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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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March 2026 was one of the most significant months of my life. Here’s what I saw.
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November 2023, I stood at Heather Meadows the day before my psychiatric crisis and had no idea what was coming. Today I went back. Same mountain. Not even close to the same person. This is what closing circles actually looks like.
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Standing in a sold out crowd of 10,000 people in Seattle on Saturday night, with lasers splitting the air above my head and bass moving through my chest and my platonic love wrapped around me and 82 days of complete sobriety underneath all of it, I started crying. Not the polite kind. The kind that comes from somewhere so deep in your body you don’t know it’s coming until it’s already happening. It was a realization that arrived at a cellular level: I am really alive. This is the view from the top of the mountain I have been climbing…
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I have written a lot about what I burned down. The codependency. The enmeshment. The relationship decisions I kept making out of fear, not love. But here is the thing nobody really asks about: what survived? This is the inventory I never saw anyone else do. What the fire actually took. What it didn’t. What came back better than before. What showed up brand new. And what a state trooper on the side of a dark road at 11pm accidentally confirmed about all of it.
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Awareness isn’t a step on the road to change. It is the entire road. Without it, you’re not on the road at all. You’re just in a field somewhere doing donuts in the dark. From peer support work to IFS parts work to a stormy Tuesday in Bellingham where I’m still processing a decision that cost me sixteen days of hard-won peace, this post is about the one thing that changes everything, and the one thing nobody can hand you. You have to earn the silence first. And then you have to let the silence show you the truth.
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I spent three hours at the pier today. Pacing. Measuring. Flipping my camera completely upside down and taking eight shots to get one frame right. Deleting half of what I made and starting over without drama. And somewhere on that gravel beach with the tide out and the clouds doing their whole Pacific Northwest thing, I realized I was watching myself do exactly what I’ve been writing about for months. Same camera. Same pier. Completely different photographer. This is what it looks like when you stop shooting from the hip and actually do the work.
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I took the Ricoh GR IIIx down to the Little Squalicum waterfront and spent a midday with the BNSF trestle, the tidal flats, and my favorite pier. Multiple exposure, 40mm, and the particular kind of thinking that only happens when you’re far enough out over the water that the shore stops mattering.
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