The Little Weird Kid’s Story

I'd been drinking a lot. No. I'll say that a little differently.

I'd been seriously abusing myself with alcohol for the better part of two decades.

I've never had anything like a healthy relationship with alcohol. The first time I remember drinking was at about 12 or 13. Family friends were at my mom and stepdad's house (my house) for some sort of party or holiday. It was Winter; I do know that. This family's oldest son was a couple of years older than me. He stole some lite beer from one of the refrigerators and we drank them under the streetlight at the end of a long driveway, out of view of the house. We buried the empty cans in an enormous mound of snow, piled high by the city plows after they made the turn through the adjacent cul de sac. I remember watching that snow melt inch by day all Spring long, like Poe's Telltale Heart, while I waited for someone to find the evidence and start the interrogation.

That first experience didn't kick anything off with alcohol, but it did begin to live in my brain. But this story isn't about alcohol abuse or alcoholism or addiction of any kind, really.

Really, this story is about self harm. And healing.

Alcohol was an escape in some ways. It was a way to shut down my brain while I was conscious. And it was a way to spend as little time conscious as possible. But it was mostly a way to hurt myself, to keep chipping away at myself until there was nothing left.

That started (the self-harm, I mean) pretty early on. I started with pocket knives and bathroom razors- drawing trenches across my skin. At first, to see what would happen. What would it feel like and what would be under the skin? That bright, hot sting was scary. Wrong and dangerous, but powerful and I was the only one who knew about it, like the cans in the snow. It was a look in to something deeper and it was mine to control. I could make it stop, I could go deeper, I could wrap and bandage, I could sever and burn. The pain was mine. The scars were mine. The blood was mine. And I could let it out when it was too much to keep holding inside. I would drag my knuckles across the rough bricks that made up the walls of my junior-high and high-schools until I left stains in the grout lines. I punched walls and windshields and smashed my favorite belongings, childhood toys, drawings I’d done, things I loved. My release valves. Pain is release, pain is control, pain is for me.

And with the cuts, the shredded knuckles, the broken sheetrock and windows and garbage bags full of smashed GI Joes and art projects, came the hiding. The pain was for me, after all. And it could only stay mine if it was hidden from everyone else.

So, this is a story about hiding. And how even hiding itself is type of self-harm. And how healing can't happen while you're still hiding. And then it's a story about healing. It's about how ending self-harm, ending hiding, and beginning healing is a group sorta thing and everyone in the group feels the pain, the anger, the betrayal and sadness, but also the joy and the safety and the peace.

And so if you're asking yourself why this bit of personal healing and self-therapy is being presented for any and all to read? It's because I've learned that I can't keep healing if I'm still hiding. And that doesn't necessarily mean living my life as an open wound for the world to see, but part of how I'm healing is through my writing, my drawing, my storytelling. I've been hiding those things for a long time now too. And so part of my healing means putting some of my "art" out where someone else might see it. I'm starting with a personal story because it's real. It's authentic. It's what I know, or what I'm trying to know. And it doesn't need illustration or animation to get the point across. I can't hide behind turning this in to a feature-length film that will take me years to make, and thus prolong the hiding. It's here. It's now. It's words on a page and nothing more.

I started smoking cigarettes when I was 18. I was dating a girl who was a year older than me. It was 1999. She'd graduated high-school a year earlier than I did and so, was experienced in the world. We shared a love of punk and rap music, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and anything that made us feel witty and subversive. She smoked cigarettes because that's what witty, subversive people did. So, I did too. That was the first drug or chemical I used, abused, attacked myself with. I hated every moment of it (except for how cool I looked). I grew up with a mom who seemed to smoke as much as she breathed. Trapped in the passenger seat for rides to the doctor or allergist while she cracked her driver's window. It tasted awful, but worse, it made my lungs feel tight and small. I had exercise-induced asthma and allergies (I know. Just take my lunch money, okay?) and the feeling of the smoke in my lungs felt like the beginning of an asthma attack, gasping for air that isn't there. I've always secretly felt like my death would come with gasping. My mom's mother, a tiny Irish Catholic woman I called "Grandmama" because she adored it (And I felt like I owed her that in return for the amazing homemade rolls she baked at every Thanksgiving and Christmas. And the special kindness she would show in wrapping up leftover cranberries in a crystal dish just for me to take home.), spent her last couple of years with an oxygen tank herself, slowly dying from emphysema. On the day she was buried it was bitter cold and windy. My uncles and I joked about just kicking her casket in to the open grave and going inside to warm up. I wonder if we were all mourning the only person in that family who dared to show real affection for us.

Anyway, when I was 20, that girl who liked punk music and Buffy and I had been together kind of off and on for a long time. We'd lived together, we'd broken up, we'd come back together again. Neither of us were happy. We were as emotionally and mentally abusive to each other as we were to ourselves. She was controlling, jealous, unreasonable, unrealistic, untrusting and untrustworthy. I was the same. We were neutron stars merging, orbits spiraling until they collapse in to each other, bursts of chaos and destruction exploding out of our union with each doomed orbit.

I was living in the basement room of my parents' house when she called to tell me that she was pregnant. It was a surprise, but in the kind of in the way where it's not much of a surprise at all. The pregnancy wasn't planned, but it was...inevitable, even purposeful? It was another way to cut myself, to feel something. But it was also a desperate attempt to have a family. To be loved by someone. It was self harm and a cry for healing and love in one.

That relationship, the emotional and mental abuse, even the sex was really just more self-harm in a new disguise. The beer cans in the snow became razor scars on my arm and chest became bloody knuckles became cigarettes became unprotected sex I didn't enjoy with a woman who I "hated" (spoiler alert: I really hated myself) knowing full well that the eventual outcome would be a baby. There'd already been one miscarriage or false pregnancy after all. And that scare didn't change anything.

My daughter was born in 2002. I was 21 years old, working overnight shifts stocking shelves at Home Depot while failing miserably at maintaining my tattoo apprenticeship under an artist at a tattoo shop in the next town over. I was depressed, sick, and trapped in a co-dependent, abusive relationship that was killing us all.

I quit the apprenticeship. No. I'll say that a little differently.

I ran away from my apprenticeship.

Buffy's jealousy extended to my art career as well. She made every moment of my apprenticeship unbearable. "Did you tattoo any girls today? Did you talk to any? Who? Why was she there?" I dreaded every day when I got home. I dreaded going to the shop because I didn't go in often enough. I was an apprentice, there to learn, the new guy. I should've been the first one there and the last one to leave every day. I knew that. But I didn't go in often enough, because I knew every time I went in I'd hear from my mentor how I needed to show more dedication and put in more time and effort. I knew when I got home I'd hear how selfish I am, how I'm never home, how I must be spending my days surrounded in naked women; I'd need to account for every second.

