What We Taught Each Other
This is a full accounting of the wisdom I have shared, the lessons I have learned, and the people who were brave enough to teach me back. Because here is the thing nobody tells you about doing the work: you cannot do it alone, and the moment you stop pretending you can, the real learning begins.
I shared everything I was figuring out. Every realization. Every hard-won piece of clarity. And the people I shared it with reflected it back at me in ways I was not ready for. They showed me myself. They showed me what I was still missing.
This is not my wisdom. It never was. It is ours.
The Crack That Let the Light In
The third week of November 2025.
Everything I had built, every relationship, every identity, every comfortable familiar pattern I had been running on autopilot for decades, cracked open all at once.
I took this photo two hours before my entire world as I knew it began to violently implode.
I wasn’t prepared for it. Nobody ever is. You don’t get a warning. You just wake up one day and the scaffolding is gone and you are standing in the rubble of a life that looked fine from the outside and was quietly caving in from the inside for years.
I could have done what I had always done. Numbed it. Ran from it. Rebuilt the same house with the same broken bricks and called it progress. Poured myself back into a bottle or a relationship or a performance or a career title or all four at the same time and called myself healed.
I didn’t.
Something shifted. Something in me finally got tired enough of the suffering to actually face it instead of outrunning it. I started talking. Really talking. Not the curated, managed, carefully edited version of talking I had been doing my whole life. The raw, unfiltered, terrifying kind where you say the actual thing that is actually happening inside you and let someone else hold it without immediately trying to fix it or flee from it.
Two people in particular were there for that. A platonic love who showed up in the passenger seat of my brand new car on a November afternoon and sang me a song she had written. A song. To me. When she barely knew me. When I was nine days into the implosion and didn’t even know who I was anymore. And my daughters, who had every reason to keep the distance we had held between us, but didn’t.
I started sharing everything I was learning. Every realization that cracked me open. Every piece of wisdom I had spent 42 years accidentally accumulating without knowing what to do with it. I wrote it out. Talked it out. Sent long voice messages and longer texts and sat across from people in coffee shops and said the things that terrified me to say.
And something I was not expecting happened.
They gave it all back.
Every piece of wisdom I shared, they reflected something back at me I didn’t know I needed to see. The platonic love taught me what safe connection actually feels like in your nervous system when you stop trying to secure it. My daughters taught me what it means to be a father who shows up for the healing, not just the performance of parenting.
This is not a post about me dispensing wisdom from some mountain I climbed alone.
This is a post about what happens when you finally get honest enough, and brave enough, and still enough, to actually let people teach you something.
This is the full accounting of what we learned. Together.
The Paper Folding
I have this metaphor I keep coming back to. I shared it early on with my platonic love when she was starting to feel the weight of her own transformation and couldn’t see why any of it was working.
Think of healing like folding a piece of paper.
The first fold barely does anything. You can barely see it. Second fold, still thin. Third fold, still feels like nothing is happening. You start to wonder if you’re doing it wrong. You start to wonder if maybe you are just broken in a way that doesn’t fold.
But here is the science: you only have to fold a piece of paper in half 103 times for it to be thicker than the entire universe.
Every fold doubles the growth.
Awareness doubles. Courage doubles. Compassion for yourself doubles. It doesn’t feel dramatic at the beginning. And then suddenly the shifts become undeniable. What once felt light as paper becomes something powerful. Something thicker than mountains.
When you stop resisting and let each fold happen, each uncomfortable truth, each release of old pain, the transformation is clean and strong. But if you fight the fold, it crumples and tears.
There will be joy. Moments that feel like light exploding inside you. There will be sorrow. Grief for the parts of yourself you kept hidden so long. Both are sacred. Both are the yin and yang of existence. The dark lets you notice the light. The light gives meaning to the dark.
So you take baby steps. One fold at a time. Small changes that will one day surpass everything you thought possible.
What I didn’t expect was that sharing this would teach me something too. Watching someone else fold. Watching someone take that terrifying first step and do it anyway even though they couldn’t see where it was going. Watching that courage up close reminded me why I kept going when I couldn’t see my own next fold either.
We were both folding. At different rates, in different directions, toward different shapes. And neither of us was doing it alone.
