PS C:\> tar -xf 200_Days_Of_Clarity_And_Hell_v1.zip
Application_Install.exe
Two hundred days ago I stopped reaching for anything to soften the edges. Not a drink, not a hit, nothing. I already had two years of alcohol behind me by then, so this wasn’t the first door I walked through. It was the last one. And on the other side of it wasn’t peace. It was everything I had been medicating for twenty four years, arriving all at once with no buffer between me and it.
I didn’t get sober during an easy season. I got sober in the middle of the single most difficult chapter of my entire life, while a partnership was ending, while I was rebuilding a relationship with my daughters I’d nearly lost, while I was being stalked and labeled and torn apart by people I used to love and trust, and while I still had no idea I was autistic. Sobriety wasn’t the reward at the end of the hard part. It was the floor I built the hard part on top of.
What I learned in these two hundred days is that sobriety was never the finish line. It was the ground I needed to stand on so I could finally do the actual work: grieving what I lost, owning what I broke, learning how to sit in a circle with other people and actually be seen instead of performing for them, finding out I am autistic after a lifetime of masking it, and rebuilding a relationship with myself that doesn’t require me to disappear to survive it.
That is the application. The rest is the source code.
Source_Code.txt
The open-source code below is free, for you to analyze, modify, and build your own application with.
> what two hundred days actually looks like: escapade.mp4
This is what two hundred days feels like in my body, not just on paper. Make the rules up as we go along, and break them all if we’re not having fun.
> the reset that started before day one: zero_return.sh
Before I ever got to January 6th, I had already deleted everything. Every website, every social account, every performance of a person I no longer wanted to be. No announcement. No explanation. Just gone.
I burned bridges intentionally. Not to punish others, but to protect myself. The execution was messy. The impact was real. I own the harm, the confusion, and the collateral damage. What came after wasn’t collapse. It was freedom.
Chemical sobriety on January 6th wasn’t a separate decision. It was the same decision, finished. Before that I had already crossed two years alcohol free, carrying addiction and trauma and loss I never chose in the first place, still cleaning up wreckage that wasn’t mine to begin with. January 6th was the day I stopped letting cannabis and everything else be the quiet exception to a sobriety I was already claiming out loud.
I stopped giving myself an exit. There was no more back door left to walk out of.
> writing the instructions before I could follow them: tuos_apexis.cfg
I did not walk into these two hundred days with a plan. I walked in with two documents I had to write myself, because nothing already out there was built for how my brain actually runs.
TuOS is my manifesto. A living operating system, written entirely in first person affirmations because telling myself what I believe in my own voice works completely differently than reading someone else’s rules about how to heal. Its opening line does not soften anything: I am leading my life only from a place of unconditional love and acceptance. Underneath that is a single word repeated like a heartbeat: Every. Single. Day.
It is not static. I started it on January 21st as version 1.0, codename Cingulata, and by the time I published this post it had gone through fifteen logged revisions and five codenames, Cingulata, Passeriformes, Lagomorpha, Accipitriformes, and now Testudinidae, in six months. That is not a document I wrote once and filed away. That is a system I kept rebuilding in real time as I actually changed, section by section: the Firewall, the boundaries of what I am walking away from and what I am choosing to keep. Clean Code, the exact dates I quit everything, inhalants in 2023, ketamine that same brutal night, alcohol in January 2024, cigarettes days later, hallucinogens that September, kratom that October, and cannabis on January 6th of this year, the last one standing. The Accountability Protocol, where I own my 2020 conviction in plain language and where I logged, the same week it happened, that the five and a half year no contact order had finally expired through one hundred percent compliance, not luck. The Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware section, where I named the actual root of every pattern I was eliminating: a fear of being alone. Not two dozen separate problems. One fear wearing two dozen different masks.
Apexis is different. Where TuOS is the operating system, Apexis is the truths underneath it, the language I built for the things about me that don’t change even when the version number does. It only has two versions so far, v1.0 Helianthus from early February and v2.0 Lavandula, which I pushed live just days before writing this post to finally add the neurodivergence and grief language I didn’t have words for until recently. It is where I keep the answer to the question I used to dread most: what are you. I am a certified peer supporter. A certified mental health first aider. A long distance walker. A photographer. A dancer. A disabled veteran. A father. An adult orphan. A human being. I am a lot of things. Apexis is where I finally wrote that down without flinching, and where every single entry ends the same way, no matter how heavy the one before it was: and I am still love.
