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The LASERS FIRED

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There’s a moment in recovery nobody warns you about. When the lasers fire through the air and it’s impossible to ignore the piercing bright light.

Not the rock bottom. Not the first sober morning. Not even the grief. It’s the moment you realize the thing you’ve been running toward was you the whole time. A version of you that stopped lying, stopped numbing, stopped performing, and started owning every single thing. I didn’t get there in a blink. I crawled. But I got there. And what I found on the other side has been a sacred gift that has truly changed everything in my life.

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It’s Truly Amazing

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Aerosmith nailed it in their hit song, Amazing.

I kept the right ones out and let the wrong ones in.

Yeah. I did exactly that. For years.

I numbed everything with alcohol, kratom, cannabis, and countless other drugs. I kept people around who enabled the worst versions of me and pushed away anyone who asked me to look at myself honestly. I called it surviving. It was just slow drowning with better lighting.

There were times in my life when I was goin’ insane, tryna walk through the pain.

I’ve written about the metaphorical bus crash. The psychiatric spiral and hospitalizations. The psychosis. The horrible medication changes. The high-conflict relationships I have had several times. The moment I blew up a relationship I loved in a split second of panic and avoidance and made someone I cared about homeless in the process.

I wasn’t walking through pain. I was letting it drive.

I was so sick and tired of livin’ a lie. I was wishin’ that I would die.

I know what that place feels like. I’ve lived there. I’ve also built elaborate structures of performance and avoidance just to keep the real stuff from surfacing. The masks were exhausting. The patterns were killing me softly and loudly and in every way in between.

With the blink of an eye, you finally see the light.

It wasn’t a blink for me. More like crawling toward a window with busted kneecaps and finally getting close enough to feel the warmth on my face.

But it happened.

The grief lodge. The pier at sunset and a stranger who held me when everything inside me broke open. The IFS sessions where I finally met the parts of me I’d been running from my whole life. The moment I stopped explaining my patterns and started owning them completely.

I’m feeling very free from that business now.

And then recently, one of those moments where everything about many people in and out of my life crystallized in a matter of minutes.

People from my present and past showed their true colors again in a way I couldn’t miss. A performance I’d experienced before so many times, and I just finally had my eyes open wide enough to see it clearly.

These people acted predictably and unpredictably, again, and I gave them absolutely nothing, again.

They broke my trust.

They tried their best to hurt me.

Despite what they chose to do, I did not react at all. Not an acknowledgment. Not one second of my energy or attention.

Nothing.

I did what I originally intended to do with my life, which was to love being myself. Sober. Present. Unbothered. I have enjoyed every single moment of my life, regardless of their behaviors, to the fullest, and without any filters. None of it has changed my ability to love being myself.

For months I’d been carrying the anxiety of what it would feel like when some people from my past showed up uninvited in my life. My nervous system had been running hot around things I used to enjoy without a second thought. Their mind games carefully designed to keep me off balance, anxious, and second-guessing myself. Inserting themselves into my life in ways that were impossible to ignore. Some people I was close with later violated my trust and acted unpredictably.

I almost let it work. There were things I avoided. Places I didn’t go. Plans I changed. All because of the low hum of dread that came with not knowing what their next move was going to be.

In that moment and in the days following, I discovered a network of people, I was in association with and had previously been in association with, using the trust I had given them to access information about me that I had not consented to give them.

I have been and continue to be followed and even stalked in-person and online by some of these people and their accomplices, many of whom were people I was still trusting or had once trusted. When I saw the light of this network of people tailing me, I denied all access to those who I had not already denied access to. I didn’t acknowledge or respond to those who I had already denied access to.

If and when I find more people doing this behavior, I will deny their access as well.

This wasn’t my first time dealing with and tolerating these types of people and these behaviors. It wasn’t my first time letting these types of people control my life and imprison me with fear.

Some of these people have claimed that they want nothing to do with me and are still seeking information about me and tailing me. It is incredibly ironic and really doesn’t make any logical sense.

I sincerely wish these people would take just 10% of that harmful energy they are directing towards their continued obsession of me and my present life, and put it towards something that improves their suffering and/or the suffering of humanity. It would drastically change their lives and the lives of everyone around them for the better.

Despite the harmful behaviors these people are choosing, I sincerely wish for them to find joy and happiness, for them to have a life to be filled with love, and that all of their suffering comes to a peaceful end.

I love each and every one of these people, and everyone in the world, unconditionally, no matter how they have or continue to treat me. I am not taking it personally because their behaviors are a result of their traumas and suffering. If they weren’t suffering somehow, they wouldn’t do these things, so I am extending to them grace and wishes for a better future.

Well, that’s over now.

Because I finally saw clearly what I was actually dealing with. Not people processing things with integrity and moving their lives forward in a healthy respectable way. People running games. People being petty and putting on a show they choreographed just for me, and it was a show that I didn’t buy tickets for.

And the moment I saw it for what it was, really saw it, something in my nervous system just… released. The anxiety that had been living in my chest and gut for months went quiet. The hypervigilance dialed down. My body finally got the message my brain had been trying to send for a long time.

Absolutely none of these people have access to my peace anymore. They do not have access to me and my emotions. That access is now completely and permanently denied.

I’m done denying people’s true colors when they show them to me. I don’t care how amazing some people once were to me once. When they show me who they really are, I believe it. I have compassion for them and the suffering behind their behaviors.

And each time they show me again, I believe that too. Even if they become charming and switch it up, I still believe their harmful versions. Even when they reappear in crisis or need something from me, I believe their harmful versions. And I continue to deny their access when they are emotionally unsafe with me, because I have to protect myself.

Bottom line, I deny their access to protect myself from their harmful behaviors.

Recently, I finally lived those words instead of just writing them.

Access denied to every single one of them. Buh-bye.

Not with anger. Not with drama. Just with complete and total indifference. Which, if you’ve ever dealt with people who desperately want your attention or information that is not theirs to have, you know that not responding is the most powerful response you can possibly give them.

I gave and will continue to give them nothing.

I’m done changing my plans. Done shrinking my world. Done avoiding things. Done playing games I never agreed to enter. Their mind games only work if I participate.

I’m out.

That’s what seeing the light actually looks like. Not a dramatic spiritual awakening. Standing in your own power so completely that someone else’s choices just slide right off.

I am removing the fuel, oxygen, and heat from the big fires they keep trying to light underneath me.

For good.

Please don’t forget

The light at the end of the tunnel may be you.

This line wrecks me every time.

Because nobody told me that the thing I was running away from for so long, and now I am running toward was just… the real me. A version of me that stopped lying. That stopped numbing. That ended years of toxic patterns. That stopped blaming and started owning. That stayed in integrity and behaved respectfully even when being pushed to his limits. That cut out every person and behavior that wasn’t healthy. That chose sobriety not once but thousands of times, one craving at a time.

I’m not at the end of anything. I’m in the middle of the most important work of my life. But I can see where I’m going now. And for the first time in a long time, I’m not afraid of what I’ll find when I get there. I am finally starting to see who I really am when I am no longer being what everyone else wants me to be, solely for their benefit and pleasure. I am no longer losing myself in the process.

If you’re in the dark right now, desperate and exhausted and out of ideas, I’m saying a prayer for you tonight.

The light at the end of the tunnel may be you.

It was always me.

It can be you too.

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