It All Comes Down to Safety
Here is the thing I kept coming back to. The thread that runs through every single piece of wisdom I have shared and every single thing I have learned this year.
Safety.
Not the absence of hard things. Not comfort. Not ease. Not the removal of all risk and pain and discomfort. Emotional safety. The kind that lets you actually be yourself in the presence of another person without having to monitor, manage, perform, or protect yourself every second.
I had never had it. Not in the way I understand it now.
I grew up learning that the world was not safe. That the people closest to you could hurt you. That love came with conditions and manipulation and the constant threat of withdrawal. My nervous system learned, very early, to be on high alert at all times. To read the room. To manage everyone’s feelings. To anticipate the threat and neutralize it before it arrived.
That is not living. That is surviving with the lights on.
When I finally encountered real safety, it was so foreign I almost didn’t recognize it.
My platonic love gave me that gift. From the very first afternoon. No pressure. No agenda. No hidden expectations. No escalator to force our connection into something it wasn’t ready to be. She just showed up. Exactly as herself. And let me show up exactly as myself. And the connection that grew from that foundation of nothing but honesty and warmth and mutual respect is the most solid thing I have built in my entire adult life.
Here is what I learned about safety that I want to share with everyone who reads this:
Safety through open, respectful communication without fear. Healthy boundaries, set and kept. Mutual moments of vulnerability. These are not nice-to-haves. They are not the extras you add after the connection is established. They come before anything else. They are the foundation. Everything you build on top of them will hold. Everything you build without them will eventually collapse.
I settled for connections that didn’t meet any of those needs for most of my life. And it caused me more pain, suffering, and trauma than I can fully account for. I was passively telling myself I wasn’t worthy of true safety.
I was wrong.
And what I learned from my platonic love, from simply being in the presence of someone who naturally, effortlessly, genuinely gave me all three of those things, is that safety is not something you earn by performing well enough or being palatable enough or shrinking yourself enough to fit in someone else’s container. Safety is something you recognize. And when you find it, you protect it like your life depends on it. Because it kind of does.
My daughters taught me this too. When we started talking, really talking, I was afraid. All of the ways I had let them down came flooding in. The guilt was enormous. But they kept showing up. They kept being honest. And slowly, carefully, I stopped managing the conversations and started actually being in them. That is what safety does. It creates space for the real thing to happen.
Know Better, Do Better
I want to be really honest about this because I think people get it wrong.
Accountability is not a flogging. It is not dragging yourself through the same guilt and shame over and over until you feel like you have suffered enough to be forgiven. That is not accountability. That is punishment. And punishment does not actually change anything. It just hurts.
Real accountability is simpler and harder than that at the same time.
It is not repeating the thing.
I have done hurtful things. I have hurt people I loved deeply. I have hurt them through patterns I didn’t even know I was running. Through avoidance. Through anxious attachment that looked like love but was really just terror of being abandoned. Through silence when I should have spoken. Through escalation when I should have slowed down. Through choosing the numbing over the feeling every single time the feeling got too big.
The reason is not that I am a bad person. The reason is that it was all I knew in the moment. And that is not an excuse. But it is the truth. And the truth matters here because without it, you cannot actually change anything.
I shared this with my daughters: knowing better, doing better is the only path forward. Not perfect. Not a spotless record. Not a guarantee that you will never make a new mistake. Demonstrating accountability through not knowingly and willfully repeating the same mistakes is how you make amends. Not with words. With a different life. With different choices. With the kind of changed behavior that doesn’t need to announce itself because it speaks clearly enough on its own.
They taught me this back, each in their own way. Watching them face their own hard conversations. Watching them speak their truth even when it cost them something. Watching them refuse to silence themselves to keep the peace. They were doing the thing I was still learning to do. And seeing it reflected back at me in people I love cracked something open that all the therapy and journaling in the world hadn’t quite reached yet.
We were both learning accountability at the same time. From each other.
Patterns Are No Different Than Drugs
This is the one that changed everything for me. This is the anchor.
It all came down to emotional sobriety.
Patterns are no different than drugs for me. Short term relief, long term consequences.
