs out. That sentence was unthinkable a year ago. That’s how far I’ve come.
Today I am a completely different person than the last time they saw me. I am living a life worth living. I am not hating myself. I am not hollow. I am not walking around soaked in shame pretending to be functional. I am full of love for myself. I haven’t repeated a single old pattern once. I am sleeping. I am dreaming again. I look forward to every single day. I feel gratitude for things I used to not even notice.
I am so unrecognizable to my old self.
And I am never going back.
Watching their faces while I said all of that. That’s what the finish line actually looks like. Not someone being forced to admit something. Not validation from people who were never going to give it anyway. Just people who genuinely love you getting to see that you made it. That you’re okay. That you’re love walking around in a human body, finally free.
The People Who Love Me Are Out There Running Their Mouths. Thank God.
Here is how you know the transformation is real.
The people who have done their own work, the ones who are emotionally healthy and secure and genuinely growing, those people are out there talking about me when I’m not in the room. Not tearing me down. Building me up. I found out recently that people in my life who love me are telling people close to them all the things they see in me, all the things they love, all the ways I show up. And those people came back and told me what they heard.
I was almost speechless. Me. Almost speechless.
Not because I don’t believe it. I do. I feel it. But to know that the things people say to my face are the exact same things they say when I’m not there to hear it, that’s a different kind of thing entirely. That’s not performance. That’s not social courtesy. That’s just the truth about who I am now traveling from person to person without me in the room to manage it or explain it or defend it. That’s what unrecognizable looks like when it starts to have a reputation.
Alan Watts said you’re under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago. The people who love me took one look at who I became and decided to tell everyone.
The people who couldn’t handle it ghosted. Or worse.
The scoreboard is right there. I don’t have to say another fucking word about it.
I Gave Myself Permission to Be Free as Hell and I’m Never Giving It Back
Free.
Not free like reckless. Free like sovereign. Free like my life is mine and I get to live it exactly the way I want to and I don’t owe anyone a performance of my healing to prove it’s real.
The old me needed to earn everything. Earn love. Earn space. Earn the right to exist without apologizing for taking up room. Run himself ragged trying to be useful enough that no one would leave. Swallow every want and every need and every true thing because saying it out loud felt too dangerous. Stay quiet. Stay small. Stay available. And they left anyway. They always leave when that’s the deal you’re running on. Because that deal is not love. It’s a transaction dressed up as love and it collapses eventually under its own weight.
I gave myself permission to stop earning it. To just be it. To walk into a room and take up space without a resume. To want things. To feel things. To say no. To say yes just because I want to. To walk away without explaining why. To speak up the first time instead of the last time. To be loved without performing for it. That’s what it means to finally become love instead of chasing it.
That’s the permission nobody hands you. You have to give it to yourself. And it turns out you could have done that the whole fucking time.
The transformation got so real it stopped needing defending. That’s the part I couldn’t have explained to you before I lived it. You don’t get loud about it. You don’t argue it. You just keep living it until one day you’re standing in a clinic telling people who love you that you made it and the proof is just standing there in the room with you, thirty pounds lighter, completely unrecognizable, and more full of love than you have ever been in your entire life.
No finish line. No dramatic reveal. No one forced to admit anything.
Just free. Just alive. Just love.
I am Tukayote.
I am unrecognizable.
I am love.
And I don’t need you to believe it anymore.
