I’ve had my tribulations, struggled with addiction, drowned in depression and anxiety, and have been diagnosed with PTSD due to the experiences I have had as a paramedic. I’ve welcomed loneliness with inevitability hoping that at the bare minimum loneliness might give me peace. 

I have pushed good people away, convinced myself of fake truths, and made risky life decisions with the hope that I might feel something, anything, even if its pain. This pain... it’s real, even if its scorching nature is torture. I used to think that sometimes torture just reminds me that I’m still here, that I’m still alive and that this fire is all that I can really control, even if the means of keeping it lit are undeniably unhealthy ones. 

The problem with depression is that you instinctively and subconsciously know that looking back at your life means revisiting those regretful moments, even when those moments are the catalysts behind your depression, yet are really ultimately the only way you can unlock the reasons behind why you feel the way that you do. So in order to survive you just end up staring forward, convincing yourself that concentrating on the future is how you’ll fix the broken parts of your past.

When I chose to walk away from alcohol all I could feel was grief. Grief and regret for the things that I had done. Those two emotions are powerful antagonists, and the pain that I thought I might walk away from in the moment that I quit never materialized. I felt broken, lost, anxious. Never thankful. Just.. nothing. I felt nothing.

Until one day I woke up. Some of my worst moments have come during the best of circumstances. My exhaled and relieved breath that I let go when I get a pulse back on a dead kid, or saving a random stranger from jumping from a 200 foot bridge. The moments that I find prescient, measured, and influential are typically someone else’s nightmare. But they served me a purpose and I knew my place was here, alive, and not at the bottom of a bottle.

Depression and addiction have a particularly obscene way of taking control of unpredictable aspects of your daily routine. When alcohol took over my life I felt like everything had ended, but it was the depression that started to unhinge parts of me that I never expected. I didn’t expect that I would end up tossing every single piece of mail I received from my mailbox onto the floor of my truck because I was terrified to see what negative letter I might receive. But it was instinctive for me- and its origin was dreaded fear- anxiety- pain. I didn’t have any reason to fear receiving something in the mail that might otherwise ruin my day, but I couldn’t bring myself to opening up these letters with my name attached to them.  My name was all I had, and I felt like I had tarnished it by failing to alcohol. 

But that’s what depression is: an unpredictable strife of your life’s normality that places you in a position of unfamiliarity. These unfamiliar places lead you to self destructive behavior because sometimes all you really want is to desperately numb the sensation of feeling forign in your own skin.

If you are broken then you are just like me. We are all broken, in some way, and that’s a powerful realization. You’re human, like all of us, but that is what makes the struggle such a magnificent journey. The struggle with addiction can ruin you, it can ruin anybody, but when you choose to overcome it then it will always, ALWAYS, give you a mental strength so powerful and strong that you’ll never find the same in any other circumstance that this life has to give. You will overcome the addiction one-day-at-a-time.

We all get the same 24 hours. Choose to fight for your life with every minute that those hours give you, and I promise you that you will find the answers you’ve been looking for.

I commend all of you for the powerful strength you seek in your battle against addiction. I’m walking the same path, and we are all in this together.

Stay strong 💪