On top of that, I was struggling. I'd been an "artist" for as long as I could remember. I loved drawing. When I was in elementary school, I drew a damn-near life-sized picture of Mickey Mouse to display at our 3rd grade music class performance. It wasn't that drawing was easy for me, but it felt right. It was a challenge to make what was in my head come out on to the paper the way I saw it, but even so it felt natural. Like running or jumping, like playing. And people seemed to respond to it. They'd look over my shoulder and I'd feel their surprise. "You drew that? By hand? From memory?" All questions I imagine every budding artist has grown ill hearing long before adulthood.

The problem was, I had a ceiling. There was a limit to how good my drawing, my art could get. And it was made of steel rebar-reinforced concrete, 100 feet thick and defended by rabid, bloodthirsty dogs. I didn't know why, yet. I just knew that I could do a lot of things pretty well. Above-average, if I'm being totally honest. It wasn't something I meant to do or tried to do or even felt good about, necessarily, but in most things I could kind of succeed or perform better than most of my peers without really putting much effort in to it. Drawing, writing, math, reading, doing somersaults, whatever. I'd do what everyone else was doing, then collect my blue ribbon or my A+ or my gold star. That was pretty good for getting by on, especially in the American educational system of the 80s and 90s. Where things got more difficult is when I tried to push any further on those things. I didn't care much about being amazing at Math or Geography, but I did want to be the best artist. I did want to be the best writer. I wanted to be the best guitar player or skateboarder or chef. But the best I could ever seem to muster was "better than the amateurs and intermediates, worse than the best". Why? Was I just mediocre at everything?

I knew there was a problem. I didn't know what it was. Or why. I didn't have a name for it. Not one that felt true, anyway. The names I heard were "laziness", "wasted potential", "unserious". None of those felt true, though. Even as much as I'd already become comfortable with self-harm and tearing myself apart, I didn't really believe I was lazy or unserious. There was nothing in the universe I was more serious about than my art, my stories, music.

There were some clues, though. I drew every day in school. Every minute of every class of every day. I drew or wrote. Created. Imagined. But mostly that came out in the form of drawings in my notebooks, on tests and quizzes, folders and textbook wraps. The teachers that either didn't complain, or gave up on complaining, were my favorites. It was so much easier to draw and create without having to hide my paper or art supplies behind stacks of books, backpacks, and classmates. One day, I realized when I was looking back at a drawing I'd made in a history class, that I could remember details of the teacher's lecture just by looking at the parts of the drawing I was working on at that time. It worked for most of the classes that didn't require calculations. Math, chemistry, most sciences. But the other subjects, things with stories and concepts, the drawings were better than notes. And it seemed like it was easier to pay attention to what was being said if my hands were moving and eyes were on my paper. It frustrated and angered more than a few red-faced history teachers who thought they'd caught me napping with a directed question, but instead found my answer thoughtful and more or less well-reasoned, at least for a teenager.

Once I got to middle-school and high-school and found my love of writing, school was pretty much over for me. I could still do the cool take-notes-by-drawing trick, but that didn't work the same with writing. I couldn't write and listen to the lecture at the same time, and what I was writing or creating was always much more interesting than what the teachers were talking about, even when I knew I needed that information to pass, to not be caught out for not paying attention, to not be caught out for having not paid attention since Kindergarten. Drawing was my first love, but writing is where I finally felt like a dolphin popping in and out of the waves as it swims playfully alongside a boat. It's how I imagine an owl feels, swooping down silently through the air to grab a mouse that never knew it was being hunted. Writing felt like breathing. It was like drawing, but without banging my head on the desk to get things to come out the way I saw them in my head. It felt easy and natural. Like it's what my specific combination of body parts and brain electricity was designed for. The same way dolphins are designed perfectly for swimming and snowy owls are designed perfectly for being silent, flying, night time ninjas. And what was even more amazing was that writing made the constant voices, the arguing, the bickering, the self-doubt, and all of that noise stop for awhile. I didn't realize it then, (I'm only really reckoning with it these days) but words and ideas and entire worlds get stuck in my head. I create them without trying and they bounce around, circling and ricocheting and smashing in to each other, and they get all tangled up and confused. And when they do that I get angry, frustrated, and irritable. But, if I write them down, if I lay them out in an order that makes sense to my eyes, they start to quiet. They don't argue as loudly. They let me rest.

So, I knew something was different in my head. No one else I knew seemed to do things the way I did. And for the most part, the way I did things worked. I got A's, I earned awards, I was made captains of teams for sports I'd never played before, I got promotions for jobs I didn't really want or care that much about. So, I was succeeding, kinda. As far as everyone else was concerned, anyway. And if the penalty for that was hearing a non-stop barrage of attacks on my character and integrity, being called lazy and unserious and wasting my potential, I guessed that was just the cost of doing business? Well, at least in my case, it didn't take very long for a kid like that to develop a very "fuck 'em, then" attitude.

But I wasn't really succeeding. I was failing myself every day. Every day I wanted more for myself. Every day I fell short. Most days I struggled to even start. I felt awful every day. I still do. I was beating myself up worse than anyone else was (and they were were really putting their shoulder in to those punches).

There wasn't much I knew for certain at that age. I'm sure I had a very typical, teenager facade where I acted like I had it all figured out, but I've always been pretty self-aware, so I knew there was a lot I didn't know. But one thing I knew for certain, that I was as confident in as gravity and the sun rising tomorrow, was that I could never get better than mediocre or just above average. That my laziness or unseriousness or terrible lack of character and stick-to-it-iveness was a non-negotiable, unavoidable, insurmountable obstacle. So, when I pretended to leave my three ring binder of pencil drawings behind at the tattoo shop in the hopes of earning an apprenticeship there, I knew that I was setting myself up for failure. I knew I wouldn't succeed. I knew I wouldn't complete the apprenticeship or be a real artist or even fit in with the real artists. I knew that unbreakable wall of laziness and poor character would be my doom. When I came back to get my binder, a tattoo artist there who'd done my first tattoo a couple of years prior, sat down with me and paged through it. He'd been looking through it on his own. He pointed out a few drawings and told me what he liked about them. He appreciated my clean line work. He liked the energy and how I wasn't afraid to use and play with perspective and warp things to convey a feeling. My style was very influenced by Disney, anime, and comic books, so the large shapes, characters with large expressive eyes, and lots of movement were a pretty natural fit for tattooing. I don't know if I'd ever felt that type of validation before. Every other person who'd ever commented on my drawing either gave me very surface-level praise that wasn't interesting or helpful to me as an artist, or they asked stupid questions. (And yes, in some very rare cases, stupid questions do exist. "Where are his legs?" while I was still actively working on the drawing, for example.) Or needlessly critical opinions like, "That's really good, but it's so scary. Why don't you draw some flowers or something cute?" No, when he talked about my drawings, he talked about the same things I saw in them. The line work was clean and strong and confident and my shading and rendering skills were good, but I didn't have a good grasp for using color and lighting, I didn't use references often enough so a lot of my art was too basic or generic. And he was dead right. And nothing he said hurt. It was all glorious. And he mostly explained things in a way I understood. And he was bald and had giant holes in his ears and gold veneers on his teeth and metal hearts implanted under the skin on the backs of his hands. This guy was fucking cool, okay? And he liked my art for all the reasons someone should, and he criticized it for all the reasons that someone should and he wanted me to be as good as he imagined I could be.

