The Spiral, and the Way Back

I've written around this for a few posts now, and I think it's time I just tell it straight. In November of 2024, my mother died of a fentanyl overdose. I was already enrolled in a court-ordered treatment program at the time, already white-knuckling my way through staying clean one supervised day at a time. Her death didn't just hurt — it detonated something. Within days I was using again, and I want to be honest about why: it wasn't to feel good. It was because I'd stopped caring what happened to me next, including a very real possibility of prison. Some part of me thought that would almost be a relief — a decision made for me, so I wouldn't have to keep making it myself.

I'm not going to romanticize that period or pretend there was a single cinematic rock-bottom moment. It was just weeks of letting go of everything — the program, the people checking in on me, the version of myself that had been trying. The shame spiral had its best material yet: of course you couldn't stay clean, of course this is how it ends, you were always going to end up here. At 2am, with your mother a month in the ground and a court date on the calendar, that voice doesn't sound like a lie. It sounds like the most honest thing anyone's ever told you.

Here's what actually got me out, and it wasn't a big gesture. I didn't have a dramatic turnaround scene. I just reached a specific, quiet decision on January 5, 2025 that letting her death also take the rest of my life would be one more loss on top of a loss I never agreed to. I didn't try to fix everything at once — I didn't walk back in with some grand redemption speech. I picked one single piece of a routine, the smallest one I could find, and did only that until it felt normal again. Then I added the next piece. That's the whole method. It's the same one I use now.

That routine got me moving again, but the real turning point took a lot longer to show up. For a long stretch, some part of me was still quietly waiting it out — some unspoken idea that once the program was done, I'd be free to go back to using. It took me a long time to have what I can only call a spiritual awakening: the moment I stopped resonating with that idea at all. Once I finally let go of the obsession, I realized I could do so much better with my life than just surviving it. Things actually started to come together once I began taking care of myself and putting myself first, because if you don't have yourself, you can't help anybody else.

That shift didn't happen overnight either. It took months of sitting in the back of the rooms, just listening to people I could relate to, before I finally figured out how to speak up myself. Now I'm the one sharing my story. I've accepted where I came from, the difficulties I still have to face, and what my next steps look like in order to keep combating what I know is a lifelong disease.

I'm telling you this now, eighteen months later, from the middle of a legal fight that's still not resolved — a disputed test result, a case that could still, technically, end in prison time regardless of how long I stay clean. Some days that unresolved ending feels unbearable on top of everything else this year has cost me. But I keep coming back to the same fact: I am here, today, clean, because I decided to be, one restarted piece of routine at a time, and nothing a court decides can undo the fact that I already chose to come back once when I had every reason not to.

After a setback — and I've learned this the hard way, more than once — resist the urge to rebuild your whole system at once. Restart with the single smallest piece of your routine, even if it feels too small to count. It was true after the mail pile. It was true after the worst month of my life. It's still true.