I did not write either of these after the healing happened. I wrote them as the tools I used to do the healing in the first place. Every amend, every boundary, every night I chose the pier over numbing out, ran through a seven step decision matrix built directly into TuOS: regulation check, core check, emotional cost, integrity and alignment, pattern check, relational integrity, future self. I built my own compass because I could not find one that pointed the direction I actually needed to go.
> grief doesn't wait for a good time: grief_lodge.log
Twenty five days in, I spent five hours in a grief lodge with no chemical buffer between me and any of it for the first time in decades. I screamed. I cried. My anger moved through my body instead of staying trapped in it. That was the first proof that letting a pattern actually die feels nothing like what I expected. It feels like grief, raw and embodied, not like a breakthrough with a soundtrack.
Grief kept showing up all year, not as a phase I finished but as a wave I learned to let move through me instead of fighting. By late spring I was grieving several other losses too, stacked on top of each other, not one clean wound but many, all surfacing at once now that I no longer had anything to numb them with. Bison run straight into storms instead of away from them. That became the whole model, and it kept getting tested. Twelve miles on a Thursday afternoon, flipped off by an ex, hit by a mail truck an hour later, and finally understanding on a tidal flat that the grief underneath all of it was never one clean loss. It was a stack.
A scar doesn’t erase what was there before it. It just marks where the wound used to be.
Being present for my own grief also meant I started actually seeing it in other people, in the veteran community, in strangers I talked to on long walks. Once I stopped numbing myself, I could recognize the same struggle in someone else immediately: shame that came from an addiction they never chose, grief that finally had room to move instead of getting shoved back down, a solitude that scared them until it didn’t anymore. I wasn’t taking any of that on as mine to fix or carry. I just finally had the presence to actually witness it in someone else, which is most of what peer support is.
Bison don’t run from storms. They charge straight into them. Head down. Horns forward.
> accountability without a redemption arc: amends.exe
The apartment itself had already emptied out back in mid November 2025, months before I ever wrote a word about it. It took until February to have enough distance to tell that story straight instead of defensively, and when I finally did, I did not write it as a villain story and I did not write it as a redemption story either. I wrote it as what accountability actually looks like when nobody is watching: looking directly at my own patterns without turning the awareness into self-hatred, and without waiting for applause.
I wrote amends I never expected forgiveness for. I released guilt behind Old Bellingham City Hall, bass in my chest, staying present with harm I caused instead of explaining it away. I let ego death be exactly as brutal and invisible as it actually is, not the glow up version people post about. Daily triggers. Hypervigilance. Boundaries tested and violated. People disappearing. Grief without witnesses. Accountability without applause.
Some of it never resolved cleanly. Some choices don’t undo. I woke up one morning with guilt that didn’t fade with insight, danced to the only honest response I had at high tide, and made peace with the fact that no rescue and no repair were coming, only the choice to live differently and never cause that kind of harm again.
The version nobody sees is the one that’s real.
> the body keeps score, and also keeps the recovery receipts: nervous_system.dll
Somewhere around day thirty, thirty seven, eighty two, the numbers stopped being the point and the nervous system work became the actual curriculum. Long distance walking, 882 miles by May alone, a camera at 40mm and no agenda, chasing color and geometry and lines instead of chasing anything to numb out with. Dancing alone downtown at night for the first time in four years, then again and again, letting parts that had been frozen since my twenties finally move.
By spring I stood in a sold out crowd of ten thousand people in Seattle with my bestie, bass moving through my chest, eighty two days sober underneath all of it, and started crying the kind of crying that comes from somewhere so deep in your body you don’t know it’s coming until it’s already happening. A cellular level realization: I am really alive.
Sobriety, for me, was never about willpower. It was learning to actually listen to my body instead of overriding it every single time it tried to tell me something. Walking in the sun, literally and figuratively, after years of crawling through darkness, is not a metaphor I reached for. It is what regulation actually feels like once you’ve done enough of the work to be able to notice it.