But, by that time, I'd already been hiding for too long. I couldn't say, "I really want this apprenticeship so badly, but I am terrified because I know I won't be able to complete it. I know I'm going to fail. I know my art looks good and has a lot of potential and I've learned how to say all the right things to make you trust that I can do this and someone with a real, working brain and good character and strong will could turn it in to real, professional, amazing art, but my brain is bad and my character is bad and I'm too weak and lazy to change it."

Instead I said, "When can I start? I promise, I will work harder than anyone you've ever met. Thank you so much!"

A year or so later, I wasn't as far along as I should've been in my apprenticeship. I'd drawn pages of flash, practiced tattooing oranges, grapefruits, potatoes, and one disgusting, thawed roaster chicken with tissue paper skin that shredded with the slightest touch from the needles and really only succeeded in making everything unsanitary and smelly, but produced more than enough laughter and mockery to be worth the pain and mild embarrassment. I'd tattooed a few friends, the owner of the shop, my baby mama, and a handful or so of trusting walk-in customers. I was loving every moment that I could manage, but the sword of Damocles was threatening to drop with a sharp snap any second. I wasn't spending as much time as I should drawing and improving my skills outside of the shop. I wasn't in the shop as often as I should be. But worse, I wasn't asking questions and learning. I wasn't telling anyone the truth about myself, that no matter how hard we all tried, I was not going to get any better at this. And now I had a baby daughter who I was terrified of losing, of failing, of hurting. And I was about to run away again.

I'd been trusted with a key so I could stay late or come in early to make needles or sanitize equipment in the autoclave. One morning, I went in to the shop before the sun was up and collected some things; my portfolio of drawings, I think, and my drawing supplies (a fishing tackle box full of pencils, ink, and erasers, wrapped in a collage of stickers). I'd left most of what I'd decorated my stall at the shop with, though. My horror movie and band posters, McDonald's Simpsons' Treehouse of Horrors Happy Meal toys, some art and drawing books. I just took the stuff I'd made myself. The stuff that was really important to me. I left the key behind and ghosted them. The whole shop, including my mentor, a guy who was barely 10 years older than me, who'd seen a troubled kid with a little bit of talent and offered him an opportunity at everything he'd ever dreamed of, being a professional artist. He trusted me, he believed in me, he gave me his knowledge and expertise free of charge, and even gave me the full licensed-artist 50% commission on the tattoos that I did, even though I was just an apprentice. I disappeared completely.

When I cut him off and left tattooing behind, I left that dream behind too. I left the artist behind. I locked him up in a dark cell in my brain. I locked him up with the 8 year-old kid who made a cardboard city for his Monster in My Pocket toys and the 9 year-old who wrote and drew his own comic books. They all shared a cell with the kid who poked holes in a black piece of construction paper and used an old 8mm camera to film a toy spaceship flying in front of it, even though he knew he'd never get the film developed. The cell was getting crowded now.

My parents divorced when I was 4 years old. It was pretty devastating for me. I remember telling myself over and over that I would never do that to my own children. I'd never let them grow up with an absent father or take them away from their friends to a place where they didn't belong, to spend holidays with a family that wasn't their own. So, when punk rock Buffy mom and I finally split and went our separate ways right around the time our own daughter turned 4, I started drinking.

I was willing to spend the next 14 years hating every moment of my life to make sure that my daughter didn't grow up the way that I did. At least, I told myself that's what I was willing to do. But when her mom told me that she'd found someone else, she was moving out, and moving on, I was secretly grateful. She'd blinked first. She'd been the one to call it quits. All I had to do now was make sure that I wasn't an absent father and that I did everything in my power to give that kid a good life.

But, I wasn't strong enough to do that all sober. Or at least, I wasn't then. I was 24 or 25, sick, lost, terrified, poor and already in debt from a college I never attended, responsible for a beautiful little girl who filled my heart with everything I could have ever hoped for, and so terribly depressed.

I'd had run-ins with thoughts of death before. Thoughts of suicide. The thoughts were usually centered around the how. And ending whatever pain I was feeling in that moment. But now, with a child I loved, with a little girl who loved me, those thoughts came with a new feeling. The feeling of being trapped. I couldn't die anymore. Not without hurting the only person in the world I truly loved and felt loved by.

So, I drove to the liquor store up the street. I bought a bottle of rum and a bottle of vodka. The clerk asked for my ID and made a joke about me being an "old fart" or "old bugger" or something. I laughed it off like I was older and more experienced than 24, even though he'd just looked at the age on my license. I wanted to seem older, smarter, more experienced. I wanted him to believe that I'd done this before and that I was a responsible adult. I was terrified of what I was going to do with this stuff. I felt myself taking a step in the wrong direction and I wanted to do it in secret. I didn't want witnesses to my shame.

I brought it back to the house and made a rum and coke. Even those first few drinks were mostly alcohol and very little soda. The soda was there to hide the alcohol from everyone else, but I wanted to taste the poison. I wanted to feel it burn. I wanted to breathe smoke. I wanted to kill myself with every sip and every breath. There was always a perverse joy or comfort or something in the taste of alcohol, choking and gasping on smoke, eating the spiciest food I can stand. That never went away while I was drinking. I always wanted it to hurt going down.

I learned pretty quickly that straws made it easier to drink faster and therefore get drunk faster. My ex was still living in the house at that time and noticed. She reported it to my mom who asked me about my new drinking habit. I explained that the straws were just for stirring and everyone was worried about nothing. That was the last that anyone challenged my drinking for almost 20 years.

Once we'd fully separated and each moved in to our own apartments, it was all over for me and any hope of sobriety. We split custody of our daughter 50/50 at first. 4 days with me, 3 days with her. Next week, 4 days with mom, 3 with me. Until she's 18, we decided. The days that she was with her mother, I was unconscious. I'd go to work, come home and immediately start drinking vodka. If you’ve seen the show Severance, I kind of did that to myself. Any moment to myself, I would try to shut off, shut down, try not to remember anything. I would draw the curtains, light up a cigarette, turn on a movie or some music, and get started killing myself with each drink. My little apartment freezer had 3 liters of vodka and an old Bertolli Italian pasta in a bag meal. The refrigerator was soda and whatever food was left over from the last time my daughter was home.

Still, I made it through an 18-month visual and web design program at Brown College and got my first job in design at an online startup that sold stone countertops. They’d hired me on a contract to design an instructional pamphlet that they intended to print and send with samples of their product. The pamphlet would teach their customers how to use their website to measure and estimate their countertops. This turned in to a full-time job offer and a 6-year stay where I designed websites, logos, business cards and trade-show graphics. I also made sales calls and collection calls and shipped samples and flew to trade shows. It wasn’t art. But it was kind of in my wheelhouse and as long as I was creating something, I felt like I could be a pretty successful part of a team. And this was kind of raw, grassroots, non-corporate. We swore and laughed and chased ideas and fought. I learned. It wasn't quite like being with the guys at the tattoo shop, but it was fun and I could support my daughter and myself, even if it meant totaling up our groceries on a calculator while shopping and putting things back to avoid going over budget.