I could take the easy road. Repeat the comfortable and familiar patterns. The anxious attachment, the people pleasing, the avoidance, the rescue operations, the securing of connection at all costs, the silence when I should have spoken. Stay in the familiar because the familiar is comfortable even when the familiar is actively destroying you.
Or I could do the hard internal work. Experience the discomfort of changing myself. End my denial of other people’s patterns and my own. And gain the long term result of emotional stability and actual freedom.
The easy route is not self-love. The difficult route is.
I am a Buffalo. I run towards the storms in my life. Not away from them.
That is what sobriety taught me. Not just sobriety from alcohol or substances. Emotional sobriety. Sobriety from the patterns that gave me short term relief while quietly bleeding me out. Sobriety from the relationships that were addictive in all the same ways that substances were. Sobriety from the performance of being okay when I was not okay. Sobriety from the rescue operations I launched for other people so I didn’t have to look at myself.
My platonic love was getting sober from alcohol around the same time I was getting sober from all of it. Watching her face day seven. Day twenty-one. Day twenty-five. Watching her nervous system lose its old familiar crutch and freak out the way a nervous system does when you take away the thing it has been using to regulate for years. I told her: your nervous system right now is a toddler who just had its binkie taken away. This is completely normal. It gets better. Keep going.
And she would turn around and tell me things about myself that she was seeing from the outside that I couldn’t see from the inside. That I was different. That something had shifted. That the version of me she was watching was not the version the world had been getting before. She named things I hadn’t given names to yet.
That is what safe witness does. It shows you yourself.
When you stop numbing and start actually feeling, the first thing that happens is everything hurts. The feelings you have been outrunning for years are sitting right there waiting for you to slow down enough to deal with them. And then, slowly, something else happens. The regulation comes back online. The nervous system figures out that it can actually handle things without the substance or the pattern. And what you get in return for all that suffering is a quality of presence and realness and aliveness that you cannot manufacture any other way.
I didn’t pick a quit date. One day I was like, I haven’t used today. I’m going to not use today. And then the next day I said the same thing. And then weeks became months. And now I stand inside a life that I built by choosing differently, one day at a time, more times than I can count.
That is not willpower. That is love for myself I didn’t have until I started doing the work to build it.
Self-Love Is Not a Bathroom Mirror Affirmation
Let me be really direct about this because it matters.
Self-love is not looking in the mirror and saying words. You won’t believe them. Not yet. And saying words you don’t believe does not change a single thing.
Self-love is taking actions that demonstrate love and compassion for yourself. And not repeating the things that break your own heart.
When you continuously do this, you begin to see how you are actually loving yourself. Not through words. Through a different life. Through different choices. Through the slow accumulation of evidence that you actually matter to yourself.
I shared this with both my daughters and my platonic love in different ways at different times. And they all gave it back to me in moments when I needed to hear it from someone other than my own head.
My platonic love was the first person in a very long time who showed me what it looks like when love doesn’t come with conditions attached to it. She accepted me as I was in that moment. Imperfect, constantly changing, evolving, figuring out who I was without all the old scaffolding. She didn’t try to fix me or change me or push me toward some version of myself she needed me to become. She just kept showing up for the actual me that was standing in front of her.
That is one of the most profound things another person has ever given me. Because it showed me that the version of me that existed before all the performance and the patterns and the armor was worth loving. Not the version I was going to become after I finished healing. The version that was right there, mid-wreck, covered in rubble, doing his best with what he had.
You are enough exactly as you are, in this moment, figuring it out. That is not a feel-good sentiment. It is a fact. And the proof of it is not something you will find in your head. You will find it in the mirror of safe connection, when someone who has nothing to gain from lying to you looks at you and loves what they see.
And here is the part nobody tells you: the more you practice loving yourself, the better you get at recognizing when someone is actually giving you that. Because you know what it feels like now. From the inside. You have the reference point. And when someone’s love for you matches what you are building for yourself, you don’t have to chase it or secure it or perform for it. You just receive it.
Speak Your Truth or Lose Yourself
The biggest challenge I have had in my life has been speaking my truth.
Not because I didn’t know it. Not because I was confused about what I felt or what I needed. But because I learned very early that speaking my truth was dangerous. That it cost things. That the people who were supposed to be safest to be honest with were sometimes the least safe. And so I got quiet. And I stayed quiet. And the silence built up into resentment, and the resentment built into a toxin that slowly poisoned everything I tried to keep alive.
