The Darkness

There's a photo of me sitting on a bench outside a hospital. Bald from chemo. Hospital gown on, ass hanging out. Smoking a cigarette under a "No Smoking" sign. My mom caught me as she walked up to visit.

But the cancer came later. After the shift. After I'd already started putting my life together.

The real darkness came before.

Hospital bench, 1999

Before the cancer

Before I was sitting on that bench, I was an addict. Substances were how I managed the internal chaos. The only way I knew to get temporary relief from the war inside. They worked until they didn't.

Before addiction, there was abuse. Sexual abuse. Physical abuse. Emotional abuse. Mental abuse. The kind of childhood that installs a suffering machine so deep you don't know it's there. You think it's just what being alive feels like.

I was neglected. Both parents eventually cut me off. I don't blame them. I've been to jail. I've been to halfway houses. I've been to rehabs. I've been homeless, with nothing but what I could carry and an identity that kept recreating the same hell no matter where I went.

The statistics

If you study people who grow up in my level of disorder, the research is clear: most end up either institutionalized or dead.

I've watched that research play out in real time. I have more friends who died from suicide than I care to count. More who died from overdoses. More who never found the exit from the loop they were trapped in.

I found the exit.

Not because I'm stronger. Not because I tried harder. Because something happened that I didn't expect and didn't know was even possible. Something that ended the war instead of helping me fight it better.