If you knew me back then, you would never have bet on me.

I was the guy in the back of the meeting who did not talk, did not believe, and did not think he could ever get clean.

The real problem

I did not want to die. But I did not want to live either.

The drugs were never really the problem. I was the problem. Restless, irritable, discontent, and nothing was ever enough. I tried to fill that hole with money, girls, cars, clothes. None of it worked. Drugs worked for a while, which is the whole trap. Then the consequences piled up and the drugs stopped working too.

Which left me alone with the person I hated most. Me.

Fifty something times

I went through detox and treatment at more than fifty facilities, passed from one place to the next.

The whole time, people kept telling my family the same line. He just has to want it.

I wanted it. You do not go back fifty times if you do not want it. What I did not know was how to live. Not without my solution. And almost nobody was working on that with me. The First Step is two halves and I only ever got help with one of them. Get me sober, hand me back an unmanageable life, and then act surprised.

What changed

I met a guy named Sean. He introduced me to HEAL Culture and it moved something that fifty facilities had not.

He taught me how to live life on life's terms and how to actually succeed at it. Not how to avoid a substance. How to build a life.

Before that I had put one small seed of faith into the program, mostly because I watched enough people get sober that I eventually thought, if they can, maybe I can. I told them I did not believe in the God concept. Somebody said, you had faith that whatever your dealer handed you was going to work. That was a higher power. You just have to know you are not God.

That seed grew. I got honest. I stayed open minded. I took suggestions even when I did not want to. And little by little life got better. Not the life I had been praying to get back. A much better one I was this close to never having.

What I want you to know

Early sobriety is brutal. Anyone telling you different is lying. It is uncomfortable, emotional and lonely in stretches.

But if you stay. If you do not quit. If you do the work even when it hurts.

It gets better in ways you cannot picture from where you are sitting. I have never met one person who truly committed to recovery and then said they wished they had not. Not one, in all these years.

That is why I built the page and the groups, early in my sobriety, when I needed a purpose just to stay sober. In helping other people, all of you helped save me too. You still do. Honestly you help me more than I help you.

That is my why. Giving back what was so freely given to me. Period.