I used to think if I could figure out why, I could finally fix everything.
Why did I become so anxious about the future?
Why did my mind learn to run three exits ahead of wherever my body happened to be?
Why did I discover that a drink could make all that noise go quiet?
And why, once I discovered that, did quiet start feeling like something I needed to buy by the glass?
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering.
Preferably at 2:15 in the morning, because apparently that’s when the human brain likes to conduct forensic investigations of childhood.
Nothing productive has ever happened in my head at 2:15 in the morning. And yet my brain continues scheduling meetings.
I’ve searched my childhood for clues. The frustrating thing is, I can’t point to one giant thing.
I had a relatively normal childhood. I got bullied sometimes, but so was everyone in my neighborhood. I was shy. Uncertain. I knew I was different in ways I couldn’t explain.
But this was the 1980s. Nobody asked how you were processing your emotions. Mostly, they told you to go outside. That was therapy. Go outside and don’t come back until dinner. Remarkably, an entire generation survived.
I didn’t figure out what I wanted to do with my life until I was twenty-six. I barely drank until I was twenty-eight. That’s what puzzles me.
For twenty-eight years, alcohol was basically an extra in the movie.
Then it got a speaking role.
Then apparently fired the director and took over production.
Why?
Was adulthood harder for me than I admitted?
Was I looking at people my age who seemed to have everything figured out and wondering why I hadn’t received the instruction manual?
Careers. Houses. Families. Confidence. Now I realize most adults are just children with mortgages pretending they understand escrow. Nobody knows what they’re doing. Some people just have nicer kitchens while they’re doing it.
Maybe I carried some quiet belief that I wasn’t enough, so I decided I would become enough.
Another degree. Another promotion. Higher. Keep going. Prove it.
See? I’m okay.
Nothing says I’m completely secure with myself quite like collecting credentials as if there’s a prize at the end.
The problem with spending your life proving you’re okay is that somewhere underneath all that proving is a person who isn’t entirely convinced.
So maybe alcohol wasn’t really about alcohol. Maybe it was about relief.
Maybe I didn’t want to drink as much as I wanted, maybe for a few hours, to stop being responsible for being me.
Then, at forty, I stopped. Completely. And stayed stopped for almost ten years.
During those years, I started noticing how much other people drank.
Friends. Family. Family at dinners and holidays. I’d watch someone refill a glass and genuinely wonder, How do they do this?
How do you drink that much and get up tomorrow and go to work? I’d have needed three business days and a medical team.
I wasn’t judging them. I genuinely didn’t understand.
And then, years later, I became the person I once watched and couldn’t understand. That stays with me.
Maybe that’s why I don’t judge people much anymore.
Life has a terrifying way of walking you across the room and putting you in the chair you once looked at from a distance.
So why, after nearly a decade, would I ever go back? There are answers to that question that belong only to me. The past has excellent bookkeeping.
For a long time, I kept opening the books.
Why?
Why?
Why?
As if somewhere, buried beneath enough regret and analysis, there would be one answer that explained everything.
There wasn’t. Eventually I realized: I was asking the past a question only the present could answer.
The question wasn’t...Why did I do it?
Not anymore. The question was... What am I going to do now?
Understanding matters. Therapy matters. Programs matter. Recovery communities matter.
We need to know where the holes are if we don’t want to keep falling into them. But there’s a difference between learning from the past and moving back into it.
I don’t live there anymore.
And there is one thing I don’t wonder about... How I finally stopped trying to numb myself.
For me, that answer is God.
I know. That sentence will lose some people.
A few years ago, it probably would have lost me too. There was no lightning bolt. God didn’t float down from heaven, slap the drink out of my hand and say, “Michael, enough.”
Although, frankly, that would have saved everyone considerable time. It was much quieter.
Some mornings it was just me sitting there asking... Please help me do this today.
Not forever. Today. And somehow, today became tomorrow. Then another today.
The thing I once believed I needed to survive slowly became the thing I knew I could no longer use to survive.
God didn’t erase my consequences. He didn’t rewrite my history. He didn’t repair every relationship.
He certainly didn’t give me my old life back. He gave me today.
That’s recovery for me now. I am accountable for what I’ve done.
Completely. But I am also accountable for what I do next.
Today I can tell the truth.
Today I can help somebody who’s hurting.
Today I can pray.
Today I can stay present.
Today I can choose not to disappear from my own life.
I spent years asking God why.
Why did I need it? Why did I go back? Why did all of this happen?
I thought healing meant eventually getting an answer. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe sometimes God doesn’t explain your past. Maybe He just keeps handing you a present.
One ordinary morning at a time.
So I don’t wonder why much anymore.
I spent enough of my life asking why I became that man. I’d rather spend what’s left becoming the man I was supposed to be.
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