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My Recovery and Healing Mainframe.
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"If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month."-Theodore Roosevelt
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A year ago I walked off a 25 year IT career with no plan and no safety net. Since then I have lost a partnership, an identity, and most of my extended family, and found chemical and emotional sobriety, a personal operating system that actually works for how my brain runs, and the truth that I have been autistic and masking my entire life without knowing it. This is the full road from that exit, including the boundary that got tested within days of finally setting it, and the new connection I’m building without a mask on for the first…
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May 2026 was a month of feeling everything, protecting everything, and losing nothing that actually mattered. 146 days completely sober. 71 days emotionally clean. 210.3 miles walked. Got hit by a mail truck and walked away. Felt the grief. Honored the nervous system. Held the boundaries. Said goodbye to what wasn’t safe. Said hello to a bison Brotherhood, Lummi elders, new friendships, and a pier I danced off as a free man. This is what healing looks like when it’s actually working.
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For the first time in my life, I can actually feel the love. Not as a concept. As a felt thing. I danced to prove it.
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Someone called me a creep in public last weekend. Loudly. In front of other people. He looked at a stranger spreading anonymous kindness and reached for the most dehumanizing word he could find. He didn’t ask what I was doing. He didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt. He just aimed it 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 anymore.
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Your brain doesn’t keep you stuck because it’s afraid of what’s ahead. It keeps you stuck because it’s afraid of losing what it already knows. I walked 12 miles, got hit by a mail truck, and sat on a beach watching the tidal flats before I finally understood what my nervous system had been trying to tell me for months. Grief was behind all of it. Not one clean loss. A stack.
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Bison don’t run from storms. They charge straight into them. Head down. Horns forward. This is a collection of wisdom from real conversations with real people: about addiction and shame, grief making space, shedding the skin you’ve outgrown, learning that solitude is freedom, and what unconditional love actually looks like when it’s real. If you are in recovery, healing wounds you didn’t ask for, questioning who you are becoming, carrying guilt about your past, or losing people and old versions of yourself: this is for you. You are not alone in this herd. Keep charging.
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Fear of being alone drove every single destructive pattern and decision I ever made. I didn’t know that for most of my life. I just kept running the program. On May 6, 2026, my no contact order expired at midnight and I walked to the pier alone, happy, sober, and left there completely free for the first time possibly since birth.
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