What I don’t say enough is how much of this year was sheer hell in my body, not just my head. Months of adrenaline jolts for no reason I could point to, my nervous system firing a full fight or flight response while I was sitting still doing nothing. Anxiety and panic living in my gut on a normal Tuesday, no trigger, no threat, just a body that forgot how to stand down.
My appetite has been destroyed for months. Food has stopped registering as something I want or need. I have lost over ten percent of my body weight (~30lbs) and counting, essentially from starving without ever deciding to, because a nervous system running that hot has no room left to also manage digestion. I’m sick and fucking tired of headaches and protein shakes (they are often the only thing I can keep down).
Some people have told me they thought that I trimmed down and have a completely new wardrobe because I am single and want to look sexy to attract women.
Ugh. Hardly.
I would rather have a calm nervous system, be 30lbs heavier, wearing the same clothes, and actually be able to eat. And on top of that, I am not interested in dating people who are first attracted to my appearance instead of who I actually am (spoiler alert, I’m not going to look like this forever as aging is an inevitable bitch).
All of this is not the version of this year that photographs well. It is the version that was actually happening underneath all of it.
> the peer support circle that held me through all of it: growing_veterans.cfg
None of this happened alone, and I want to be specific about who actually held the line with me, not just gesture at community in the abstract.
Growing Veterans trained me in peer support, and that training changed how I show up for every relationship in my life, not just the ones inside that community. It gave me language and structure for something I had been doing instinctively for years without knowing how to do it safely: sitting with someone in crisis without trying to fix them, without making their pain about my own discomfort, without rushing them toward a resolution they aren’t ready for. That training is underneath almost every hard conversation I had this year, the amends, the boundary setting, the moments I sat with a veteran in crisis and just stayed.
And every single week, without fail, I show up to a peer support coffee check in circle. A circle of chairs and people who ask how everyone is actually doing, not the version you give strangers. That circle carried me through every transition since I walked off my job in 2025: the partnership ending, ego death, a five year no contact order finally expiring, and most recently the autism discovery that reshaped how I understand nearly every year before this one. I did not white knuckle two hundred days alone. I did it with a circle of people who show up on purpose, every week, for no reason except that showing up is the whole practice.
> the labels people threw, and the ones that were weaponized: stigma.txt
For months, people who loved me and people who didn’t reached for the same words, turned labels. Manic. Isolating. Concerning. Narcissist. Avoidant. A diagnosis is cleaner than accountability, and a lot of people needed the clean version more than they needed the true one.
Doing the work and having a manic episode do not look the same. One runs from grief. The other sits inside it, every single day, on purpose, without numbing it.
One person I used to love took it further than the rest. They didn’t just label what I was going through, they tried to use “manic bullshit” as a weapon aimed directly at my credibility, my sobriety, and my sense of self. They even went so far as to use AI to gaslight me and avoid accountability for how they violated my safety and boundaries when I confronted them about it. And to this day, not a single acknowledgment of wrongdoing, apology, or any kind of amends made.
I have also been physically and electronically stalked and followed for several months this year, by a significant amount of people, all working in tandem to seek information about me and my whereabouts—and use that information to interfere with my activities and my life. Many of the people I once trusted and later found out were seeking information about me on behalf of others I have denied this access to. This is a very different thing to sit with than being misunderstood. It put my nervous system into a state of hypervigilance and genuine terror for a long stretch of this year, checking locks, checking behind me, unable to fully settle even in places that were supposed to feel safe. That is not an exaggeration and I’m not interested in softening it for the sake of a tidy narrative.
Late May a stranger called me a creep in public, loudly, for the crime of quietly spreading anonymous kindness downtown. He didn’t ask what I was doing. He aimed the most dehumanizing word he had and fired. I wrote him a letter, not to start a fight, because he tried to silence me with shame and I do not let anyone do that to me anymore.
Your labels were never mine to carry. That took most of the spring to actually believe, not just say.