When my daughter was about 6, I met the woman I would marry. She was 23, finishing up college while working at the coffee shop owned by my brother-in-law. I’d been drinking myself to death alone in that apartment for years, but I’d been taking walks with my dog recently, getting outside more often, still drinking every day, but less. Sometimes only to get to sleep at night and hardly at all during the day.

I was terrified. The last relationship I was in felt like a life sentence I’d never escape. I knew I couldn't ever allow myself to go back to that. And I knew how much of that awful mess was of my own making. But it had been years of living alone, years without sex or kissing, no romance or affection. I hadn’t dated. I barely had any friends.

But I’d also spent all of those years alone, designing in my head, the perfect husband and father for my future wife and family. I’d be cool, calm, responsible, confident, never jealous. I’d lift up my wife and support her passions. I’d be her biggest fan and loudest cheerleader. I'd be everything I wasn't in my previous relationships. And that would manifest someone good for me too.

When we started dating, I was Him. I tried new, scary things. I hung out with her college friends and went to beer olympics, and I was supportive and encouraging. I built her up and cheered her on and I was open with my affections, honest, vulnerable. I was cool with her guy friends and never jealous. The perfect boyfriend.

She moved in to my apartment less than a month after our first date. We hadn’t had sex at that point, sleeping in the same bed for weeks already without anything beyond making out. I’d never really felt very comfortable or known how to approach sex, and 6 years of celibacy and alcohol abuse had me more than a little gun shy around a cool, pretty college girl who I was certain had plenty of options beyond me. So, I hid all of that from her too. I wanted her to see only the best of what I had to offer and I hid everything I was ashamed of. Once, early on in our dating, I stood her up for something. Maybe just a phone call or something. She asked me what happened and I think I said I'd been drinking and fell asleep or something. I don't remember all that clearly, but I do recall her saying, "Oh, you didn't hang out with me because you passed out drinking? That's kind of a red flag." I was astonished. No one in my life was that up front or honest with me. No one talked like that. No one addressed people's red flags to their faces. I was in love. She was terrifying and challenging and didn't let my bullshit fly. I should've told her then. I should've said, "You're right. You're so right. I am a walking red flag, but I've been hiding it because I want so badly to not believe what I know to be true. I am shit." And so, I brushed it off and acted like she was overreacting to nothing.

We fell in love. We started building a life. In 2011, we bought a house just a mile from where her parents lived and married the next Fall. My daughter was 11. The drinking had kept going in hiding over the years. Every night. Getting worse, creeping back out from where I'd hidden it and infecting every hour of my days.

At our wedding, I’d been sober most of the day, but right before the ceremony, someone offered me some scotch to take the edge off. I made a horrible, tasteless joke about "one last chance to hook up with a bridesmaid" or something I instantly regretted and beat myself up for. I took a gulp, then snuck a few more gulps before the music cued my entrance.

By dinner, I was pretty buzzed, but not enough to speak in to the mic without stage fright, so I gulped some red wine. I’d daydreamed of that moment. I wanted so badly to stand up in front of everyone in that room and thank my new wife’s grandfather, a lovely, bright-faced little French-Swede who made everyone around him instantly at ease, within moments of meeting. I wanted to thank him for welcoming me in to his family. For giving me a shot at something I’d wanted all my life, and for doing it with kindness, warmth, and joy. I wanted to thank my new father-in-law for the way he’d taken me in so easily and made joining the family so comfortable for me. For being real people who hated the Yankees and yelled at the TV and sometimes got too loud or too emotional, but then calmed down and it was okay. I wanted to thank him for being an amazing father to my wife, his stepdaughter. Her experience with her step-family was so much different than mine. I wanted to thank him for showing me a different way. And a small, immature, very hurt part of me wanted my family, every one of them, to hear me say those words to those men and to that family. I knew I couldn’t. I knew my eyes would flood, my heart would beat out of control and get away from me. I was certain my voice would crack and the floodgates would open and all the pain and fear and anger and hope and love and gratitude and desperation would come spilling out. I wasn’t even afraid of what people would think of me in that moment, I just knew I couldn’t allow it. I did try. I took the mic. I stood on legs made of the same fettuccine alfredo and chicken breast that was on my plate and gurgling in my gut. I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I handed the mic to my wife.

We danced. We did the traditional white-people midwestern wedding stuff. Lots of awkward elbows and knees and "don't know what to do with my hands" dancing. At one point I went to the bar to get a glass of water. My alcoholic cousin bought me a drink. Then people were lining up to buy them for me. Then I was sneaking extra drinks between the ones being bought for me against my protests, “Really! No, I’m good! I’ve had enough! Okay, fine. Make it a double. Yeah, no ice, neat please."

My best man brought me home that night and tucked me in to bed. I spent the next day nauseous and sick while we opened presents and I prayed everyone would just disappear. Leave me with my vomit. I was so ashamed, filled with so much guilt for ruining my wife’s wedding day. Ruining my own. I carry that guilt today. I shame myself today. More self harm.

When I started thinking about our relationship long-term a few years earlier, I left my job and took a boring job with a boring company that made boring websites about god who cares. But it was almost twice the salary and we could get out of our apartment and start building a life. My boss was a recovering alcoholic himself. He never said as much, but he twitched uncontrollably, and once when he gave me his login credentials to pull some stock photos off of a website, I saw that he'd saved a collection of inspiring affirmations for people recovering from alcohol abuse. I judged him. I'd disliked the man already. He took credit for other peoples' work and ideas, he gave himself the ridiculous title of Vice President of Creative despite being one of only three people in the design department of a pretty small company. I didn't like anything about the job, but I did get to do some video directing, editing, writing, shooting, etc. And the office building was a 5 minute drive from Grandmama, so I was lucky enough to spend some lunch hours with her in the final year or so prior to her passing. I’d switch jobs again once more, about 18 months later, and get a pay increase that I’d never expected or planned for. Pretty soon we were making 6 figures and our family started growing.

In 2014, our first son was born. We waited until he was born to learn his sex (a decision my wife and I would repeat with each baby). I was floored. I hadn’t expected a boy. It didn’t matter, truly. My daughter was the light and warmth and gravity that sustained my life. I adored her and wanted her to have a sister. To see that boy, though, I think I saw a little more of myself than I had ever before. I’d felt like a man raised by women, mostly failed, mocked, and belittled by men. I didn’t know how to raise a son. I didn’t know how to protect him or provide for him what I thought a father should. I was terrified again, but in love. So deeply in love with my son, my daughter, my wife, our family. So deeply in love with my wife who was a seemingly a whole new person, a mom. Someone who would nurture and love and care for my son. She would build him up, give him strength and confidence.

