The Problem With Survival

For a long time, I thought the most important question about me was whether or not I was a good person.

It is an appealing question for those who are wounded, theatrical, or self-absorbed, and I have been all three. It is the kind of question wounded people and self-absorbed people both ask with equal intensity, which should have been my first clue that it was not, in fact, the right question to be asking.

It kept me trapped in extremes. Good person. Bad person. Victim. Villain. Promising boy. Cautionary tale. I rotated between identities the way some people rotate seasonal wardrobes, trying each one on for a while, hoping one would explain me cleanly enough that I could stop feeling so uneasy in my own skin.

None of them did.

The truth was less flattering but ultimately more useful. I had been hurt in real ways. I have also hurt people. I had reasons for becoming the way I did, but reasons are not the same thing as innocence or absolution. I learned early how quickly a life could turn unstable, how conditional love could feel, how humiliating it was to need people, how dangerous it could be to be visibly soft in the wrong room. By the time I was old enough to make my own decisions, I was already full of faulty wiring: fear dressed up as vanity, loneliness dressed up as appetite, shame dressed up as performance. A personified laundry list of bad decisions waiting to happen.

I became obsessed with appearance, which is one of those things people like to dismiss as shallowness because it makes them feel superior. Sometimes it is shallowness. Sometimes it is grief with better lighting.

In my case, it was often a form of negotiation. If I were thinner, maybe I would be more lovable. If I looked better, maybe I would feel less exposed. If I could become attractive enough, polished enough, convincing enough, maybe I could outrun the older and more private feeling that something in me had gone wrong too early, before I had any real say in the matter. Appearance became less of a pleasure than a strategy. I did not admire myself so much as audit myself. Hair, skin, weight, posture, clothes, the whole arrangement of a person trying not to be recognized as someone afraid. What some people experience as grooming, I often experienced as damage control.

That logic made me vulnerable to anything that promised transformation without requiring actual peace.

Cocaine fit into my life with the kind of elegance that should have terrified me. It did not arrive looking like ruin. It arrived looking like an answer. It made me thinner. It made me social. It made me feel less trapped inside my own body and less pinned beneath the weight of my own self-consciousness. It gave me temporary access to a version of myself that felt easier to want, easier to sell, easier to believe in. It quieted the static. It blurred the shame. It turned the mirror from a courtroom into a campaign poster.

What I did not understand then was that anything which solves your pain by taking away your ability to accurately register consequence is not a solution. It is a lender with predatory terms. It lets you believe you have been rescued when really you have just agreed to lose your life in installments.

By the time I realized what it was costing me, I had already built too much around what it seemed to give. Not just habits, but personality. Not just behavior, but identity. There is a particular humiliation in discovering that the thing which made you feel most charismatic, most alive, most wanted, was also steadily hollowing out the part of you that might have built a real life. You become loyal to your own vanishing. You defend the mechanism of your disappearance because, for a little while, it was the only thing that made being you feel less unbearable.

And once you have done that, once you have handed your sense of possibility over to something that cannot love you back, almost everything afterward becomes easier to justify than to stop.

This is where people often become very lyrical about trauma, and I understand the impulse. Trauma is seductive material. It explains a great deal. In my case it explains quite a lot. An abusive childhood. Treatment centers. Foster care. Family members stepping in and failing and stepping in again. Wealth in some corners, chaos in all of them. The kind of instability that teaches a child to monitor the room before he learns how to inhabit it. The kind of emotional weather that produces an adult who can read a shift in tone from twenty feet away but cannot always locate his own motives until after the damage is done.

All of that is true.

It is also true that trauma can become a kind of favored currency for people who are smart enough to narrate themselves and still reluctant enough to change. I know this because I have done it. I have used the architecture of my past to explain my present in ways that were not wrong, exactly, but were sometimes too flattering in their distribution of responsibility. I have been perceptive about why I am the way I am. I have not always been equally rigorous about what I then chose to do with that information.

I have not only been hurt. I have also behaved badly.

I have lied. I have been selfish. I have taken money. I have been vain, entitled, difficult to satisfy, and deeply capable of making my restlessness someone else’s burden to carry. I have mistaken being emotionally compelling for being morally serious. I have been more committed to explaining myself than to correcting myself. I have hurt people who loved me, including people who loved me in practical, exhausting, unsexy ways, which is often the truest kind of love and the easiest to resent if you are still committed to a life organized around appetite.

I have also been helped in major ways during periods of my life when I was not capable of caring for myself in stable or adult ways. I was given support, structure, and forms of safety that I did not know how to provide for myself. I do not say that lightly. In return I made choices that created pain, instability, and consequences beyond me. That history carries its own mixture of gratitude, guilt, dependence, and confusion, and I am still trying to understand what it means to grow up emotionally after years of surviving in ways that kept me from fully becoming responsible for my own life.

That, more than anything, is the territory I am in now.

