The View From The Top of The Mountain I’ve Been Climbing
It is gray and quiet in Bellingham this Sunday morning. A gentle Pacific Northwest drizzle, the kind that doesn’t storm at you, just settles in like it owns the place. I woke up at 10AM after falling asleep at 4AM the night before, my body still unwinding from something so beautiful it refused to let me close my eyes quickly. There were tears on my face before I went to sleep. Good ones.
And then I woke up to a text. A veteran was had been in crisis. They were at the ICU. Come now.
So I went.
This post is about what happened between those two moments. About a Saturday in Seattle that I will carry in my body for the rest of my life, and a Sunday morning in a veteran’s apartment that made me understand, in a way I never have before, exactly what it means that I am still here.
This is the view from the top of the mountain I have been climbing for years. I didn’t fully see it until this weekend.
The Artist Who Changed My Life Before I Even Knew His Name
Before I tell you about Saturday night, I need to tell you about a song.
In 2018, an electronic music artist named INZO released a track called “Overthinker.” It’s built around a speech by philosopher Alan Watts, laid over chest-caving bass and synth lines that flutter through the air like something you can’t quite name but immediately feel in your sternum. I heard it and I heard Alan Watts for the first time, and something cracked open in me that I didn’t have language for yet.
Watts was talking about thinking. About what happens when you confuse the map for the territory. About how civilized people have become crazy and self-destructive because they’ve lost touch with reality by living so far inside their own skulls.
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts.
So he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.
I was living in a world of illusions. I just didn’t know it yet.
And all so-called civilized peoples have increasingly become crazy and self-destructive.
Because through excessive thinking, they have lost touch with reality.
We confuse signs with the real world.
Yeah. That one landed somewhere specific.
And a great occasion is somehow spoiled for us unless photographed.
To read about it the next day in the newspaper is oddly more fun for us than the original event.
This is a disaster.
Alan Watts said that decades ago and somehow perfectly described the era of social media. The way we caption our pain instead of feeling it. The way we perform our joy instead of living in it. I was doing both for years. Performing presence while being completely absent from my own life.
INZO has another song called “Angst.” Also Alan Watts. Also bass that hits you somewhere between your ribcage and your spine.
So I am worried.
And I ought not to worry.
But because I can’t stop worrying, I’m worried because I worry.
And you see where that could lead to.
That is what we call anxiety.
No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that’s gonna happen.
God. Yeah. That one too.
All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.
Every ounce of darkness I was projecting onto the world around me was my own interior condition wearing a costume. All of the darkness being projected onto me from the world was their shadows trying to emerge. The chaos I kept finding was projection. I was generating it from the inside and then wondering why everything kept catching fire. Alan Watts said it through the music. I heard it. And eventually, slowly, I started to understand it.
These two songs are the reason I know who Alan Watts is. And Alan Watts is a significant part of the reason I understand myself well enough to be sitting here writing this today. Alan Watts and INZO have been one of many things that have changed my life in so many ways. I love EDM, and it isn’t just for the bass drops and intensity, its because it speaks to my soul on the deepest levels. INZO didn’t know he was handing me a lifeline when he sampled those speeches. But he was.
If you’ve never heard either of these songs, stop here, they are below, and go listen to them before you read another word. Then come back.
I am unrecognizable from the man who first heard those tracks. And I am love. That’s the whole story. Everything else is just the evidence.
Fourteen Hours With My Person
I have a platonic love.
I know that word combination makes some people’s brains glitch out. We’ve been socialized to believe that love between two people who aren’t fucking each other and aren’t romantically entangled is somehow a lesser or suspicious thing. It’s not. It is one of the most pure and sacred forms of connection I have ever experienced in my life. And I have been in it for 4.5 months without escalating it, without rebounding into it, without making it into something it isn’t just because my nervous system is used to doing exactly that.
That is not a small thing. For me, historically, it is a massive fucking thing.
We spent 14 hours together on Saturday. Brunch first, because brunch is sacred and so is she. And then we drove to Seattle for our first big adventure together.
Here’s what I want you to understand about the whole day. I felt happy. I felt joy. I felt unconditional love. I felt connected. I felt peace. I felt calm. I felt grounded. I felt accepted. I felt chosen. I felt vulnerable and safe at the same time, which is not something I have experienced in connection with another person very often in my life. I felt seen and heard. I felt secure. I felt present in the moment the entire time, not drifting into the past, not running calculations about the future, just actually there, in the room, in the moment, in my body.