We were all so in love. We learned not long after that another baby was on the way, due 18 months after our son’s birth. I was happy in life, but bored and restless at work, exhausted by the weight of my responsibilities at home. I knew how to provide things and services for these people, my family. I knew how to pay the bills and clean the house and make the meals and tell everyone when it’s time to go to bed. But I didn’t know how to live with them. I didn’t know how to live with them and be happy and comfortable and safe and content. I didn't know how to relax with them and live in the moment and just be dad or just be there.

After passing by a Fire Department Corn Feed booth at our local city summer fair, I applied for a part-time job. My step-uncle was a full-time post office delivery man who walked the same route for 34 years in the town he grew up in. In his off hours, he was a volunteer fire fighter for the city my family lived in. I grew up hearing the crackle of his pager interrupt Thanksgiving dinners. I'd always admired him. I liked that he was a postman. I liked that he had three kids and played on the floor with them and treated them with love that you could see on his face. I liked that he seemed to want to be there with them. I wanted some of that. I didn't like arguing over insignificant details about web design for a giant corporation. I loved that my wife was doing something important with her life every day, teaching high school students with autism, Down Syndrome, DCD, and other traits that require extra help at public school and in a world designed not for them. I wanted to help people. I'd wanted to be a superhero since I discovered The Flash and The X-Men as a pre-teen. And I was restless. I was scared to be at home with the people I loved.

I'd been working out more often, exercising, lifting weights, and just generally trying to treat myself better in the months leading up to joining the department. I'd still been drinking every night, but just to get to sleep, sometimes just a few beers. I went to the informational session with my wife. We learned that it was a paid, part-time job, not an unpaid volunteer type of thing. I was excited. I was going to fight fires and drive big, red trucks and save people's lives and make a real difference and my wife would be so attracted to me and my kids would be proud of their superhero dad who had finally done something to earn some respect and love. A dad with real character and integrity. Sure, I'd still be lazy, I still wouldn't be an artist or be able to put my full self in to something, but firefighter had to make up for a lot of what made me a shitty person. I didn't believe in god, heaven, or karma, but if you're hedging your bets, you could do a lot worse than life-saving firefighter.

Despite my enthusiasm and joy for being new at something, for not being expected to know everything already, for not being expected to be the best, I took firefighting on the same way I'd taken on just about everything in my life: Immediate life-changing passion, learn everything I can, be better, faster, stronger, smarter than anyone else in my class, get promoted a few times, then lose all interest and bail out as soon as it got too uncomfortable to push harder. I fucked up again. For the next 7 and a half years, I'd get up in the middle of the night and fight fires and pull people out of cars and perform CPR and save actual human lives while my family and daytime coworkers slept. And each time I'd feel awful about myself. I did it, but not really. I could've done it better if I'd put in the practice, the work, read the whole chapter, did the pre-tests and quizzes. I was just a poseur. I was just pretending.

Our middle daughter was born in December. When I first saw her I was in love, but something was missing. Something didn't feel the same as it had when my oldest daughter was born. Something didn't feel the same as it had when my son was born just a year and a half prior. Had I run out of love? Was I terrified that I was bringing more children in to this world that I didn't know how to care for? That I didn't know how to live with? Was I just setting up more kids to suffer what I had been feeling my entire life? And did I do all of this knowing full well what I was doing the entire time? Was I hurting my own children, and not only that, but doing even worse by making more children to hurt?

When she was a few months old, she came down with a case of RSV that had me shook. Hearing her little lungs struggling through wheezing breaths had a physical effect on me. I was short of breath myself just from being in the room with her, but I couldn't leave her alone. I stayed awake for 2 nights while she slept on my lap on our living room couch. I watched each breath leave her little lips and waited to see her chest rise with each new breath in. Each breath in and out choking my throat, my skin crawling. After those few nights, we've been inseparable. I feel that girl in my chest like I feel my own heart. I would die for each and every one of my children, but I feel her in my bones.

15 months later, our youngest boy was born. He was so round and beautiful. Huge brown eyes and reddish hair that covered his head in waves of giant curls. By this time, I was a Lieutenant in the fire department and drinking heavily, every night, most days, some mornings. Thinking about his baby and toddler years destroys me. I don't remember them clearly. I was so absent, even when I was home. And he scares me. I see pain in him and hurt. I see so much of what crushes me in that boy and I just want to take it all away and save him. I want to slow him down and hold him and make him feel okay. I want to jump ahead to the future and make sure that he's going to be okay. That he's going to be better than me, stronger where I wasn't, smarter and more resilient in the times that I caved. I feel a deep debt to him. To protect him from our brains.

I spent the next 4 years taking on more and more responsibility at work, leading a group of 7 designers working on the Cart and Checkout experiences for one of the top retail websites in the world. At the fire department, I led companies on scenes, fought structure and car fires, ripped doors off of cars to save people trapped inside, performed CPR on dozens of people, loaded patients on to medevac helicopters, earned awards, took on more hours, traveled to chief's conferences and got more training and certifications.

I drank and I distanced myself. I turned inward. I got dark. I was alone. I was angry and short with the people I loved. I was critical and picked at minor flaws for no reason. I was hurting every second of every day and trying to pour more alcohol on top to try to keep the self harm commensurate with my hatred for myself. I was hiding everything. I went to bars and restaurants over my lunch hours, sitting alongside other middle-aged men with red, swollen eyes, round noses, and bloated guts. I poured bottles of scotch in to coffee thermoses and hid tiny bottles of liquor in the console of my truck. I drank before, during, and after driving. I kept cases of beer and bottles of scotch and vodka hidden in the garage, where I'd sneak out to quickly guzzle down throatfuls, stifling gags as I forced myself to swallow, sometimes throwing up all over the inside cab of my truck or on the floor of the garage. I'd race to clean it up before anyone saw, and wash down the taste of vomit with more scotch.

I hurt everyone around me. All of the people I loved. Everything I'd every wanted, dreamed of, needed, cried hoping I'd someday get to feel a little bit of. I was self-harming, but it was spreading. It was a growing cloud, darkening everything and everyone around me.

In 2020, like most of corporate white-collar America (and the world), I started working from home. Before the COVID-19 pandemic closed everything down, I was already well along in my destructive drinking. I was drinking during work most days, driving drunk regularly, and pretty quickly traveling a road of certain self-destruction. So, when I got a free pass to stay home, get paid, drink without any limitations, and do most of my work off-camera for the first 9-12 months, I was cinderblock on the gas pedal, bottle of liquor in each hand, heading for death and doom as fast as I could get there.