> the relationship I've been rebuilding, not this year but for fifteen months: daughters.txt
The hardest chapter and the best outcome of my life did not both happen in this window. Three and a half years, two hospitalizations, and a note that said “get help” on an empty bedroom door came first, and my daughters came back into my life in early 2025, well before I ever quit my job or got completely sober. This is not a highlight reel. This is the whole ugly house.
What these two hundred days actually did was strengthen something that was already being rebuilt. Fifteen plus months of showing up consistently, and now sobriety gave that rebuilding a steadier floor to stand on. We are healing together, not because I fixed everything and delivered a finished version of myself, but because I kept showing up sober and honest instead of disappearing again. That is still in motion. It will probably always be in motion.
> the five year order that finally expired: accountability_protocol.cfg
There is a longer boundary underneath this whole year that I haven’t fully explained here, and the fuller context for it lives in TuOS, section 8, Accountability Protocol. The short version: a five year no contact order finally expired at midnight on May 6th. I walked to the pier alone that night, happy, sober, and free in a way I don’t think I’d been since before I had a choice in any of it.
Fear of being alone drove almost every destructive pattern I ever ran. I didn’t know that for most of my life. I just kept running the program.
Separately, a state trooper conversation on the side of a dark road at 11pm became its own kind of inventory, an accidental confirmation of everything that survived the fire this year and everything that didn’t.
> finding the people who could actually hold it: community.json
A complete stranger held me on a pier at sunset for thirty minutes with no explanation needed on either side. A veteran in crisis reminded me how thin the margins really are, for him and for me both, the morning after the best night of the whole spring. Lummi elders, a Buffalo Brotherhood, a gratefulness group that cracked something open, a quiet kindness practice that has nothing to do with recognition.
I found God on an Easter Sunday I didn’t see coming, in a room full of ordinary people, not in a lightning bolt.
Nobody tells you that wisdom isn’t something you accumulate alone. You crack open, you share everything you are figuring out, and then the people you thought you were teaching turn around and hand it all back in a completely different shape.
I also learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, that nobody underneath their worst behavior is actually a bad person. Strip away the trauma and the adverse things a person has lived through and there is nobody left to hate, not even the people who hurt me the most, not even the ones who tried to stalk or diagnose me into silence.
> the word I didn't have until June: autism.dat
A year to the day after I walked off a twenty five year IT career with no plan, I finally had language for why my brain runs the way it does. Autistic. Masking my entire life without knowing it. Persistent demand for autonomy. It reframed every pattern I had spent this whole year naming, including how I responded to being stalked, labeled, and stigmatized.
I was not a bad partner in any of my past relationships. I was an unmanaged one, running on addiction, undiagnosed autism and PDA, and patterns that took years to identify and kill. Understanding why does not excuse the damage.
I didn’t have words for it yet when I first felt the shape of it change underneath me, so I let my body move through it instead of my mouth. I road tripped almost four thousand miles through ten states figuring out how to live inside this new understanding of myself, chasing astrophotography I’d been circling for four years, recapturing a photo I first took twenty two years ago, and I turned the car around twelve days early because I finally knew what I actually needed instead of what I thought I was supposed to want.
> the mask coming back off, again: faking_it.log
Most recently I caught myself performing again. Not for other people this time. For myself. Selfies, smiles, hand hearts, all real, and all covering a grief I hadn’t let myself actually feel yet. So I took the mask off again, in public, on the blog, because that is apparently the practice now and not a one time event.
Radical honesty doesn’t get easier. It just gets more familiar.
> the numbers that are just numbers until they aren't: two_hundred_days.csv
Two hundred days completely sober from every chemical. Well over two years alcohol free. 1,278 miles walked this year so far, an average of 6.24 miles a day, every day, through five states, four of them slept in. A partnership that ended last year, before I ever got completely sober, but that I only found the words for in February. A five year no contact order finally expired. Fifteen plus months of steadily rebuilding a relationship with my daughters that sobriety has only made stronger. An identity I didn’t have language for until this summer. A weekly peer support circle I never missed. Peer support training I put to use almost daily. Not a single identified pattern repeated, not because I’m perfect, but because I finally know what I’m watching for.
I am not the guy who used to be a frequent flyer at the ER, the psych ward, and every bar downtown. I am Tukayote. I am unrecognizable. I am love. And I am still here.