I didn’t have to perform. I didn’t have to repeat the patterns of my past to make it all happen or to secure a future. I didn’t have to worry about or manage her experience. I didn’t have to plan every second of the night just to wow and woo her. I didn’t have to feel pressured to do anything or be someone I’m not just to put a smile on her face, feel loved by her, or keep her attention. I didn’t have to escalate our connection to guarantee more of it.
I could just be myself. She could just be herself. We could share physical touch without it needing to be more than just that. Neither of us has an agenda or hidden expectations for what we have. Neither of us is in the dark wondering about each other’s wants, needs, or feelings. We both value each other and what we have, and we both understand that tomorrow hasn’t and may never happen. We don’t live in our pasts. We don’t live in the unknown future.
We both live fully in the moment.
It doesn’t have to be a big experience like Saturday to feel all of that. It never will have to be. I feel it even when we have a simple coffee together. Neither of us needs extravagant gestures or big nights out to feel connected. We both show up as our best selves. We both bring out the best in each other. Always.
I believe we have known each other at an atomic level since the universe began. Through a series of events spanning billions of years, our molecules are connected once again. That’s not poetry for the sake of being pretty. That’s how it actually feels. The ease of it. The recognition of it. The complete absence of the grinding anxiety that used to underlie every connection I had with another person.
Someone once told me that every single thing that has ever happened in your entire life, and the existence of everything as we know it, leads to the exact moment you are in today. It’s wild to think about, but it’s true. Every brutal decision. Every hospitalization. Every morning I chose to try again. Every pattern I ended. Every time I said never again and held it. All of it leading to a Saturday in March, standing in a room with someone I love, completely sober, completely present, completely alive.
This is what unrecognizable looks like from the inside. And I am love. This is what that looks like in a person.
WAMU Theater.
10,000 People.
My First Completely Sober Rave.
Let me paint the room for you.
The WAMU Theater in Seattle. A massive venue, industrial ceiling and ductwork stretching up into the dark above a crowd of somewhere around 10,000 people, all of them giving themselves over to the same music at the same time. INZO on stage doing what he does, which is making you feel things you didn’t plan to feel that night. The stage lit in deep purple, red lasers cutting the length of the entire room in perfect parallel lines above our heads, close enough that you felt like you could reach up and touch them. A massive video wall behind him cycling through visuals that had no name but hit exactly right. Bass that you don’t hear so much as absorb, moving through the floor into the bottoms of your feet and up through your whole body before your ears even register it. The collective surrender of a crowd that is fully in, all feeling the same thing, all trusting the music to take them somewhere they needed to go.
And me. Completely sober. 82 days without any substance of any kind as of this morning. My third big rave ever. My first one completely clean.
I want to tell you what sobriety did to that room.
The lights were clearer. Brighter. Not overwhelming, just more real. More present. Every color had a sharpness to it that I had never experienced in a room like that before. The audio spectrum was richer, more textured, every layer of the sound distinct and followable at the same time. I could feel the bass differently sober. Not just as a wall of pressure, but as something with architecture, with intention, with movement I could actually track. The visuals landed differently when there was nothing between my eyes and what I was seeing except my own nervous system, awake and fully operational and not numbed or filtered through anything.
I could smell the room. The fog machine haze. The crowd. I could feel the specific temperature shift when the music dropped. I noticed the moment everyone around me collectively exhaled when a long build finally broke.
I was actually there. Actually in my body. Actually feeling every single thing.
Time moved differently too. Not racing toward the end or white-knuckling toward last call. The night had a shape and I was inside it and it was mine.
The old me would have needed something before the doors even opened. Would have been managing his intoxication level all night, staying in the window, not too gone, not getting sober, running that logistics operation in parallel with everything else happening. Would have woken up the next day with holes where the best parts of the night should be.
I woke up the next day remembering everything. In full, vivid, sensory detail. I have video and photos of the night. They’re beautiful. But they are a fraction of what I remember. The photos don’t have the bass in them. They don’t have the cold air outside, or the specific feeling of my person next to me when the music dropped, or the way my chest opened up when the lasers fired across the length of that room. The photos are evidence. The memory is the thing itself.
Time to wake up.
That’s what Alan Watts said through the speaker system at the end of “Overthinker.” I was awake. Completely, uncomplicatedly, beautifully awake.