I never did return to the office for more than a day or a meeting or a conference at a time. The drinking got worse. Especially during the school year when my wife and kids were at work, school, and daycare. Over the next few years, I'd destroy my truck, get pulled over and just barely beat a field sobriety test (despite having open cans of beer in the console of my vehicle), and in one circumstance that I will never forget and never forgive myself for no matter how much therapy I experience, I drove drunk with my daughter in the passenger seat. I terrified her. I was home with her alone that evening. She had a gymnastics class that I'd forgotten about and had been drinking all day prior. When my wife texted me and asked if we were going to gymnastics, my daughter was unsure. She'd been shy about going in the past, but I talked her through it through slurs and, I'm sure, angry, frustrated bellowing. I've wondered often since that evening if she didn't want to go because she could sense that I was off, or that it was unsafe. We got in the truck. It was dark already, a December late-afternoon, the day before her 6th birthday. I don't recall much of what happened next, but I remember her panicked and crying, asking me to stop. I remember being lost in a neighborhood, among houses I didn't recognize. We never made it to her class, but we made it home, safely. She was traumatized. I was sick. I'm still sick.

The next day we celebrated her birthday. I've kept the photo of her smiling in front of her birthday cake and lit candles as the wallpaper of my phone since that day. It reminds me how lucky we all are that she got to take that picture, and every birthday cake picture since.

My wife should've started the divorce that very next day. She should have left me. She should have saved those kids from a sick, dangerous, out of control man whose entire life had been darkness and chaos and terror and unanswered questions. She should have taken them all and ran.

Instead, I vowed never again. I'd never drink again. I'd never put our children in danger again. It was either I quit drinking and change for good, or I don't deserve this family.

I continued to drink nearly as often and as dangerously for the next 2 years.

My wife and I, despite the awful person I'd been, despite my anger and dark moods, despite the way I picked at everyone, snapped at everyone, criticized and belittled the people I loved- despite all of that, we decided to have our final child. It wasn't a "save the marriage" thing. We felt like our big family, one teenager graduated from high-school, and three elementary/daycare aged kids, really needed one more. Someone was still missing. So we decided to try for one more baby.

We learned that in June of 2021, our final child would be born. I was drinking a bit less, but hadn't made any real progress on quitting. Mentally and emotionally, I was as lost as ever. As chaotic and broken as ever. But we were excited about the baby. Everyone was.

In March, I was doing some house chores and laundry when my wife told me she wasn't feeling right and she was going to go to the doctor. We'd had 3 children together already, so we felt pretty accomplished at both the creating and the birthing of babies. She'd had 3 c-sections already, the first because my son didn't seem to be progressing after 19 hours of labor, then the 2 following out of a sense of precaution for my wife’s safety. But despite the 3 c-sections and a few other very minor issues in the past that all ultimately came to nothing, we felt pretty good about this last pregnancy.

So it was odd when she told me she was going to the doctor for the baby on a Sunday, but I was busy with the other kids and getting the house put together, so I didn't think much of it. Later she called to tell me that she was going to the hospital. That she was losing amniotic fluid and that they were going to try to prevent the pregnancy from moving in to active labor, a full 3 months early.

I was scared. Bed rest and hospitals for 3 months? How would we manage? What would that cost? Would my wife be okay? Could I handle the kids by myself for 3 months while she's either in a hospital or confined to bed? How could I take all that on, pay for all of that, while continuing to drink myself to death every day?

The next morning, I got a call from my wife. I was kind of just taking it easy that morning, trying not to stress, trying to think positive and just get everyone off to school and daycare. When I picked up the phone, I was playing it cool. "Okay, they were trying to stop the labor but you're still losing fluid? You're deciding whether to deliver the baby today? You decided already?! Okay. I can be there in 20 minutes." For the first time as parents, we learned the sex of our baby before she was delivered. My wife told me and apologized for ruining the surprise. I was devastated. My little girl.

I called my mom. I called my wife's parents. I was sure our baby, the final piece of our family, was going to die. It was way too early. 26 and a half weeks. Did she even weigh a pound?

When I got to the hospital, my wife was already in the delivery room, strapped to a table with her arms spread out to the sides like she was on a crucifix lying on its back. The baby, our little girl, had just been born. She was 2lbs, 4oz. My knees buckled. I nearly fell backwards to the floor. But I saw her. I went to my wife. We cried and held hands. I was sure my drinking had caused this. My wife was secretly sure that something she'd done had caused this.

While the doctors were sewing my wife back together for the last time, they brought me to the NICU, a place my wife, our daughter, and I would all come to know very well over the next 4 months. I got to put my fingers inside the incubator box. She grabbed my finger with the tiniest hand I'd ever felt, but she was strong. Like really strong. The nurses gathered around me and tried to comfort me. A doctor chuckled a bit at my tears and asked why I was crying. I was still so sure that she wouldn't survive. Their laughter at my fear was a little calming. They were experts, they weren't afraid or nervous. This was just a Monday morning. Tomorrow would be Tuesday. My time in the fire department up to that point had taught me that much. If the experts are cool, laughing, just having a regular work day, it's probably going to be okay.

We'd spend the next 4 months in that NICU and another NICU at a hospital in the city. We spent all day and night with her, taking shifts. My wife spent full days with her, trying to get her to take food by mouth, skin on skin time, rocking, singing, cuddling, love. I'd come in the evening, usually after the kids were in bed. I'd drink in the parking lot, then go inside and rock her, sometimes falling asleep in the rocking chair with her in my arms. Always wishing I could be there sober, spending time with my beautiful baby girl, whose very life was a miraculous gift that should've been enough to keep a drop of liquor from ever touching my lips again. But I was there. I rocked her in my arms. I tried to keep her from smelling my breath. I felt her in my arms and just wanted to be healthy for her. To be as strong as she was. As strong as my wife was.

She finally came home to us in July. She had a feeding tube and a nasal cannula. The incessant beeping and machines and tubes and adhesives and oxygen tanks followed her home from the hospital. But she was home.

I continued to drink, but fight against it, for a couple more years. In 2022, I left the fire department. I had a lot of reasons for leaving, but they all boiled down to - I needed rest. I'd joined the department fully intending to spend 20 or more years as a firefighter. I wouldn't likely make the 30+ years my uncle had when he retired, but I would give it a shot. But now, I needed to pull back. I was terrified that my drinking was going to get someone seriously hurt or killed. I was terrified that I was losing my family and I knew that I needed to be home with them. And the birth of our youngest, the time we spent in the hospital, it changed me. It changed all of us. It changed how I looked at the Fire Dept and my role in it at that time. I'd spent almost 8 years helping everyone else in town around me, plus leading people and mentoring younger firefighters, plus taking a role as a peer counselor, meeting with other firefighters for phone calls or text chats to talk people like me through their struggles with drinking, PTSD, suicidal thoughts, etc. That's rich, isn't it? I guess I ended up being a pretty good choice for those guys to talk to, but at the time, I remember laughing at myself, thinking I could help someone else with their suicidal thoughts when I had taken the 9V battery out of my gun safe combination lock just a few weeks prior. I'd woken up in the middle of the night once after blacking out. I don't remember what I'd done, but I know I did a lot of stuff that I couldn't remember. And so after that, I didn't trust myself when I was drinking. I was afraid that I'd pull the trigger when my body was conscious but my brain wasn't. I couldn't do that to my children or to my wife. So I took the 9V out of the gun safe and trusted that if I went near it, I'd be too drunk to figure out how to get it in there again.

