I Parked at Rock Bottom Once. Drove Back Up Today and Left Nothing Open.

The Last Time I Was Here, I Had No Idea What Was Coming

November 25, 2023, 12:32PM
The last selfie I took before my world as I knew it would began crumbling apart.

November 25, 2023. Heather Meadows. I hiked up the snowy trail, stood in front of Mount Baker, had no idea that the next day was going to be the worst day of my life. No idea that a psychiatric crisis was waiting for me when I got home. No idea that I was about to lose the first of two of my partners to my patterns. No idea that I was standing at the edge of the bottom without being able to see it.

I was just a guy at a mountain. Telling myself and everyone around me that I was fine.

I was not fine. I just didn’t know it yet.

And here’s the thing about that version of me: he wasn’t a villain. He was a person who had never been taught what was actually happening inside him. He had no language for it. No tools. No map. He was running on patterns so old and so baked in that they felt like personality. They felt like just who he was.

That guy went home from this mountain and his life fell apart.

I went back today, ironically and unknowingly wearing the same exact shirt, to stand where he stood.

Listened to this and many other ford. songs on the trip today.
On repeat.

I Know What That Parking Lot Smells Like in November

Sending love from the Heather Meadows parking lot.

The extremely dangerous and intoxicated crisis came first. Then the train-wreck of a hospitalization that afternoon. Then, still not fully awake, almost two more years of wreckage. Another relationship destroyed by the same patterns last year, minus alcoholism, because you can survive a crisis and still not be done yet. You can white-knuckle your way through the acute stuff and still be completely untouched at the root.

Surviving and changing are two completely different things. I learned that the hard way. More than once.

The sobriety from alcohol came first. That was necessary but it wasn’t sufficient. Then came the real work: getting completely physically and emotionally sober. Dismantling the patterns at the root instead of just managing the symptoms. Learning what was actually driving the bus, and why, and where it learned to drive like that in the first place.

That work is not cute. It is not a montage. It does not happen on a schedule. It is slow and it is humbling and it requires you to be willing to look at yourself without flinching, over and over again, even when what you see makes you want to look away.

I did that work. I am still doing that work. And I am so goddamn different because of it that I barely recognize the person who drove up here two-and-a-half years ago.

That’s not a metaphor. That is a clinical, measurable, felt-in-my-body fact.

What March Did to Me

A year ago, the estrangement with my daughters ended. I don’t have a small enough word for how much that matters. There is no clean way to write about it. It is just one of the most important things that has ever happened to me, and it happened because I did the work, and I will not take that for granted for a single day of my life.

A month ago today, I finally closed the door on my last relationship. For good. The night before this, something cracked open and I saw it. Really, clearly, finally saw it. I’m not going to pull that whole thread here. What I will say is that when I went home that night, something in my nervous system was quiet in a way it had never been quiet before. Like a frequency that had been running for years, underneath everything, finally went silent.

I didn’t know what to do with that kind of quiet at first. It felt unfamiliar. A little suspicious, honestly, the way good things can feel suspicious when you’ve been braced for a long time. So I just sat with it. And then I started protecting it. Fiercely. Because I had worked too hard and come too far to let anyone or anything take that quiet away from me.

March 2026, hands down, has been one of the most transformative months of my entire life. I mean that without hyperbole, as someone who has had a lot of dramatic months. This one is different because it’s not dramatic at all. It’s steady. It’s mine.

I am unrecognizable to the version of me who parked at that mountain in November 2023 with no idea what was about to happen.

The Victory Lap Nobody Warned Me About

I went back today.

Same mountain. Same parking lot. Same snow-loaded firs doing that thing where they make everything look fake, like a movie set that’s trying too hard. Same cold. Same sky that doesn’t care one bit about anything that’s happened to you.

Different person standing in it.

I took my Ricoh GRIIIX up there and just walked around in all of it, and I let myself feel the full weight of the distance between then and now. That’s not a small distance. That’s psychiatric hospitalization to sobriety to doing the actual work to daughters back to nervous system healed to here. That is a staggering amount of ground covered by one person in two-and-a-half years, and I let myself feel that today without deflecting it or shrinking it or immediately pivoting to what still needs work.

I just stood there and felt it.

The photos I took in the gallery at the bottom of the post aren’t the story. They’re witness. Evidence that I was there on a Monday in March, walking around in the cold with my camera, genuinely, quietly, completely okay. Not performing okay. Not white-knuckling okay. Not telling myself a story about okay. Just okay, the way people who have done the work eventually get to be.

I did a shaka at the top and took a selfie because I wanted to remember exactly what my face looked like when I realized I’d made it. Not for anyone else. For me. Because I earned that face.

Today, March 30, 2026, 12:46PM
Same guy, same mountain, even the same shirt, but unrecognizably different inside.

This is what unrecognizable looks like. It looks like a Monday at a mountain. It looks like nothing special at all, and it is everything.

Circles Closed.
Forward.

The mountain didn’t change. The parking lot still smells the same. The snow still doesn’t give a shit about your personal journey.

I’m the thing that changed.

I’m not going back. Not to the patterns, not to the people who fed them, not to the version of me who drove up here and couldn’t see the cliff coming. That guy deserved better from me. He got it. Late, but he got it.

That’s what closing a circle feels like. Not a dramatic ceremony. Not a speech. Just you, standing somewhere you’ve been before, noticing with your whole body that you are no longer the same person who was here last time.

I noticed it today. Every single inch of it.

I am Tukayote.
I am unrecognizable.
I am love.