My silence ruined every relationship I had. Every single one. Not because I was absent. Because the most important version of me was absent. The version that had needs. The version that had limits. The version that sometimes wanted different things than what I was pretending to be okay with.
I shared this with my daughters. If I could only give them one piece of advice in life, it would be this: never silence yourself out of fear of what other people will do when you speak your truth. If you are not speaking your truth, you are only hurting yourself in the long term. And likely destroying everything around you in the process.
People will leave when you start speaking it. Lots of people, and very quickly. That is the part nobody warns you about. When you start setting boundaries and saying the actual thing and refusing to contort yourself into shapes just to keep people comfortable, some of them go. They were attached to the quiet version of you. To the one that didn’t require them to actually show up. And when that version is replaced by one who has standards and communicates them, it disrupts the arrangement.
That is not a failure. That is information.
What I learned from watching my daughters start to find their voices, from watching them have the conversations they were terrified to have, is that the courage it takes to speak your truth does not come from certainty. It comes from doing it scared anyway. From deciding that the dignity of being honest is worth more than the temporary comfort of staying quiet.
They gave that back to me. Every time they were brave, it reminded me why I had been brave. Every time one of them told me something hard to say, it gave me permission to keep doing the same.
What We See in Others Is What We See in Ourselves
This one is worth sitting with.
I told my platonic love early on: what we see in others is what we see in ourselves. I told my daughters: what people see in you and criticize about you is what they see in themselves that they don’t want to see.
But here is the part I didn’t fully understand until I lived it this year.
The reverse is also true. What you love in others is what you love in yourself.
When I look at my platonic love and what I see is radical honesty, genuine vulnerability, authentic presence, the courage to be herself even when that is uncomfortable, the refusal to perform or pretend, the warmth that radiates from someone who is actually in their body and actually in the room with you, I am not just describing her. I am describing the version of myself I am becoming.
We are mirrors for each other. Safe, honest mirrors. And when you find a mirror that shows you the best version of yourself rather than distorting you or diminishing you, you protect that mirror. You do not take it for granted.
There were two women in at an ecstatic dance event I went to. We did a warm-up where we partnered with strangers and made all kinds of silly faces at each other. Vulnerability and continuous eye contact. It was insanely magical. I wrote something that night, anonymously, about what I saw in them. And then I realized that everything I had written, every beautiful quality I had named, was actually how I felt and loved about myself.
That is parts work in action. That is the mirror doing what it is supposed to do.
I see something extraordinary in the people I love. My platonic love. My daughter. They are not perfect. Neither am I. But they are doing the work. They are folding. They are choosing the hard route over the comfortable one. They are speaking truth even when it costs something. They are getting honest about the things that are no longer serving them and letting those things go.
I see all of that. And they see it in me. And we keep reflecting it back to each other until we both believe it a little more than we did before.
That is what the right people do for you. They show you yourself until you finally stop arguing with what they see.
The Buffalo Runs Toward the Storm
I went to a mountain. Not metaphorically. An actual mountain.
The last time I had been there was the day before my worst psychiatric crisis in two and a half years. Before I chose to get sober. Before I started this whole long terrifying beautiful process of becoming unrecognizable.
I went back to close some circles. To stand in a place that had witnessed a darker version of me and let it see who I was now.
On the drive up I was thinking about everything. The closure I had found in the weeks prior. The peace that had settled into my nervous system after months of being on high alert. The relationships with my daughters that had opened back up. The connection with my platonic love that had become one of the most sacred things in my life. The fact that it was one of the most transformative months I had ever had.
The mountain didn’t care about any of that. The mountain just sat there being a mountain. And I stood in it and breathed and let the bigness of it remind me that I am small and that small is not the same as insignificant and that showing up to the hard thing is always the move.
I am a Buffalo. Buffalos are the only animals that run toward storms instead of away from them. When a storm is coming, every other animal turns and flees. The buffalo turns and charges directly into it. And because it moves through the storm instead of running from it, it gets through faster. The suffering is shorter. The other side arrives sooner.
