I'm B. This is the honest side of the record.

My story, the short version

Hi, I'm B, and I'm about 18 months sober. For more than ten years, drugs ran my life — quietly at first, then not quietly at all. I'm a genuinely outgoing, caring person underneath all of it, which made it easy to hide behind for a long time. It took me a really long time to actually understand what I was doing to myself, and even longer to understand how tangled that was with having severe ADHD and some autistic tendencies nobody ever taught me how to work with instead of against. Recovery is the process of learning both things at once: how to stay clean, and how to finally understand the brain I've had this whole time.

The dog thing

If you stick around here, you'll notice I bring up dogs constantly. I'm not sorry about it. I genuinely believe dogs are one of God's gifts to us — they don't care about your clean date, your diagnosis, or the version of you from ten years ago. They just want you to come outside. On the days recovery and ADHD are both winning, a dog is often the reason I get off the couch, keep a routine, and remember that showing up for something else can carry me through showing up for myself.

How I actually keep myself accountable

The tool that matters most to me isn't a fancy app — it's forcing myself to think a process all the way through before I act on it, out loud if I have to, instead of letting my brain skip straight to the impulsive part. Accountability, for me, is slowing that gap down on purpose.

And then there's the one I'll admit isn't in any workbook: when life gets too overwhelming, I take a stress nap. I put everything on pause, physically lie down, and nap about it. It sounds like a joke. It's saved me more times than almost anything else on this list.

Why I'm pseudonymous

B isn't a persona — it's just the version of me that's willing to tell the truth in public without it being tied to a résumé, a family, a town, or a version of my life other people have already decided how to feel about. Recovery asks you to be radically honest with yourself. It doesn't require you to be identifiable to strangers on the internet to do that. So you won't find my name, my location, or any identifying detail here, and I'd ask readers not to guess at them in comments or messages — the anonymity is part of what makes the honesty possible.

Why recovery and ADHD, together

Most writing about recovery treats it as one story, and most writing about ADHD treats it as a separate, milder one — something about losing your keys and losing focus in meetings. Nobody really prepared me for what it's like living at the intersection: the same brain that's supposed to help me plan, remember, and follow through is the one rebuilding trust with itself, one day at a time. They're not parallel problems. They're tangled into each other. Pulling on one thread moves the other, for better and for worse.

So this blog doesn't separate them either. Some entries are about a hard day in recovery. Some are about a system that helps my ADHD brain function. Most days, honestly, it's both at once.

What this blog is — and isn't

This is a personal journal, written close to when things happen, before memory has a chance to either dramatize a day into a disaster or sand it down into nothing. It's not medical advice, not a treatment program, and not a story with a tidy ending I'm building toward. I'm not a counselor and I don't play one here. If something I write overlaps with what a doctor, sponsor, or therapist has told you, great — but always trust them over a stranger's blog.

What I can offer is specificity: the actual timers, systems, reminders, and small rituals that get me through an ordinary day, and the honest record of the days those systems don't quite hold. If you're managing your own version of this tangle, I hope some of it is useful. If nothing else, I hope it's good company.