2020

I worked at Press Coffee from 2016 to 2020. Then the pandemic happened and I was out of work.

This is the part of my story I would skip if I were building a better one.

More money than I had ever made

Here is the specific thing that got me, and I have not heard many people say it out loud.

During that stretch I was getting paid more than I ever had in my life. Unemployment, plus the federal supplement. More money than any job had ever given me, for doing nothing, with nowhere to be.

If you have a history with substances, read that sentence again and see if you can spot the problem.

Money, no structure, no shift to be sober for, no coworkers who would notice, and a world where everybody was drinking at eleven in the morning and calling it a coping mechanism. Every single guardrail I had built after rehab at twenty-four was made of having somewhere to be. They all came down in the same week.

It ramped back up pretty drastically. Drinking and drugs both.

I thought it was the end of the world

I genuinely did. Not as a figure of speech — I thought this might be the actual end of things.

It was so bizarre. Empty streets, a number on the news every day, nobody able to tell you how long any of it would last. And I have bipolar disorder, which means my brain is already willing to go to extremes about the future, and it had just been handed genuine evidence.

That is a terrible combination to be unemployed and well-funded inside of. If the world is ending, the argument for restraint gets very thin.

What I am not going to claim

That I pulled myself out through willpower. I did not.

What changed was the same thing that changed the first time: the room changed. In January 2021 I started at Cruising Kitchens and had somewhere to be again, with people who would notice.

Structure is not a lesser solution than resolve. For me it has been the only one that has ever actually worked, twice now, and I have stopped being embarrassed about that.

What else was happening

My wife started a candle business in that same period. She got pregnant with twins.

So the same stretch contains the worst my using had been in years and the beginning of my children. Both. At once. That is not a narrative arc, it is just what a year is, and anyone telling you their rock bottom was tidy is editing.

Where it leaves me

I still drink. I do not use hard drugs. The title track is about overcoming abusive addiction and the verb is present tense on purpose, because 2020 is the year that taught me it is not a thing you finish.

You can be six years out and one changed circumstance from being right back in it.