That is the only way I know how to move through hard things. Toward them. Not with recklessness. With intention. With every tool I have available. With the support of people who can hold me while I am in the middle of it. But toward it. Always toward it.
My platonic love taught me something about this too, without even knowing she was teaching me. She is doing her own charging. Her own turning toward the hard thing. And watching her do it, watching someone I love refuse to run, reminded me that the charging is a choice and it is always available and it is always worth it.
Emotional Sobriety, Pattern Deaths, and the Parts That Finally Got to Rest
I want to talk about IFS for a minute because it is one of the most important things I have ever learned and I do not think people outside of therapy circles talk about it enough in plain language.
You have parts. We all do. Parts that formed in response to things that happened to us. Parts that developed their strategies for keeping you safe based on what they knew at the time. The anxious attachment part that formed because love was inconsistent when you were young and unpredictable and sometimes disappeared without warning. The avoidant part that learned to not need things because needing things was how you got hurt. The performing part that figured out early that being impressive was how you bought safety in rooms that weren’t safe.
These parts are not your enemies. They are not broken pieces of you. They are protectors that got stuck in a job they should have been able to retire from a long time ago.
The work is not to get rid of them. The work is to earn their trust enough that they can step back from the driver’s seat and let Self take the wheel. Self is the part of you that is compassionate, curious, calm, clear, creative, courageous, connected, and confident. The eight C’s. It is not something you build from scratch. It is something you uncover by slowly convincing the protectors that they can rest.
I have lost count of how many pattern deaths I have had this year. That is the moment when you become aware of a pattern, really aware of it in a way you cannot pretend to un-know, and you decide in that instant that it cannot exist in your life anymore. It is a death because something that was part of you for decades is gone. It is also a birth because what replaces it is something new and lighter and more aligned with who you actually are.
Every pattern death comes with a grief. Every freedom has a mourning cost attached to it. That is the yin and yang again. You cannot have one without the other and you should not try.
I shared this framework with my platonic love when she was deep in her own becoming. I watched her start to name her own parts. Start to recognize when a pattern was driving instead of Self. Start to have compassion for the parts that were scared instead of attacking herself for being scared.
And she showed me something I hadn’t fully seen yet. She showed me what it looks like from the outside. What the awareness looks like when it is still new and tender and raw and hasn’t had time to harden into wisdom yet. She reminded me how far I had come by showing me where the beginning of this looks like.
We were teaching each other the language. She the words she was just learning. Me the words I had almost forgotten were new to me once too.
You Cannot Change What You Cannot See
This is the one I come back to over and over in my peer support work. Every single time someone I am sitting with demonstrates awareness of something in their life, anything at all, I stop and I name it as a win. Not a future win. A win right now, today, in this moment, regardless of whether a single thing has changed yet.
Because here is what most people don’t understand: awareness is not a step on the way to change. It is the entire thing. Without it, you are not on the road at all. You are in a field somewhere doing donuts in the dark, wondering why you keep ending up in the same ditch.
I have sat with people who want to quit drinking and haven’t stopped yet. I don’t push. I say: start by watching it. Notice how it feels in the moment. Notice how it feels the next morning. Notice when you reach for it and what was happening emotionally five minutes before. That is not failure. That is the beginning of everything. You cannot leave a room you don’t know you’re in.
I shared this with my daughters and my platonic love repeatedly throughout this year, in different ways, at different moments. Because awareness was the hinge point for all of us. The thing that made everything else possible.
Carl Jung said that until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. That is it. That is the whole problem stated in one sentence. The patterns that have been running you, the anxious attachment, the people pleasing, the avoidance, the silence, the escalation, none of it felt like a choice when you were inside it. It felt like just how things were. Like personality. Like bad luck. Like the kind of person you simply are.
It was not fate. It was an unexamined autopilot.
IFS gave me the language for this in a way nothing else had. My mentor put it plainly: any time you are not in the eight C’s, compassionate, curious, calm, clear, creative, courageous, connected, confident, you are dealing with a part. That one sentence cracked the whole thing open for me. Suddenly the things that had been silently driving my bus had names. Had histories. Had reasons for doing what they were doing. They were not character defects. They were protectors running old code in situations that no longer required their particular brand of protection.
