In early recovery, there are moments when the weight of what I have done feels heavier than the weight of getting sober itself.  Detox stripped the substances from my body, but it did nothing to dull the memories.  If anything, it sharpened them.  Faces rise up in my mind without warning—people I love, people I disappointed, and people who trusted me until they couldn’t anymore.  Conversations come back in fragments: raised voices, slammed doors, and long silences that said more than any argument ever could.  I don’t always remember the exact words I said, but I remember the damage they caused.  I remember how things ended—most often badly, sometimes abruptly, and occasionally in ways that could never be undone.  I think about the trust I broke so casually, and so repeatedly, when I was sick, desperate, and convinced I would fix it all “tomorrow.”  I treated other people’s faith in me as if it were renewable, as if it could be drained and refilled without consequence.  I made promises I truly believed in while I was saying them—and broke them the moment the cravings spoke to me louder.  Back then, survival meant taking whatever I could: patience, forgiveness, second chances, and so on.  I rarely stopped to consider what it cost the people who kept giving them.

One of the first hard truths I had to accept when I got sober was that recovery does not remove my triggers.  Getting sober didn’t magically erase the things that once pushed me toward a bottle or a substance—it simply forced me to look them in the eye without numbing myself.  There is no buffering agent anymore, no chemical distance between me and the reality of my own mind.  Sobriety didn’t make life safer; it made it clearer.  It’s important for me to remember that triggers are not weaknesses.  They are not character flaws or moral failures.  They are reminders—evidence of where I’ve been, what I’ve survived, and what still has the power to pull me under if I stop paying attention.  As an addict in recovery, my life now exists in the narrow but critical space between awareness and action.  That space is where everything changes.  Every day, I make the conscious choice not to react, not to numb, and not to run.  Every day, I learn more about what threatens that choice.  Some triggers are loud and obvious, easy to name and easier to avoid.  Others are quiet, deceptive, and far more dangerous because they slip in disguised as comfort, confidence, or relief.  They don’t announce themselves as threats—they present themselves as rewards.  The most difficult truth of all is that many of my triggers are not tied to pain alone.  They are tied to success, to silence, to memory, and to loss.  They surface not only when life hurts, but when it feels calm, accomplished, or familiar.  Recovery requires me to remain vigilant in all seasons, not just the difficult ones, because for me, the real danger has never been suffering—it’s forgetting.

There is a saying that people throw around when life gets hard, though it rarely feels comforting when you’re in emotional pain. someone always has it worse than you do.  For most of my life, I rejected that idea.  When I was drowning in addiction, pain didn’t feel relative—it felt absolute.  My suffering felt total, consuming, and personal.  My pain didn’t feel comparable to anyone else’s.  When I relapsed in November and found myself back in rehab, that phrase felt hollow and dismissive, like something people say when they don’t understand how bad things really are.  That phrase really felt like salt in a wound, because I believed—truly believed—that I had ruined everything beyond repair.

The New Year arrived quietly this time.  No champagne corks popping, no countdown fueled by liquid courage, no promises scribbled on the back of a bar receipt and forgotten by morning.  Instead, it comes with a trembling kind of honesty.  I am an addict in early recovery, and the turning of the calendar feels less like a celebration and more like a checkpoint—proof that I am still here.  Still breathing.  Still trying.  These are my ten New Year’s resolutions, written not from a place of confidence, but from a place of survival.  They are not lofty goals or inspirational slogans. They are lifelines.

People often ask me if it’s uncomfortable coming home from rehab, especially during the holidays.  It’s a fair question, and I understand why they ask it.  The truth is, I’m not uncomfortable—but it is a huge change, one that I don’t take lightly.  Coming home isn’t scary because of my family or the love that waits for me here.  It’s challenging because rehab is an extremely controlled environment, and the outside world is anything but.  At Bon Secours, every day followed a strict routine.  My schedule was packed from morning to night—groups, therapy, meals, reflection, lights out.  There was structure in every hour, safety in knowing exactly where I needed to be and what I needed to do.  Decisions were limited, distractions were removed, and accountability was constant.  That kind of structure doesn’t just support recovery—it protects it.  When you leave that environment, you feel the difference immediately.

