“I was the life of every party, and the death of every relationship.”
This is My Recovery.
No Anesthesia.
No Bullshit.
All love.
🥰
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Every city has a haunted house. Mine is all of downtown Bellingham. The bars, the alleys, the breakfast tables, the blocked contacts, the empty chairs. I changed my name, got sober, lost almost everyone I knew, and I still have to walk through all of it. Here’s what it looks like when your whole former life becomes a ghost, and you realize you’re the one who got away.
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Probably conceived to Dark Side of the Moon. Definitely delivered to Maniac. Music has been my whole deal since before I could even choose it. These are the 25 songs that have been carrying me through 2026 so far, and honestly, some of them would shock the old me. That’s kind of the point.
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Let me tell you a little story about a guy I used to know. Drunk. Psychotic. Angry. Drug fueled. The life of every party and the death of every relationship. In a two-year span of time, he attended 94 shows at the Wild Buffalo House of Music, high on drugs and alcohol every time. And even wilder is that the “Buff” was just one of several venues he frequented. Bartenders knew him by name. So did the drug dealers. So did the police. So did the St. Joe’s ER and psych-ward staff. You could call him a “frequent-flyer” with all…
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3.5 years. Two hospitalizations. One note that said “Get help” on an empty bedroom door. This is the story of my estrangement from my daughters, what I had to burn down to become someone worth coming back to, and how I found my way back to them. This is not a highlight reel. This is the whole ugly house.
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Three days of real peace. Then Thursday happened and my nervous system decided to manufacture a full-blown crisis out of thin air. This is what it looks like when your rational mind is miles ahead and your body is still running trauma drills for a war that is already over. Also: a word to the critics, the ghost-readers, and anyone still watching from a distance. Spoiler: the firewall is up and the view from up here is worth everything it cost.
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I spent months grieving what I lost. Then one Tuesday the grief shifted into something I didn’t have a word for yet. Not sadness. Not anger. Bewilderment. A deep, disorienting, almost embarrassing what the actual fuck was I tolerating? I had been pouring everything into people who were treating me like a resource. Emotional support they never returned. Money that disappeared. Access. That’s what they wanted. Not me. When I walked away from enough of it, the noise stopped. And in the quiet, I found him. The version of me that had been waiting his whole life to be seen…
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For months the past kept showing up uninvited. Mind games. Hypervigilance. Plans I changed out of dread. I almost let it work. But recently something crystallized, I finally saw clearly what I was dealing with, and something in my nervous system just released. This is what seeing the light actually looks like. Not a dramatic spiritual awakening. Standing in your own power so completely that someone else’s bullshit just slides right off. Access denied.
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