I am unrecognizable from the person who needed substances to feel safe in a crowd that size. And I am love. That’s why I was there. That’s why any of it was possible.
When INZO Played Overthinker Into Crazy Into Angst and Cracked Me Wide Open
Toward the end of the set, he did it.
He played “Overthinker” and went straight into “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley, and then into “Angst,” all three woven into a single extended moment that felt like it lasted much longer than it did because I was completely present for every second of it.
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts.
The crowd knew it the second the first notes hit. You could feel it move through the room, that collective recognition, that specific energy of ten thousand people realizing at the same moment that they’re about to hear something that matters to them. Hands went up. The bass began to build underneath the speech, slow and inevitable, the way a tide comes in.
I didn’t record it all because I wanted to experience it without holding my phone.
I remember when I lost my mind.
There was something so pleasant about that place.
Even your emotions have an echo in so much space.
Gnarls Barkley, sung by a crowd of thousands in a room bathed in bubbles and red light with lasers splitting the air overhead. I have been crazy. The diagnosed, involuntarily-committed, sedated-with-two-syringes kind of crazy. And I have been the kind of crazy that doesn’t show up on paper until everything has already burned down. Both kinds. Multiple times. And standing there in that crowd hearing those words and feeling the weight of them and the humor of them and the release of them all at the same time, something moved in me that I wasn’t expecting.
Does that make me crazy? Possibly.
And then “Angst.”
All that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.
And that is what we call anxiety.
And then you think, can I observe the thinker thinking the thoughts?
So I am worried.
And I ought not to worry.
But because I can’t stop worrying, I’m worried because I worry.
No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that’s gonna happen.
Standing in that crowd, with my person next to me, with lasers above my head and that bass moving through my chest and ten thousand humans around me throwing hand-hearts into the air all surrendering to the same truth at the same moment, something broke open in me that came from nowhere and everywhere at once.
I was smiling ear to ear, when tears began to start rolling down my face.
Not the polite kind. The real kind, the kind that comes from somewhere so deep in your body that you don’t know it’s coming until it’s already happening. Tears falling out of my eyes in the middle of ten thousand people and I didn’t give a single shit because the feeling was too important to manage.
It was a realization. Not a thought. A realization the way a bone knows when it’s been broken, not because you reasoned it out but because the information arrived at a cellular level.
I am really fucking alive.
Not as a platitude. Not as a thing people say. As an actual, breathtaking, physical fact. I am alive. I am in this room. I am sober. I am holding my person, and she is holding me. I am feeling this music without anything between me and it. And I am here because I made choices. Specific ones. Hard ones. The kind that didn’t feel like choices at the time because they were really more like surrenders, surrenders to the truth of what I had become and what I was capable of becoming instead.
When I said never again to intoxicated psychiatric emergencies in the ER.
When I quit drinking in January 2024.
When I left the job that was destroying my sanity.
When I ended the long-term relationship I had lost myself completely inside of.
When my identity collapsed five days later and I looked at myself in the wreckage and said, not one more pattern. Not one. Not ever again. And meant it. And then held it. Four and a half months and not a single pattern repeated. None.
When I said goodbye to cannabis on January 3rd, 2025 and became fully sober as an adult for the first time in my life. Each day I wake up is a new record.
Every one of those decisions was a brick in the foundation of the room I was standing in on Saturday night. Every hard, miserable, lonely choice was a rung on the ladder that got me to that view.
I could finally see the view from the top of the mountain I have been climbing so hard, for so long, and it was fucking breathtaking.
After the mashup ended, INZO went into slower songs. The energy in the room shifted, that specific softness that settles over a crowd when the music asks them to stop moving and just feel. Everyone on the floor was holding each other close. My platonic love and I held hands and wrapped ourselves around each other and just melted into the present moment together. The entire place was full of love. Not the performed kind. Not the kind people put on for photographs. The real kind, the kind that happens when ten thousand people and their nervous systems all surrender to the same moment at the same time.
It was fucking magical.
I got home at 2AM. I watched the video of the mashup with tears rolling down my face again. I watched it several more times. It was the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes. Because those digital versions only capture a small fraction of what I remember of the night. They simply don’t have my senses in them. They don’t have the feeling of my person next to me or the specific quality of that bass at that volume in that room. The photos are evidence. The memory is the thing itself.
It’s not material, that’s just an idea.
Reality is.
The point cannot be explained in words.
