I spent the better part of sixteen years unable to look at myself in the mirror.

Every time I caught my reflection, I saw another lie I'd told, another promise I'd broken, another person I'd let down. I was constantly manipulating the people who loved me most just to feed a never-ending thirst for drugs and alcohol. The shame became so overwhelming that eventually it was easier to avoid my own gaze altogether than confront the man I'd become.

When I finally hit bottom and asked for help, the change didn't happen all at once. In fact, it happened so slowly that I barely noticed it. The people around me started commenting on how different I seemed long before I believed them, until one day, almost without thinking, I looked up into a mirror and realized I wasn't looking away anymore.

Although it happened just months after I got sober, that moment has stayed with me ever since.

Over the last nine years, I've done the difficult work of trying to understand the parts of me that created so much chaos and hurt. I've made amends where I could, accepted the places where I couldn't, and little by little, I became someone I actually wanted to know.

These days, when I catch my reflection in a window or a mirror, I don't feel shame anymore. I feel gratitude. Not because I'm perfect, but because I know how hard that man fought to become the one looking back at me.

February 2, 2017 // Long Beach, CA

I'd just been evicted from my fourth apartment because, once again, I'd decided that drugs were a better use of my money than rent.

So the old familiar ritual began.

I packed anything that still mattered into the back of whatever car I was driving at the time and left everything else behind. Every few months I'd repeat the process, deciding what was worth keeping based on one depressingly basic question: Will it fit in the trunk?

The apartments never looked much better than I did by the time I left them. Trash everywhere. Furniture hanging on by a thread. Half-finished art projects that only made sense after you'd been awake for three days straight. Whatever didn't fit stayed behind, and before long I stopped caring what happened to it.

Nothing valuable. Nothing sentimental. Just... gone.

Nine years later, I own far more than what could fit in the back of a car, but none of it comes close to what sobriety has given me. These days, I'm fortunate to have the time, the means, and the room in my heart to carry a message of hope to people at their worst moments in hospitals and institutions, helping others find the kind of stability I once couldn't imagine for myself.

It's funny the things you stop taking for granted once you've spent enough time without them.

My mom used to tell me that ever since I was a little kid, she knew if I ever got lost, I'd always find my way home. I'm not sure how she saw that in me at such a young age, but she was right. Moms usually are.

Now, as an adult, I've started getting lost on purpose.

I'll intentionally turn down the alley that doesn't lead anywhere, skip the itinerary, and trust that I'll sort it out as I go. As soon as I stop worrying about where I'm headed, something interesting almost always happens.

I strike up a conversation with someone whose life looks nothing like mine, and my worldview broadens just a little more. A stray cat that's claimed the same quiet corner for years decides I'm worth saying hello to. I stand in front of a building that's watched generations come and go, knowing thousands of people have stood in that exact same spot long before I ever arrived, and sometimes that thought alone is enough to bring me to tears.

Every place I've ever been has a story, and most of them are hiding just out of sight of the main road. Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn't really wandering around looking for those stories. I was looking for the parts of myself that only seem to show up once I've stopped trying so hard to find my way.

I just spent a few days in New York and the intoxicating juxtaposition of beauty and despair never ceases to amaze me.

One minute you’re standing beneath the 1911 Beaux-Arts masterpiece that is the New York Public Library. The next, you’re stepping over people folded into sleeping bags with needles still in their arms.

One of the oldest and most culturally significant cities in America somehow manages to hold both extraordinary beauty and unimaginable suffering on the same block.

Learning to hold space for both has been one of the hardest lessons of my life. Nearly a decade after being homeless myself, it still breaks my heart. Having intimate, lived experience not knowing where my next meal or shelter was going to come from has made it impossible to feel any other way.

The next time you’re in a city like Manhattan, spend a little less time looking up at the architecture and a little more time looking people in the eyes. I know how easy it is to walk past someone and only see addiction, mental illness, or another statistic.

Most of them were somebody’s whole world before they became invisible.

"The life we lead is a sleep; whatever we do, dreams. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us. I wish I could have woken before this." — Petrarch

I just finished The Great Mortality by John Kelly, and of all the horrific stories in a book about the Black Death, this was the passage that stayed with me.

For twenty years, it felt like I was just waiting to die. I wasn't living, that’s for sure. I was moving through a dream that got darker every year.

The plague victims in this book had no choice and often it felt like I didn’t either. Death was coming for them whether they deserved it or not and while I had more agency than they did, it never felt that way. Reading their stories forced me to look at my own differently.

One chapter describes families abandoning loved ones after they became sick, terrified they would catch the disease themselves. I spent so many dark years believing the false truth that everyone had given up on me, too.

Turns out they hadn’t.

Once I got sober for good, the truth became easier to see. All along, my family was still there. Waiting. Hoping. Ready to love me the moment I found my way back. The plague took people despite the love surrounding them. Addiction convinced me there wasn't any love surrounding me at all.

It's wild how sometimes a history book ends up telling you more about yourself than the people it's actually about.

I used to think that if I was ever going to find God, someone else would have to introduce us.

A church. A preacher. A book. Someone with more certainty than I had, surely.

Instead, I found a higher power myself. It was hiding near me all along, somewhere in between a sunset and an overdose.

I still don’t know exactly what to call that power. Some days it feels like God. Other days it feels like the collective love of the people who didn’t give up on me.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. All I know is that something else had other plans for me and the older I get, the less interested I am in defining it.

There’s a strange peace in believing you don’t have to.