There are certain chapters of recovery people warn you about—the cravings, the loneliness, the sudden waves of shame, and the rediscovery of emotions you numbed for years, but no one really prepares you for grief.  Not the kind that comes from lost opportunities or broken trust—those are painful, yes—but the grief that comes when someone you love dies while you’re trying to rebuild your life.  That kind of grief hits differently.  It hits in a place your addiction once protected, and now, without the substances, you feel every inch of it.

If there’s one thing recovery has taught me, it’s that the hardest work doesn’t happen in detox, or rehab, or even in the meetings where you sit in a circle and tell pieces of your story out loud.  All of that is difficult in its own right.  Detox pushes your body to its limits.  Rehab breaks you open so you can rebuild.  Meetings force you to speak truths you’ve buried for years.  But none of that compares to the quiet, slow, humbling work of rebuilding trust with the people who love you.

This week, I want to talk about something I used to think I’d never be able to do — forgive myself.  There are moments in recovery when the silence hits me hardest — those quiet hours at night when the world settles down and I’m left alone with my thoughts.  That’s when the memories creep in.  The things I said.  The faces I hurt.  The opportunities I threw away.  Sometimes, it feels like recovery is less about staying sober and more about learning how to live with the ghost of the person I used to be.

For most of my life, I thought recovery was about learning how to live without drugs or alcohol.  I thought it was about white-knuckling my way through cravings, sitting in meetings, collecting milestone chips/tags, and somehow finding the strength to say no each time temptation came knocking.  Over time, I’ve come to understand something far deeper: recovery isn’t about staying away from a substance—it’s about finding your way back to yourself.  Addiction didn’t just steal my sobriety; it stole my identity.  It stripped away my sense of purpose, my confidence, and the light that once lived inside me.  I used to wake up each morning with a quiet shame that no one but me could see—a weight pressing down on my chest that whispered, You’ll never change.  The truth was, for a long time, I believed that voice.

For most of my life, I ran from the ordinary.  I thought I needed chaos to feel alive—loud nights, louder people, endless motion that drowned out the silence I feared most.  That silence, I know now, was myself.  When I finally stopped running, when the drugs and alcohol stopped working, when the world grew small enough that I couldn’t hide anymore, I came face to face with a truth that nearly broke me: I had built my life around escaping reality, and in doing so, I’d lost the ability to live it.  Recovery, for me, has been about learning how to love the ordinary again.

There’s a saying I’ve heard countless times in recovery: “Rock bottom will teach you things that mountain tops never will.”  I used to hate that line.  I hated it because it sounded too poetic for something so painful. There was nothing beautiful about the way I fell.  There was nothing graceful about the way addiction stripped my life bare—piece by piece, promise by promise, until I didn’t even recognize the man staring back at me in the mirror.  But today, after everything I’ve lived through, I can finally understand what that saying truly means.  It turns out that rock bottom wasn’t the end for me.  It was the beginning.

There’s a moment in recovery that no one prepares you for.  It doesn’t happen in detox, when your body is still shaking and sweating and screaming for another hit or another drink.  It doesn’t happen in rehab, when you’re surrounded by others just as broken, all trying to piece themselves back together.  It happens later—quietly, almost unnoticeably—when you realize that for the first time in a long time, you’re living again.  Not surviving, not running, not numbing—but actually living. For me, that realization came on an ordinary morning.