One morning while I was working a duty shift at the fire department, my partner and I got a call for a possible gunshot wound. The chatter over the police lines while we were getting in the rescue truck was that a woman woke to find a note from her husband next to his empty handgun box. The note said that he'd just found out he has cancer and wanted to save his family from the expense or the pain of watching him slowly and inevitably die. I don't know if that part of the story was true, in the end. When we arrived at the scene, we staged our vehicle just around the corner and waited to be cleared in, a safety protocol that we used whenever a gun was thought to be unsecured on scene. We were about to settle in for a long wait when we heard the police who were inside call frantically on the radio. They'd found the man in the garage, he was still breathing, and the gun was secure. We raced in and found him seated upright, but slumped against the garage door. Blood was congealed and bubbling in his nostrils with shallow breaths. I could smell the alcohol on his breath. It mixed with the iron in his gluey blood and hung in the winter air inside the garage. As I cut off his puffy knit jacket and shirt and reached for the hard suction device in our med bag, I imagined the moments before he pulled the trigger. I knew that helpless pain. I knew what it felt like to want to save your family from your own doom. To stop it from spreading to everyone else the same way it spread through my own body and brain like this man's cancer. I saw him there on the garage floor, smelled him there in the morning, smelled the alcohol he drank to get him over that last finger pull. He lived a few more days in the hospital. Long enough to donate an organ or two. We considered that a win, considering the scenario.

I'd been witness to plenty of other suicides, hangings, more gunshots, pills- but that's the one that sticks with me. Smelling the booze and the iron and the gunpowder. I knew I couldn't let that be the end to my story. I knew that couldn't be a chapter in my childrens' stories.

In September of 2023, I had my last drink. I don't recall the last one. I don't want to. I don't want to mythologize it or carry around a token of it. I used to imagine that I'd carry around the bottle cap from my last drink, the way that Sam Malone did on Cheers. A lucky talisman to keep me on the right path. But now that I'm done, now that the alcohol is gone and I'm free, I don't want anything like that. I don't recall a drink or a date. I don't celebrate an anniversary other than Sept. When I hit September, I allow myself a pat on the back for having stayed away and protected my family from that poison for another year. I'm not surprised that I don't remember the last one, though. There was no ceremony to it. I don't think I knew it was my last, even days later when I'd finally gone without drinking any sort of alcohol for more than 48 hours for the first time in decades. It was just over. I was just done. I went to the final home game of the Twins season that year and didn't drink all game. I just sat and watched the game and enjoyed the fresh autumn air. And it was all over. The drinking anyway.

I realize that's anti-climactic, and this many words in to the story it might be irritating to read, but it's just how it went. I just stopped going to the liquor store, stopped going to bars and restaurants, walked past the liquor shop at the grocery store as I left, instead of turning inside. It's the same way I quit smoking cigarettes the year before I met my wife. I just stopped going in to gas stations. Maddening, I know. After all those years of feeling trapped, powerless, helpless. All those years of not wanting to drink, not wanting to go in to the liquor store or sit at the bar surrounded by all of those other pathetic, drunken losers. Talking myself out of it the whole way there, in the parking lot, parking, getting out of the car. Talking myself out of it while walking to the door, putting the bottle on the counter, watching myself do everything I didn't want to do. Watching myself hurt everyone around me and screaming at myself to stop, but watching it happen all the same. But it's also anti-climactic because we're not at the climax yet. Like I said, this isn't a story about alcohol abuse.

It was several more months, maybe 6 before I finally woke up one day and felt like my brain was back. I felt like a huge weight had lifted off of me. Just a few months prior I truly could not imagine living without alcohol, even for a day. For as long as I can remember, I've been proud of my imagination, proud of my creativity and ability to construct entire worlds and characters and universes out of my own restless brain, but I could not imagine going a day without alcohol. And then, suddenly it was gone. And I couldn't imagine drinking ever again. Even the thought was revolting. I gagged thinking about how I used to drink warm scotch straight from the bottle. How I used to pull the plastic stopper out of the top of the vodka bottle and squeeze to get the alcohol down my throat faster. To turn off faster. To be dead faster. And I cried. That day I cried. That night I cried. I'd cry many more times over the coming years, and all for the same reason- gratitude. I was so grateful. To be alive. To have my brain back. To have a chance at being a real father to my kids, a real husband to my wife, and maybe even a good person in my own mind, a person I could be proud of for myself in the end. But let's not get carried away.

It was an amazing change in all of our lives. I was happier. I was feeling freer. I wasn't as angry or as short with people. I showed more affection and wasn't as irritable or quick to spiral. But I was still sick. I was still lost in chaos and darkness. I still didn't have answers to why I was the way I was. And the not-knowing made me certain that all I'd really done is fixed one big, ugly, scary problem. There were bigger, scarier ones still to come and I had no faith in my ability to beat them, much less even take them on.

One morning in July, my wife asked me to come outside with her and the kids to take pictures while she released some butterflies in to the wild. For the last couple of years, she'd developed an interest in butterflies, planting milkweed in our yard, collecting eggs or caterpillars, feeding them and raising them through their larvae stages, chrysalis, and metamorphosis. Then she'd release them and start again with their offspring until the last group migrates south for the Winter. I followed her outside, enamored with her entirely. It was amazing to watch this beautiful, strong, amazing woman who'd given birth to 4 children, who'd stood by me over a decade while I destroyed myself, hid, lied, drank, spent all of our money on alcohol and drove us to Chapter 13 bankruptcy. She'd survived everything I'd put us through, stood by me, and now nurtured and created even more life to put out in to the world. I took photos, I took videos. I focused on her. My wife. Her movements, the way she smiled at our kids as they laughed and clapped and chased the butterflies as they took their first flights. I was in love with her. I was in love with our children and with our family. The photos and the video were a celebration of that. These were the first memories I could make in any of our lives together where I wouldn't feel bad about being secretly drunk behind the camera.

Then I showed her the photos and the videos. She wasn't happy. She wasn't rude about it or mean, but I had focused on her. She wanted to see the kids and their reactions. I'd made this about her, when she'd wanted it to be about the butterflies and our kids and our family. But really, I made it about me again. Not just in focusing on her and what I loved about her, but I used the Cinematic mode on my camera. She didn't know that, but I did. I knew that I wasn't shooting those videos and photos for her. They were for me. They were for my perspective, what I wanted to see. And terribly, they were for my art too. I had hoped to use the videos and photos as reference for a story I was writing. I'd made this all about me again. And worse, when she didn't show immediate love and gratitude for the photos and videos I made, I got angry. I told her she was being selfish. I ruined everything. She was so hurt. She'd put so much of herself in to those butterflies and that memory she wanted to make and now I was angry and moody and saying awful things I didn't mean. I was sullen and angry. I was hurt and felt attacked. I'd done a nice thing. I made it about her and she was angry? (I knew I was wrong. I knew I'd really made it about me.) I saw how badly she was hurt. I was mortified. I'd failed again. I really had tried. Even though I knew I snuck those things in for me with the cinematic mode and all of that, I had tried. I was sober. I had meant well. And still, I failed. I was lost.

