Seasons Of Life

In two days, I’ll be six years sober from meth.

Six years.

That number still doesn’t sit right in my mouth. It feels too big for someone like me. Too clean. Too far away from the person I was when I was deep in it. Sometimes I still catch myself waiting for someone to tell me it doesn’t count. That I didn’t do it the “right” way. That my recovery is somehow less valid because it didn’t follow a script.

And that shame? That’s something I’m still unlearning.

I didn’t go to rehab.

I didn’t sit in folding chairs in church basements.

I didn’t find God in my sobriety or have a moment where the light broke through and everything suddenly made sense.

I didn’t have a sponsor, a program, or a roadmap. No chips. No steps. No applause.

What I had was silence. And wreckage. And myself…. with nowhere left to run.

I sat alone with the damage I had caused. I looked at the people I had hurt, the bridges I had burned, the version of myself I no longer recognized in the mirror. I felt the weight of every bad decision land all at once, without a substance to blur the edges. And in that stillness, I realized something that was both brutal and freeing:

I was my own worst enemy.

And no drug…. no matter how powerful, no matter how “good” it felt in the moment was ever going to fix what I was running from.

Meth didn’t make me strong.

It didn’t make me fearless or confident or unstoppable like I told myself it did. It made me smaller. It shrank my world down to cravings, paranoia, and survival mode. It hollowed me out while whispering that I was finally in control. It convinced me I was broken beyond repair while quietly stealing my time, my trust in myself, my ability to feel anything real.

It didn’t save me. It erased me.

Getting sober wasn’t some beautiful, Instagram worthy transformation. There was no glow-up montage. No triumphant music. It was ugly. It was lonely. It was clawing myself back from the edge day after day with shaking hands and a screaming mind. It was nights where sleep wouldn’t come and mornings where getting out of bed felt impossible. It was feeling emotions I had buried for years come rushing back all at once…. the grief, the rage, the guilt, the fear….. without anything to numb them.

Sobriety meant learning how to sit with shame without letting it kill me. It meant facing myself without the shield of distraction. It meant realizing that escape and healing are not the same thing, no matter how much we want them to be.

I didn’t wake up one day magically “better.” I woke up exhausted tired of running, tired of lying to myself, tired of barely surviving and I made a decision. Not a grand one. Not a perfect one. Just a stubborn, desperate decision to fight for something more, even when I didn’t believe I deserved it.

Sobriety didn’t save me. I saved me.

And that truth still scares people. It makes them uncomfortable. Because it means we have more power than we’re taught to believe and more responsibility than we want to admit.

If you’re reading this while stuck in the spiral…. if you think you’re too far gone, too broken, too deep to ever come back please hear me…..

You are not weak for using. You are not disgusting for wanting relief. You are not a failure because you tried to survive the only way you knew how.

But the thing you’re chasing will never give you what you’re actually craving. Not peace. Not safety. Not wholeness. Not freedom.

You don’t have to do it the “right” way. You don’t have to follow someone else’s story. You don’t have to look like recovery is supposed to look.

You just have to choose yourself once and then keep choosing yourself again and again on the days it feels pointless, and boring, and unbearable.

Six years ago, I didn’t believe I’d make it a week. I didn’t believe I was worth saving. I didn’t believe a future existed for someone like me.

Now I’m here.

Still standing.

Still healing.

Still choosing.

And if I can claw my way out of that darkness with nothing but stubbornness and the will to stop destroying myself, then so can you.

If you’re waiting for a sign…. this is it.