Watts was right. I cannot fully explain what happened in that room. I can only tell you it was one of the most emotionally beautiful moments of my entire life. And I can tell you I was there for all of it.
I am unrecognizable from every version of myself that couldn’t imagine standing in that room feeling that way. And I am love. That is why those tears came. Love recognizing itself in the life it built.
The Hospital.
The Apartment.
The Piece of Paper on the Wall.
Sunday morning. Gray, gentle rain outside. I got a text asking me to join the executive director of Growing Veterans and another veteran peer supporter at the ICU at St. Joe’s hospital. A veteran had experienced a mental health crisis on Friday. The details were sparse. My gut told me it was someone I knew from the weekly coffee check-ins I attend. And being that he was in the ICU, my heart sank immediately. This wasn’t going to be a warm fuzzy situation.
If I had been hungover this morning, I couldn’t have gone. Full stop. That’s not hypothetical. That’s just the math.
When we got to the hospital, we found out the veteran had been discharged the night before. Nobody had been informed. Not us. Not his family. Not anyone. Barely 24 hours after he stopped breathing and almost died in an ambulance on the way to the ER, the hospital handed him discharge papers and sent him home.
No follow-up plan. No therapy appointment. No supports in place. Nothing.
We drove to his apartment and knocked. No answer. We had keys and we used them.
We found him alone in his room. He didn’t want us there. He was sober, which meant he was feeling everything sobriety forces you to feel in the immediate aftermath of a crisis. The guilt. The shame. The confusion. The physical wreckage of what he’d put his body through. The emotional weight of everything that brought him to that moment. No appetite. No one with him. The days after a psychiatric crisis are some of the most dangerous days in the whole arc of it, because you are detoxing from substances and medications and a massive neurochemical disruption while simultaneously holding the heaviest emotional load of your recent life. A feedback loop from hell. Your brain chemistry is a dumpster fire and your emotions are right there with it, and not eating makes everything dramatically worse. And they sent him home into all of that.
Alone.
We got him up. Got him into the living room. Ordered food. Sat with him. Did peer support the way peer support is supposed to work, which is not from a textbook or a clinical framework but from lived experience. From having walked that exact road and knowing how the shoes feel on your feet. We have all walked it. That is what Growing Veterans is building. Not book-smart clinicians who have studied the trenches from a safe distance. People who have been in them. People who know what it smells like down there.
He went from telling us to get the fuck out of his apartment to smiling and laughing before we left. That’s not magic. That’s connection. That is what it does when you offer it from a genuine place.
On the wall of his apartment, there was a piece of paper with words written in a child’s handwriting.
I love dad.
I stood there and felt it hit every part of me at once. His kids don’t know what almost happened this weekend. They almost became fatherless on Friday night and they don’t have the language or the context to understand how close the margin was. They just know they love their dad. And they wrote it down and put it on the wall.
And I thought about my daughters.
Because I have been in his shoes. Not once. Many times. At least thirteen hospitalizations over the years. The last catastrophic one in November 2023, which I have written about here and won’t recreate in full, but the short version is that I arrived at St. Joe’s drunk, high, psychotic, and suicidal, fought the security guards, had to be sedated with two syringes simultaneously, one in each arm, and was discharged about twelve hours later with essentially nothing in place. They let me go. I still don’t fully understand why.
The staff at St. Joe’s ER and psych ward know me well. I used to be a frequent flyer. That was a yearly thing for a while. It’s been 2.5 years since I walked in that way. It is not a coincidence. It is a direct consequence of choosing sobriety and choosing recovery and choosing, over and over and over, to stop breaking my own heart and everyone else’s.
I should not be alive. I say that with complete seriousness and zero drama. I have a large cockroach tattoo on my back, with the word “unkillable” embedded into it. Cockroaches survive things that should kill them. So do I. But surviving is not the same as a guarantee, and I have been close enough to the edge enough times to know that the margin between me being here and me being a statistic has been thin.
Very thin.
When I walked out of that apartment on Sunday afternoon, the weight of all of it hit me at once. The joy of Saturday night on one side. The gravity of Sunday morning on the other. Both of them completely real. Neither one canceling the other out.
That is what recovery looks like from the inside. Not a clean arc. Not a before and after. The weight and the beauty, living side by side, informing each other.
I am unrecognizable from the man who was a frequent flyer at that ER. And I am love. I’m alive to know that. And so is the veteran we visited this morning, because trained peer supporters filled the gaps that the mental health system left wide open, again.