And here is the thing about awareness that nobody tells you: it does not feel like freedom when it first arrives. It feels like grief. Because the moment you really see a pattern, you also see every time it ran without your knowing. Every relationship it burned. Every moment it cost you. Every person it pushed away or pulled too close or flattened into a role they never agreed to play.
That grief is sacred. It means you are finally present for something you have been missing.
My platonic love and I talked about this constantly. Watching her develop awareness of her own patterns, watching the recognition land in real time, reminded me of what the beginning of this looks like from the outside. The tenderness of it. The way new awareness sits raw and exposed before it has had time to become wisdom. She showed me where I had come from by showing me where she was starting. And I showed her where this leads by just being someone who had already walked through it.
That is the mutual teaching. That is awareness as a shared project rather than a solo excavation.
Alan Watts said the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. But you cannot plunge into something you cannot see. You cannot move with something you are pretending does not exist. You have to see it first. Even when what you see is uncomfortable. Especially then.
The awareness does not make you broken. The unawareness never made you bad.
You were not destroying things on purpose. You just couldn’t see what you were holding.
And now you can. And that changes everything.
What Safe Witness Actually Means
I do a lot of peer support work. I sit with people who are in the middle of the hardest things in their lives and I listen. Not to fix. Not to solve. Not to give them my five-point plan for feeling better. I listen to understand what they are actually experiencing so I can reflect it back to them in a way that lets them feel less alone in it.
That is not a therapy technique. That is love. That is what safe witness looks like in practice.
My platonic love gave me that gift more times than I can count this year. She listened when I was in the middle of things I didn’t fully understand yet. She didn’t panic. She didn’t judge. She didn’t disappear. She held space for the messy, incomplete, contradictory thing that was happening in me and let it be what it was without trying to make it cleaner or faster or more comfortable.
One sunset following a very difficult evening prior, I went to the pier at sunset to cry and something shifted in me. I had found my tears a few years earlier. I had started letting them flow.
Being held by an angel who called herself Cherish.
She had been standing next to me on the pier for most of the time I was shedding tears, headphones on, vision blurred, completely oblivious to anything around me. She had been there witnessing in silence, not intruding, not performing her compassion, just present. When she finally reached out and touched my shoulder, I turned and looked up into the most beautiful, caring, peaceful, gentle soul I have ever seen looking straight into my eyes.
She placed her electric handwarmers into my cold hands. Put her hands over mine. Then wrapped her arms around me and held me in the kind of hug you only see in movies when sailors come home from deployment. Long, deep, strong. She was standing on her toes, arms wrapped around my neck, head pressed against mine, not letting go. Squeezing me tightly, gently rubbing her hands on my back. We would loosen and talk and then she would hold me again. Over and over. For as long as I needed held.
It didn’t matter that my beard was wet from tears and snot. She just held me.
We didn’t even share our first names until our hands joined and we were walking up the pier. As suddenly as she had appeared, we hugged one last time and she walked away into the chilly evening darkness.
The universe gave me that on the exact night I needed it, on a pier that is my sacred place. And she told me at the end that I had helped her more than I could ever know. And she did the same for me.
A human I knew had tried to hurt me the night before. A complete stranger held me that evening. Without any conditions.
That is what I mean when I say the world is full of love that you cannot access when you are numb. When you are sober. When you are present. When you are actually there in your body and your heart and your life instead of managing it from behind the glass, the love finds you.
Amends Is Not an Apology.
It Is a Different Life.
I wrote letters.
I wrote them to people I had hurt. I wrote them not to get anything back. Not to repair or reconcile or make them agree with me or feel better about me. I wrote them because I had been carrying unspoken words for months and the weight of them was driving a kind of anxiety I could not shake any other way.
The letters had no blame in them. No explanation of their parts. No defense of mine. It was simply: here is what I did. Here is what I understand to be the impact it had. Here is why I was wrong. Here is how I am being accountable by not repeating it. All I statements. Nothing asked of them. Two paragraphs. Straight and to the point.
Because that is what real amends is. Not the letters. The not repeating.
