Rehab at 24

I went to rehab at twenty-four. Cocaine, alcohol, other things.

It is not much of a powerful story. It is the truth, which is a different quality, and the only one I am interested in.

What I am not going to do

I am not going to give you the rock bottom scene. I am not going to shape this into a clean arc where I was lost and then found. The arc is a format, and the format requires editing out the parts that do not serve it, and the parts it edits out are usually the true ones.

Here is what actually happened, in order.

What happened

I used through my early twenties while working at a bowling alley. At twenty-four I went to rehab. In April 2015 I met my wife. About a year after that I left the bowling alley and went to work at a coffee shop full time.

Leaving that building is the single most useful thing I did.

Not because the job was the problem. Because the environment was — the hours, the people, the availability, the specific shape of my life in that place. You can decide to stop and still be standing in a room arranged around not stopping. At some point the room has to change.

The part people skip

I struggled again afterwards, and the worst of it came later than you would expect. In 2020 I was laid off, earning more on unemployment than I ever had working, with no structure and nowhere to be — and it ramped back up badly, drink and drugs both. That year has its own page, because flattening it into one clause here would be exactly the kind of tidying I said I would not do.

I still drink.

I do not use hard drugs, and have not for years. That is where I landed. It is not the ending a recovery narrative wants, and I am aware that saying it plainly makes some people uncomfortable, including people who would rather I presented a tidier version.

But a tidier version would be a lie, and the one thing I will not do is lie about this. Someone reading this who is in it does not need another perfect story to measure themselves against. There are plenty of those and they are not helping.

The song

Bluebonnet Plague, the title track, is about overcoming abusive addiction. Not about being cured of it. About the overcoming, which is ongoing and is a different verb.

The record is named after that song for a reason.

Why this is on the website

Because it is in the music, and putting it in the music while hiding it on the site would be a strange kind of cowardice.

And because I am thirty-six now, with a wife and twins and a record coming out, and the version of me at twenty-four would have found that information useful.