The System Is Broken and People Are Dying Because of It
I want to say this plainly because it needs to be said plainly.
The mental health care system failed this veteran. It discharged him less than 24 hours after he stopped breathing, with no plan, no follow-up, no notification to his support network. That is not an isolated failure. That is a systemic pattern. And it kills people. It kills veterans at a rate that should be a national emergency and mostly gets treated as a statistic in a footnote.
It failed me too. Multiple times. Twelve hours after one of the worst psychiatric emergencies of my life, discharge paperwork and a have a nice day. I have asked myself many times since getting sober what would have happened if I hadn’t had people around me who cared enough to show up even when I was at my most unloveable. I don’t have a comfortable answer.
The gap between what the system provides and what people actually need to survive a crisis is enormous. Trained peer supporters are filling that gap right now, imperfectly, with tremendous heart and without nearly enough institutional support. What Growing Veterans is doing in this community is literally saving lives. I can testify to that. I watched it happen this morning.
The veteran needed wraparound intensive mental health care. What he got was a piece of paper and an unlocked front door. What he actually got, the thing that is keeping him alive today, was a peer supporter who showed up on Friday before EMS and kicked his door in. Peer supporters who showed up Sunday morning with food and time and no agenda except making sure he was okay. That is not how it should have to work. But it is how it works right now, and the people doing it are the reason the margin didn’t close on Friday night.
If you want to understand why I show up for this work, it’s because I know how the shoes fit. Not because I read about it. Because I wore them until they fell apart. Every medication I found in that apartment, other than the one he overdosed on, I have lived experience with. I know the system from inside the system. And that knowledge is the whole point.
One must live. We need to survive. We must go on.
Alan Watts said that too. He was right. But surviving requires people in the gap. And right now those people are peer supporters showing up on short notice on Sunday mornings because they got sober and made themselves available.
If you are a veteran in crisis, or know a veteran in crisis, please call 988 or text 838255 immediately.
Growing Veterans tackles the suicide epidemic by combining agriculture with veteran peer-support and community engagement. To donate your time or financial resources to Growing Veterans, click here or on the image below:
What It Means That I’m Still Here
After I left the veteran’s apartment and got some food and sat alone with everything that had happened over the previous 20 hours, I just let myself feel it. All of it at once. The joy and the weight and the gratitude and the grief and the bewilderment and the full, bone-deep understanding of what it means that I am still here.
If I had died in any of the crises I have survived, I would never have danced in that room on Saturday night. I would never have known my platonic love. I wouldn’t have my daughters brightening my world. I wouldn’t know what it feels like to love myself. I would be a statistic. I would have left a pile of emotional rubble behind for everyone who loved me, the same way the veteran’s kids were almost left holding rubble this weekend without even knowing what had happened.
The piece of paper on that wall that said I love dad holds everything. It holds the veteran’s life and his children’s love and the nearness of what almost happened and the reason any of this matters. It holds my own daughters and every version of that piece of paper they never had to write but almost did. Too many times to count.
I don’t waste my heartbeats anymore. That is not a figure of speech. I mean it as a literal description of how I move through my days. I tell my kids I love them every day because tomorrow simply is not guaranteed and I have more evidence of that than most people my age. I show up for peer support calls on short notice on Sunday mornings because I was sober and available and someone needed a person in their corner. I go to shows and feel the bass move through my chest and cry in the middle of crowds of ten thousand people without apology because I am alive and feeling things is the whole point.
It’s not all sadness. It’s a lot of gratitude woven throughout all of it. It’s bewilderment. It’s a mix of everything. It’s important information. It’s something I need to feel and sit with. It’s the lesson. It’s the work. It’s the recovery.
Everything I love about my life right now, every single thing that made Saturday night the most beautiful night I’ve had in years, exists because I chose recovery. Because I said never again and held it. Because I got sober and stayed sober and did the hard, unglamorous, daily work of becoming someone who could actually be here for all of it.
The late Alan Watts also said this:
Time to wake up.
We are so tied up in our minds that we’ve lost our senses. Time to wake up.
I woke up. That’s the whole story. I woke up and I chose to stay awake. Every single day. And this weekend showed me, in the most vivid way it possibly could, what that has been worth.
The view from the top of this mountain is staggering.
I made it.
Holy shit. I actually made it.
I am Tukayote.
I am unrecognizable.
I am love.
And I am not done climbing.
Capisce?
I am love.