That was the day I made an appointment with a therapist. I'd been to therapists before, but never for very long. This idea of depression as me being sad never made sense to me. It never felt true. I wasn’t sad. In fact, I had a pretty amazing life. I’d always had. There were troubles here and there, but surely other kids had much worse upbringings. I grew up in the suburbs. I wasn’t sad. And so after a few weeks, I'd disappear.

We'd even gone to see therapists a few times together as a couple, but it hadn't helped. We had some problems in our relationship, sure. But the real problem was me. The real problem was that I had some huge problems that I wasn't addressing.

I couldn't figure it out. What the fuck was wrong with me? All that gratitude and joy and freedom I'd felt after quitting drinking were gone. I was left terrified, cold, and certain that there was nothing left to try. I've never felt more alone that I did at that moment. I'd tried so hard, I'd beaten alcohol, but I was still sick. I was still wrong. Every day was still pain and discomfort and irritation. But why? I had everything I'd ever wanted. I had an amazing wife who stuck by me through the worst of who I am, 5 incredible healthy children, a 6 figure job where, even though the work wasn’t personally fulfilling, I was proud of my efforts as an ethical, caring leader who truly worked to make the people on my team happy and successful in their careers. I even had a second job as a firefighter where I did real good and saved real lives. And we all lived in a beautiful home in a safe, quiet neighborhood where the kids could play wiffle ball in the yard and shoot hoops in the driveway and ride their bikes in the street. But I wasn't happy. And not in a restless, bored way. I was still so dark, angry, lashing out at people again, distant, critical, frustrated, in constant pain and unsettling discomfort. What was wrong with me? Why?

Between that morning and my first therapy appointment 2 weeks later, I did a lot more crying. A lot more writing. A lot more digging in to my brain and trying to understand what was happening. How could I be lazy, no character, low integrity, no resilience? I had proven in so many ways that I wasn't those things, to everyone but myself at least. I made a plan. I called it The Plan. I wrote in my Notes app. It was my story, from beginning to present. As much as I could remember. It was honest, unflinching. I gave myself nowhere to hide, no cover, no grace. I refused to enable lies and hiding from the truth of who I am, who I've been. I looked at who I really was, my problems, my fears, my pain, my anger, my confusion, but also the love I knew I held for my wife, for our children. I knew that despite more than 40 years of hearing that I was lazy and didn't follow through and just wasted my potential, I knew it wasn't true. I knew the truth of my heart and who I was inside. I knew that there was something more than laziness happening. I knew that I was a good person. I just didn't know why the end result of everything was still pain, discomfort, chaos, anger, fear.

I put it all down. All the things I thought about myself. All the things I could remember. All the things I'd tried to forget. I wrote about the man who tried to kidnap me from a karate class when I was 10. I ran away and never went back. I wrote about how ashamed I was that I didn't tell anyone, and what if he'd succeeded with another little boy and it was my fault. I wrote about the girl in first grade who held me down on my parents' living room couch and tongue-kissed me for the entire runtime of the movie Mannequin. I wrote about how ashamed I was of that. I wrote about how I was worried for her and what that might have meant about how she might've been abused or treated herself. I wrote about my drinking. I wrote about my parents' divorce and how I felt I'd failed my oldest daughter in so many ways. I cried and I wrote and I made a decision that this time, when I went to therapy, it would be be to heal, to finally get better. I would tell the truth, everything. I wouldn't run or hide from myself anymore.

So I started going to therapy and I did a whole lot more crying. Sometimes in gratitude again. Sometimes in pain or out of a sense of loss, but more often than not, I cry because I have 40+ years of what I call "big feelings" inside that haven't ever really been let out properly. The big feelings aren't necessarily sad or bad or negative. Sometimes it is that gratitude or joy for how my life has changed and it's too much to hold on to. Sometimes it's relief, a new way to open the valves without the bloodletting. But it's like that same feeling I had at my wedding dinner, standing with a microphone in my hand, terrified that my voice will break if I speak a single word. The difference now, is I just plow right through. I apologize, unnecessarily I'm sure, to my therapist for my blubbering and how it must be difficult to understand my words through the tears, but I power through anyway. It's safe. She never makes me feel small or weak. I can confront the worst of who I've been, the worst of who I'm scared I could be, and she finds a way to redirect me toward ways that I can use that pain, those fears, those big feelings to rewrite my future. A future I'd written off as a completed story long ago.

I was tested again for mental health issues. Bipolar disorder and ADHD showed up, complicated by depression and anxiety, likely from 40 years of living with undiagnosed and untreated mental and emotional health problems. I take a pile of medicines and vitamins every day, but they're helping. Someday I hope I won't have to take anything, but for now they're helping. I was afraid to use stimulants, especially after killing my brain with depressants for so long, but I'm glad I gave them a shot. It's been life-changing. I sleep better, I can focus when I need to, and I feel more in control of my brain. The biggest change for me, though, came when I tried drawing again for the first time in years. I'd tried off and on, when I could muster the energy to put myself through the pain, but I'd give up pretty quickly and put away the pencil or iPad or sidewalk chalk in disgust. Back in the cell with all those kids and their comic books, movies, and screenplays. But this time, I picked up the pencil and drew and struggled, and kept going. I just kept drawing until things started to feel okay again. And then I didn't want to stop. And I couldn't stop thinking about drawing more, and animating, and writing again but like really writing. Like putting the words down instead of just batting them back and forth over and again in my head. It was like I was given a superpower as a child, I could fly or be invisible or shoot lasers out of my nostrils, but I never really got to use them. I never got to fly more than a foot off the ground or shoot my nose lasers at anything other than an old tin can on a fence post, but now I could soar.

And so I’ve started to think about unlocking those cell doors a little bit. I realize it's taken I don't know how many hundreds of words to get here, but that's where this Little Weird Kid idea comes from. I started to think about these artsy, creative, unkillable little fucks in my brain, the ones I'd locked up, I started to think about them as the little weird kid that I always felt like I was growing up. The kid I kept locking up every time someone told me I was too lazy, didn't apply myself, my drawings were too scary, my dreams were too big, no one makes movies for real, telling people stories isn't a real job, and anyway, you hardly talk that much and don't seem like you're really very good at telling stories to me. I kept hiding him away and shutting him down, but he kept going. He kept writing and drawing and making up songs and inventing worlds and characters. And he was doing it all to make sense of the world that I was failing so miserably at understanding and living in.

One night, in my garage crying and writing and dreaming again, I wrote a little note in my Notes app. It said, "Go nuts, ya little freak." I was talking to the little weird kid. I was finally unlocking the prison cell and letting him and all his little buddies out again. It was safe now. It fucking hurt like hell, but it's safe for you all to come out now.