You can apologize until you are blue in the face and it means absolutely nothing until change is demonstrated and mistakes are not knowingly and willfully repeated. That is how you make amends. That is how you live with a clean conscience. Not by saying sorry. By being different.
Part of recovery is making amends. And it is difficult. The anxiety around it is real because you have no control over how it lands. You have no control over what the other person does with it. All you can control is whether you said the true thing or not. Whether you owned what was yours to own. Whether you sent it from a genuine place with no agenda attached.
Whatever they do with it, even if they do nothing, is their choice. And it is all information. And you move forward either way.
My daughters are doing their own version of this work. Learning to hold people accountable not with punishment but with honesty. Learning that love and hard truths are not opposites. Learning that sometimes the most loving thing you can do is refuse to enable the behavior that is hurting someone. That is not easy. It is not comfortable. But it is love. Tough love is called tough for a reason.
The Three Rules.
My Decision Filters.
At some point in this year, everything distilled down to three rules.
Be ethical. Do no harm if you can avoid it.
Only choose things that are emotionally and physically safe.
Do what you want and need accordingly.
If it is unethical or unsafe, I am not doing it. Full stop. This is not negotiable and it does not require a long conversation. This filter is simple and it applies to everything.
I recently expanded on these three rules into another filter I use now. From a previous post, this is the filter I wrote for myself out of a year of 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?”
Notice what every single question in that filter is asking. It is not asking whether the decision makes logical sense. It is not asking whether someone else would approve. It is asking whether my parts are okay with it. Whether I am about to burden them or respect them. Whether I am about to run my bus from the driver’s seat or let a scared, panicking passenger grab the wheel. It is me checking in before I act instead of paying the price after.
When the answer to any of those questions points toward a problem, I do not do the thing. Period. My conscience will remain clean. Non-negotiable. Forever.
This includes my addictions. My patterns of behavior. My choices about who to let into my orbit and who to let go. My relationship with every substance and every dynamic that has historically given me short-term relief at long-term cost.
I walked out of the worst year of my life and into a new one free as a bird. With all of my autonomy. That did not happen because I wished for it or waited for it or earned it by suffering enough. It happened because I made choices. Thousands of them. One at a time. On the days when the choices were hard and on the days when they were easy and on all the days in between.
The bird is out of the cage. I will never go back to confinement.
In January, I wrote and shared my manifesto with my platonic love, daughters, family, and friends. Writing it out gave me a huge sense of relief. Like finding a map when you have been lost. Like visually seeing the results of all the suffering and pain. Like reading the lessons and knowing there was something good from all the chaos.
Life handed me lemons. Here is my lemonade.
Meeting Each Other Where We Are
This is the magic. This is the thing that keeps coming back.
Meeting each other exactly where we are. Not where we wish the other person was. Not where we think they should be by now. Not where we need them to be for our own comfort. Where they actually are. Today.
My platonic love and I figured this out early. Neither of us was in the place to sprint toward something intense. Neither of us wanted to. We had both done that. We both knew what it cost. So we slowed down. We let it be what it was. We talked about everything openly instead of letting things build up unspoken under the surface. We gave each other permission to change our minds, to not be ready, to need space, to set limits, without any of that meaning something catastrophic about the connection.
That is new territory for me. I used to escalate everything. Meet someone, feel a connection, sprint toward securing it before it could disappear. The escalation was automatic. The securing was automatic. It was insecurity driving the bus.
This time I let Self drive.
And what grew from that, slowly and then beautifully, is the most solid connection I have ever built. Not because it is the most intense. Because it is built on something real. On mutual love and trust and honesty and the genuine pleasure of each other’s company without any of the pressure or performance that used to accompany everything I tried to build.
She has shown me what freedom looks like in a connection. What it feels like to be with someone and not have to monitor and manage the whole thing. What it means to share physical co-regulating touch without it being sexual foreplay. What it is like to walk away from an evening with someone and feel genuinely full instead of anxious about when I will see them again or what they thought of me or whether I said the right things.
Every time we get to spend time together, I walk away feeling seen. Heard. Witnessed. Noticed. Acknowledged. Unconditionally loved and accepted for who I am at the core.
That is what she gives me. And what I give back. And the teaching goes both ways, always. She shows up and teaches me something every single time. I write about what I learn. And the writing teaches us both things we didn’t know we were figuring out.
