Life Is Ups and Downs

I've had a tough last few weeks. I'm not sure exactly what has changed, but I do know that I've been living in my head much more than I would like. I've been hyper-fixating on things that bother me; relationships, friends,

The Myth Of Being Ready

If I always waited until I was ready for change or ready to do something, then the truth is, I would still be in active addiction. Something that I learned from Steven Pressfield's book "The War of Art" is that sometimes, we just need to go

Every Day Is a Beautiful Day, Even When It’s Pouring

The weather is one of my favourite topics and also one of my least favourite. It’s a love/hate relationship. I love it because it allows me to practice acceptance. I hate it because why is it all that anyone ever talks about? The weather has been one of

The Gym, Recovery and Me

For the longest time, I felt embarrassed by my body. When I was younger, I was very skinny and very small. As I began to drink more and more, I started to gain weight. Now, I wasn't exactly skinny anymore but I also had absolutely no muscle. Don&

My Healing Started With A Change in Perspective

So much of life is about perspective. I used to not understand this. I used to not understand how much weight it had when people would say you have two options: you can either look at the glass half full or the glass half empty. I never understood how profound

Anger Was Only the Tip Of the Iceberg

My inability to regulate and express my emotions was something that started very early in my life. I expressed one emotion and that emotion was anger. Saying that I expressed anger is probably an understatement. I threw temper tantrum after temper tantrum. Most of the time it was when I

730 Days

May 10, 2024 to May 10, 2026. A lot has changed. I am two years sober today. It doesn't feel real. My dad asked me earlier this week how I was feeling as I was approaching two years and the reality is, I think I've been

Learning to Belong

My whole life I went from friend group to friend group, always blaming other people for the reason a friendship didn’t work out. I would find what I thought was my community and then inevitably act out in one way or another, blame them for the falling out and

I Am No Longer Obsessed, But I Still Think About Using

Something that I struggle with being in recovery is the idea that I will always have the battle in my head of the pros and cons of using drugs. I am someone who will fantasizes over what it would feel like to do heroin or meth or crack or ecstasy,

Connection Is The Opposite Of Addiction

Before I got sober, the time that I felt most alone was when I was surrounded by others. I remember vividly, one day, I was sitting in my room alone thinking about how badly I wanted to die. I was crying. I was unstable. I was high. I felt hopeless.

They Said I Needed Treatment. I Thought They Were Crazy

About a year before I got sober, I had broken up with my long time girlfriend, I started doing Xanax again and was also doing whippets and some cocaine. This was after two years of not touching anything other than weed and alcohol. That semester was also the first semester

It Was Never Just The Weed

On April 27, 2022, I smoked weed for the last time. I had decided a few weeks before that it was time for me to stop. I had a lot of trouble with it. I didn't put in any action, I didn't do anything differently. I

What a Small Town Taught Me About Letting Go

In December 2024, after 4.5 years of working towards my Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, I finally graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At that point, I knew I would be putting a bookmark in that chapter of my life and it was time to pursue something

The Failure That Helped Rebuild My Life

Up to the point of my senior year of college, in the 8 years since my mom died, I had basically been a straight A student. I never had any worries about failing any classes. I never even really had any worries about getting below a B. I have mentioned

Summer '23: Blacking Out A Perfect Summer

At the time, I thought my summer in 2023 was the best summer of my life. I was living in Chicago, had what I thought was my dream job, was living in a city with people that I considered friends, became super close with my roommate, was working out daily,

Not My Fault, Still My Responsibility

For most of my life, I lived in a victim mentality. I felt that life wasn't fair and that bad things kept on happening to me. Not only did I feel this, but I lived as if it were true. I embodied it in my everyday living and

Learning To Surrender

I had never really heard the word spirituality before. I definitely didn’t know what it meant or that the concept of spirituality would change my life in such a profound way. I don’t think the life that I was living could have been any further away from what

What Happened to the Grief I Didn't Feel

Life is confusing. One minute my mom was here, we were talking on the phone about my girl problems and the next, I got called home from camp because she was in the hospital. A few hours later and she was gone. What does that mean she died? Nobody that

The Long Way Back To Myself

After my mom passed away, I always dreamt of helping others who were in a similar situation to me. People who had been struggling with losing a parent at an early age, people who would wake up everyday, not wanting to get out of bed, wanting to die. The only

I Valued Honesty, Until I Had To Practice It

While I was in treatment, one of the things we had to do was complete assignments. Assignments varied from writing letters to people in our life to filling out different types of worksheets that they had prepared. This assignment in particular was a worksheet that helped me determine what my

I Couldn't Think My Way Into Change

From the day that I started therapy, as early as fifth grade, I began learning and understanding things in my life cognitively. I then attempted to implement these ideas into my life, change my behaviors around them. This is the very basis of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). What I struggled

First Time Smoking Weed: It Wasn’t About the Weed

It was Grade 9, after Christmas break when I heard for the first time that my friends were interested in smoking weed. At this time, I did not really feel apart of the group. This was the peak of me feeling like an outsider among my friends. Up to this

Recognizing I Was Not Alone

It was early 2024, just over 3 months before I got sober, when the beginning of the end of my addiction happened. I was sitting on my couch in an apartment that looked like a tornado had just ran through it. That tornado though, was just a blackout drunk Jason.