I have been sober a little over a year, and sobriety, at least for me, has not been an easy fix. It has felt like returning to consciousness in slow, unpleasant increments. Memory comes back. Embarrassment comes back. The body comes back with all its complaints and humiliations. The ordinary passage of time comes back too, which may be one of the crueler parts. When you are in chaos, time behaves differently. It breaks into episodes. Crisis creates pace. Desire creates momentum. Even suffering can feel strangely cinematic when it is intense enough. Sobriety removes that false sense of movement and leaves you alone with a much duller question: now that nothing is actively exploding, what kind of life have you actually built?

Mine, at present, is not one I can romanticize with a straight face.

My world has gotten very small. I live in Las Vegas, which is a difficult place to become less performative. It is a city built, in many ways, on appetite, transaction, surfaces, artificial light, and the promise that you can become someone else for the night if you are willing to pay for the costume. Even outside the obvious clichés, there is something spiritually overlit about it. Something that makes ordinary loneliness feel slightly more expensive. I do not say that from a pedestal. I say it as someone who fit the city’s logic too well for too long.

I have debilitating social anxiety. I am obsessive about my appearance in ways I know can sound trivial from the outside and feel tyrannical from within. Hair, weight, fitness, skin, the arrangement of the face, whether I look healthy enough, masculine enough, desirable enough, intact enough. I use hair systems. I am trying a wig. I walk and jog and do skincare and try to keep some small daily promise to myself because I no longer trust reinvention, only maintenance. I no longer believe in becoming a new person. I am trying, much more humbly, to become a person who can stand being himself long enough to build a life.

That is a quieter ambition than I once had, but it may be the first honest one.

Recently I went back to Arizona and saw family I had not seen in years. I spent time with my grandmother. I saw my aunt. I spent time with my sister in law and her kids. Sadly mygrandfather is dead now, he died before I could ever make things right.My father is dead too, but that isn’t a bad thing. Those facts have a way of making the rest of life lose some of its excuses. Children are growing. People are aging. Time is no longer theoretical to me. It no longer feels like some abstract substance I can continue wasting because I am sure I will eventually arrive at a version of myself worth beginning. The beginning, I am increasingly aware, is already behind me. Whatever comes next will not be youth. It will be consequence, effort, repair, maybe grace if I earn enough proximity to it to recognize the shape.

What I want now is almost embarrassingly modest. I want peace. I want joy. I want work. I want to rebuild family relationships and to do it in a way that is not just another performance of sincerity. I want to be part of my niece and nephew’s lives as a real adult, not a haunted figure in the margins of family memory. I want to make money. I want to contribute. I want enough independence to know that my life is not permanently organized around old mistakes, old debts, old rescues, and old roles.

There is a tendency to describe this kind of realization as wisdom, but that has always sounded too flattering to me. Mostly it feels humiliating. It feels like discovering that the things that might save your life are, in fact, the least glamorous things imaginable. Routine. Work. Restraint. Honesty. Boredom. The gradual dignity of becoming less of a problem. There is nothing especially cinematic about applying for jobs while mentally ill and physically tired. There is nothing romantic about paying off a low limit credit card. There is nothing profound about going for a walk because your mind is starting to lunge toward old exits. There is nothing poetic about cleaning the kitchen, answering the text, staying sober on a Thursday, resisting the urge to confuse restlessness with destiny.

And yet this, increasingly, seems to be where real life is.

For years I thought insight would save me. If I could understand myself deeply enough, explain myself beautifully enough, make enough sense of the pain, then perhaps change would follow naturally, the way weather follows pressure. It has been a difficult thing to admit that insight and change are not siblings. Sometimes they are not even acquaintances. A person can be brilliant at understanding himself and still remain committed to his own ruin. A person can describe his wounds with exquisite precision and still make everyone around him bleed.

I no longer find that interesting.

Or rather, I still find it interesting in the literary sense, but I no longer find it admirable in the personal one.

The question that matters to me now is not whether I am a bad person or a good one deep down after all. That question kept me trapped in theater. The question that matters is whether I can become more trustworthy. Whether I can stay. Whether I can stop using my life as a stage for increasingly expensive lessons. Whether I can learn to tolerate peace without treating it like an insult. Whether I can build something plain and honest enough to hold me when the drama recedes.

I do not know exactly what my future looks like. My health is still inconsistent. My circumstances are still tangled. I may not get the ending I am hoping for. Shame has not vanished. Neither has grief. I am not writing from some mountaintop of resolution. I am writing from the middle of it, from that strange and unflattering stage in a person’s life when the fantasy of being saved is dying and the more difficult task of participating in your own survival has finally begun.

Maybe that is what maturity is. Not the sudden arrival of virtue, but the reluctant acceptance of responsibility after every more easily desirable identity has failed you.

I have spent too much of my life trying to decide which story about me was the truest one. The wounded child. The difficult adult. The addict. The narcissist. The cautionary tale. The person with potential. The person who blew it. The person who was failed. The person who failed others. At this point I suspect the truest story is the least dramatic: I am a person with real damage and real blame, trying, later than I would like, to stop abandoning my own life.

That may not be redemption. It may not even be wisdom.

But it is, finally, a beginning I can get behind.