When I first began to confront the reality of my addiction, I thought treatment was a one-size-fits-all process.  You go to rehab, you stop using, and life magically gets better.  At least, that’s how I pictured it in my mind.  What I didn’t realize then—and what I know now—is that there are many different pathways to recovery.  Two of the most common approaches are inpatient rehab and outpatient rehab.  Both have their own unique strengths, challenges, and lessons to teach, and I’ve learned firsthand that the choice between them can mean the difference between finding healing or falling back into the grip of addictio

Accountability is one of those words that, before recovery, I used to despise.  It sounded heavy, burdensome—like someone breathing down my neck, waiting for me to fail. For years and years, I fought the very idea of it.  I told myself I didn’t need anyone else’s opinion, that I could handle my life on my own terms.  The hard truth was that my way was killing me.  My best thinking, my fiercest independence, my stubborn refusal to let anyone in—those were the things that had me drinking and using until I lost nearly everything.  In recovery from substance use disorders, accountability means taking ownership of my actions, being honest about my struggles, and inviting others to walk beside me as I heal.

When people hear the phrase spiritual principles, they often think of religion, church pews, or formal rituals, but in recovery, spiritual principles mean something different.  They are the guiding values that shape how we live our daily lives—honesty, humility, willingness, love, forgiveness, hope, and so many others.  For someone like me, an addict in recovery, these principles are not lofty concepts tucked away in a book.  They are lifelines.  They are the tools that help me rebuild a life I once believed was beyond repair.

When I first heard the word “humility” in treatment, I’ll be honest—it rubbed me the wrong way.  I didn’t think it applied to me.  In my mind, humility meant weakness, submission, or lowering myself beneath others.  I already felt broken enough, so why would I want more of that?  What I didn’t understand then—and what I’ve slowly come to learn through my journey in recovery—is that humility is not about weakness at all.  Humility is about truth.  It’s about seeing myself clearly: not better than anyone else, not worse than anyone else, but as I truly am.  For someone like me, who spent years hiding behind lies, masks, and substances, that realization has been life-changing.

When I first stepped into recovery, I thought sobriety would mean a life stripped down, empty, and dull.  I believed that without the substances, there would be nothing left to fill the void—the silence would swallow me whole.  Addiction had consumed so much of my life, my time, and my identity that I had forgotten what it meant to enjoy something for the simple sake of enjoyment.  What I’ve learned is that in recovery, finding and nurturing hobbies isn’t just a way to pass the time—it’s a lifeline.  It’s a way to rediscover who I am beyond the addict.

When I arrived at Bon Secours Hospital, I didn’t walk through the doors so much as collapse into them.  My body came first—shaking, exhausted, chemically broken—but my mind followed close behind, dragging years of guilt, fear, and regret like a bag I could no longer carry on my own.  I told myself I was coming for detox.  Just detox.  As if I could separate the physical from the emotional, as if my addiction had ever been that simple.

When I began writing for the Goshen Independent Republican more than two years ago, I made a promise to myself—one that felt small at the time, but has grown into the backbone of every word I’ve published. That promise was simple: Tell the truth. Tell the truth about my recovery—the good, the bad, and the parts I wish I could forget. Tell the truth even when it’s humiliating. Even when it exposes every flaw I’ve tried to hide. Even when it makes my hands shake over the keyboard. I’ve kept that promise every single week. It has not been easy. In fact, some weeks have felt like walking barefoot over broken glass just to hand you, the reader, a piece of my heart. Sugarcoating my story, or skipping the parts that make me uncomfortable, would defeat the entire purpose of why I write these columns at all. My purpose has always been to let you see what addiction and recovery actually look like—not the Hollywood version, not the whispered-around-the-dinner-table version, but the real thing. The raw thing. The thing that too many people are terrified to talk about. Addiction thrives on silence. Shame keeps people sick, and I refuse to be a participant in that silence.

James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces is a raw, unflinching story about a young man’s struggle with addiction and his fight to claw his way back from the depths of self-destruction.  The book does not sugarcoat the brutal realities of substance abuse, nor does it dress up addiction as something glamorous or mysterious.  Instead, it exposes the pain, the suffering, and the daily war addicts face against themselves. When I first read Frey’s words, I felt like he was describing my own life with haunting accuracy.  There’s a quote from that book that I can’t shake.  It rattles around inside me because it doesn’t just describe Frey’s life—it describes mine, and the lives of so many others I’ve met along the way.