Tukayote Helianthus: Unkillable
RECOVERY, EMOTION, DANCE, PHOTOS, AND TUNES.
NO ANESTHESIA. NO BULLSHIT.
Tag: unconditional acceptance
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I’m living with an open heart and solid boundaries—and it feels really damn good. This piece is about choosing joy over fear, curiosity over conformity, and ethical connection over codependency. It explores relationship anarchy, sobriety, self-trust, and the subtle art of the Irish goodbye as a way of protecting peace, staying aligned, and keeping the…
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I didn’t quit drinking and magically fix my life. I quit drinking and finally saw how overfurnished it was. Sobriety turned the lights on, and what I found was wall-to-wall clutter. Substances, work, relationships, patterns, identities, and coping strategies I had been stepping over for years. Clearing them out wasn’t graceful. It was slow, messy,…
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Grief doesn’t disappear when you ignore it, it waits. Inspired by the way buffalo run straight into storms to get through them faster, this is a story about choosing to feel instead of numbing, crying instead of avoiding, and facing loss head-on. From a small, unexpected purchase to years of buried grief finally released, this…
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For most of my life, I confused love with sacrifice and caretaking with connection. I believed that being useful, reliable, and endlessly patient was the price of intimacy—and I paid it without question. Over time, I lost my identity, my boundaries, and my sense of self. This piece is an honest examination of the patterns…
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A quiet moment on the beach turns into a reckoning with grief, not just for people lost, but for the version of myself that disappeared with sobriety. This is about mourning an old identity, honoring what it gave me, and choosing a truer life without pretending the grief ever fully ends.
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Zero-Return Recovery isn’t a rebrand. It’s a controlled burn. I didn’t drift away or take a break, I deleted everything, cut the cords, and walked straight into the wreckage of my own patterns. On purpose. I burned bridges to stop myself from going back to what kept hurting me. No negotiating with addiction. No romanticizing…
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This week, I finally stopped arguing with permanence. Not the things I can change—I know that dance well—but the things I can’t. Chronic conditions. Lifelong diagnoses. Bodies and brains that don’t magically “turn around” if I just try harder. In IFS terms, I hit a trailhead where perfection, fear, shame, and denial were all standing…
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Today, I hit a trailhead I couldn’t ignore: my fear of uncertainty. In IFS, it showed up as a very young part—quiet, tense, always bracing—using denial as protection. I’ve spent years fighting diagnoses, circumstances, and history, thinking resistance was strength. It isn’t. Acceptance doesn’t mean approval or giving up; it means stopping the exhausting war…
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Six years ago, that smile wasn’t real—I was flat, numb, and buried under a stack of psychiatric medications that dulled everything human in me. I was surviving, not living. Hospitalizations, psychosis, loss after loss followed. Then, unexpectedly, a research trial changed the trajectory. A Vagus Nerve Stimulator didn’t save me overnight—but it gave me a…