For more than ten years, drugs ran my life — quietly at first, then not quietly at all. I spent most of that decade also doing real work: running equipment, keeping a mountain operation moving through the kind of weather that doesn't care if you're having a bad day. Lifts, snowmaking, grooming, whatever broke that morning — I was good at showing up for that. I was not good at showing up for myself, and for a long time I didn't understand those were two different skills.
Part of what I didn't understand for years is how much of this was tangled up with a brain wired for severe ADHD, with some autistic tendencies nobody ever pointed out or taught me how to work with instead of against. Structure I tried to build myself never held. That job held it for me for twelve years — until the spring of 2023, when I left it. Losing that structure was the real beginning of my relapse stage, even though I wouldn't have called it that at the time. I was still what I'd now call a dry addict — not using, but with no real understanding of what recovery actually required. The only thing I understood back then was staying absent from drugs until I couldn't handle it anymore.
That's exactly what happened. By the summer of 2024, the relapse caught up to me and I was arrested while on felony probation. I spent 40 days in jail before I was released, and I was sentenced to Drug Court that September.
My first real experience with AA came that fall, not long after I got out of those 40 days. The meeting itself was so overwhelming that I jumped out of a moving truck right after it ended. I don't remember what happened next. I blacked out, and I came to on the ground with my significant other at the time screaming my name. Relationships and people-pleasing turn out to be a huge part of this story too — I'll get deeper into that as it goes.
I was already in that court-ordered program, already trying, in my own uneven way, to stay clean, when in November of 2024 I lost my mother to a fentanyl overdose.
Write down one true sentence about your day, even a bad one. Over time it becomes a record you can actually trust — better than memory alone, which recovery and ADHD both tend to distort in the dramatic direction.
Losing her didn't make me want to use — it made me stop caring whether I lived through the week. I picked up again with the specific, ugly intention of just letting the court send me to prison. If I couldn't keep her, I didn't see the point in keeping myself either.
I don't have a clean explanation for what changed. There wasn't a single moment of clarity, just a slow, grinding decision to try again anyway, for reasons I still can't fully explain to people who ask. January 5, 2025 is the date I count from. Not because it was dramatic. Because it's the day I decided her death wasn't going to be the reason I gave up on the rest of my life, on top of everything else it had already taken.
I'm writing this under the name B because I'm still in the middle of the legal case that started with that relapse, and anonymity is the only way I can tell the truth about it without putting the case, or the people in my life, at risk. I'm not an expert, a counselor, or a cautionary tale with a tidy ending. I'm just B, sober since that January, trying to be honest about the parts of this nobody warned me about — the recovery, the ADHD, the dog who doesn't know any of this is complicated, and the court dates I still don't know the ending to.
This is the B side. It's not the polished single. It's the honest one, and I think it might be the better song anyway.
Did this land with you? React privately — no name required.
Anonymous, public-count only. No comments, no names, nothing published.
Share this post