I Am Becoming Unrecognizable.
So Are They.
So Are You.
In a year, you are going to look back in disbelief at who you used to be and who you have become.
I said this to my platonic love. I said a version of it to both of my daughters. I say it to myself on the mornings when the becoming is slow and hard and I cannot see where it is going.
The caterpillar turning into a butterfly does not look like growth. It looks like dissolution. The whole structure has to dissolve before the new one can emerge. And from the inside, that process is terrifying. From the outside, to anyone who loves the caterpillar, it can look like things are getting worse, not better.
Keep going.
I am a cockroach. Unkillable. I have my whole back tattooed with one. Sacred geometry and seeds of life in the wings. A heart inked into the antennae with the word unkillable embedded in it. Not because I am invincible. Because I have survived every single thing that was supposed to take me down and I am still here and still choosing and still loving and still becoming.
Becoming unrecognizable is not a destination. It is a direction.
I am sober. Not living in my patterns. Doing the work every day. Moving myself forward. Becoming unrecognizable to anyone who liked the old me, who needed the old me to stay the old me so they didn’t have to look at themselves.
My platonic love is becoming unrecognizable. My daughters are becoming unrecognizable. We are all doing it at the same time, in our own ways, at our own pace, on our own terms.
And the gift of doing it alongside people who are doing it too is impossible to overstate. Because there are days when you cannot see your own becoming. You are too close to it. You are inside the dissolving and all you can feel is the dissolving. And on those days, the person next to you who can see the butterfly already forming says: keep going. It is working. I can see it. You cannot see it yet but I am watching it happen and it is extraordinary.
That is the gift we give each other when we do this work in community instead of in isolation.
The Wisdom I Carry Forward
Let me make it simple. Let me say the things plainly that I have been learning and sharing all year:
Safety is the foundation. Everything else is furniture.
The work is not optional. It is the thing. Not the preparation for the thing.
Accountability is a different life. Not an apology.
Patterns are addictions. Treat them the same way.
Your parts are not your enemies. They are protectors who need to be convinced to rest.
Awareness is the most important trait a person can have. You cannot change what you cannot see.
What you love in others is what you love in yourself. Pay attention.
The truth will cost you something. Speak it anyway.
Meeting people where they are is one of the greatest gifts you can give.
Safe connection does not require performance, escalation, or securing. If you have to work that hard to keep it, it is not safety. It is anxiety with good lighting.
Self-love is not a feeling. It is a series of choices made over time.
Tomorrow is never guaranteed. Say the thing. Tell the people. Don’t let heartbeats go to waste.
Be a buffalo. Run toward the storms. The other side arrives faster.
And above all: you are not what happened to you. You are what you choose to do with what happened to you.
What We Taught Each Other
I started this year thinking I was the one with something to share. I had been doing this work for a while. I had language for it. Framework. Hard-won wisdom from years of therapy and sobriety and pattern deaths and parts work and all the rest of it.
And I shared all of it. Freely. Every piece of it that felt relevant and real. I sent long messages. I sat across from people I love and said the things I had learned. I held space. I reflected. I witnessed.
And they reflected it all back.
They showed me myself. My platonic love showed me what healthy connection feels like in the body when you stop running from it. My daughters showed me what it looks like to show up as a father for the healing instead of the performance. The stranger on the pier showed me that love from a stranger is just as real as love from someone you have known for years. The veterans I sit with every week at Growing Veterans showed me that peer support is not charity. It is mutual restoration. Every time I show up for someone in crisis, something in me that was broken a long time ago gets to practice being whole.
And awareness taught us all. Every single one of us. The moment we could finally see ourselves clearly was the moment we could finally see each other clearly too. That is not a coincidence. That is how it works. You cannot truly witness another person until you have learned to witness yourself.
We are all teaching each other. All of us. All the time.
The wisdom is not mine. It never was. It came through me from everything I survived and everyone I loved and everything that cracked me open far enough to let the light in. And it belongs to anyone who needs it.
Take what helps. Leave what doesn’t. But please, keep folding.
The universe is waiting for you on the other side of fold 103.
I am Tukayote. I am unrecognizable. I am love.
