Addiction

In the body, the earliest memories are fear.

Peace comes easily in a crisis—
calm, collected,
conducting chaos like a symphony
you’ve rehearsed a thousand times.

To know what a lack of safety feels like
is to know, instinctively,
that it should never be inflicted on others.

Heavy footsteps.
A shift in posture.
A change in tone.

Conflicts—and near-conflicts—
read like a familiar book,
pages turned early
with a joke,
a gesture,
an intervention,
anything to avoid an ending
you’ve already lived
a thousand times.

You learn the patterns.
You predict the outcomes.
You pull the levers—
not for control,
but so no one else
has to feel what you felt.

But what happens
when the crisis is over?

What does a nervous system do
when it no longer needs to be on guard?

How does a body rest
when vigilance has been its language
for so long?

Or does the crisis
ever really leave at all?

I don’t know.

But I’m learning to ask.
I’m learning to listen.
I’m learning to find out.

#MightyPoets #MentalHealth #Addiction #PTSD #Grief #Trauma

When death comes for me,
I will greet him as an old friend.

For a long time,
I never thought I’d see
thirteen,
sixteen,
eighteen,
twenty-one,
twenty-five,
thirty—
and I made peace with that.

I lived by my rules.
Walked my own path.
Did my own thing.

But a life hardened by survival
is not the same
as a life fully lived.

Planning endlessly for the future
is not living in the present.
Living inside the past
is not living your life at all.

So today—
and tomorrow—
I choose presence.

I choose to love
and to be loved
unabashedly.

I choose to welcome life
and the possibility of death
with the same open hands.

I don’t have to make life great every day.
I just have to choose
to have a great day.

If I do that,
life will take care of the rest.

And today—
today will be a great day.

#MightyPoets #MightyTogether #MentalHealth #Addiction #PTSD #Grief

As the snow falls outside
and we’re held inside these physical walls,
it becomes an invitation
to look at the walls we’ve built
and the ones we’ve learned to lower
just to survive.

The isolation that softened into connection.
The loneliness that found its way into friendship.
The hardness that loosened into love.
The noise that settled into peace.
The rage—
no longer everywhere,
only rising now
when it is righteous.

To have come this far
in such a short stretch of time—
to fall in love with self and others,
to feel safe,
to feel seen,
to feel whole—

that is no small thing.

It is, quietly,
a beautiful thing.

#MentalHealth #Addiction #PTSD #MightyPoets #MightyTogether

Thirty days can feel like a lifetime
in the flattest, most borrowed moments.

Thirty days of fluorescent lights.
Thirty days of rules.
Thirty days of group.
Of check-ins.
Of charts and chairs and shared silence.

Thirty days of tracking
the ups and downs
and ups and downs
of sobriety.

But also—
thirty days of sobriety.

For the first time in decades,
I have thirty days.

That feels like a win.

A win with structure.
With rules.
With bubble wrap still on the corners.

But still—

Thirty days of being myself.
Thirty days of taking off the mask.
Thirty days of feeling all the feelings
instead of managing them.
Thirty days of softness.
Thirty days of falling in love.

The next thirty days are a little scary.

The re-entry.
The noise.
The choices.
The freedom that cuts both ways.

The possibilities—
good and bad—
waiting on the other side
of the doors I’m about to walk through.

But I don’t need to make
the next thirty days great.

I just need to make today great.

I just need to be myself.
To be honest.
To be loved.
To be light.

To make someone else’s day
a little better.

I have thirty days,
and I feel good.

I can lighten someone else’s load.
I can be of service.
I can build something that feels like community.

I can prioritize myself
without disappearing from the world.

I can do the hard work.
I can love.
I can be loved.

I have thirty days.
And today,
that is enough.

#MentalHealth #MightyPoets #PTSD #Addiction #Grief #MightyTogether #CheckInWithMe

It wasn’t the violence that hurt the most.
It wasn’t the endless cycle of abuse
that finally pushed me away.
It wasn’t your fists.

What broke me
was believing, for the first time,
that I could fall apart safely—
and realizing you didn’t care enough
to help put me back together.

I was handed off instead.

To cops.
To jails.
To therapists.
To military schools.

Institutions that tried to parent
what you weren’t willing to.
What you didn’t care to.
What you didn’t know how to love.

Because you couldn’t love me.

You never learned to regulate
what I had to.

You say you won’t tolerate a relationship
that isn’t rooted in respect.

Was it respect
when you beat me?
My mother?
My siblings?

Was it respect
when you offered to pay for my education
and later threw it back at me as worthless
because it made me empathetic—
because it made me soft
in ways you never survived being?

When I look back on a life half-lived,
I can’t find a single moment
where you actually respected me.

Only obedience.
Only dependence.
Only the version of me
that needed you to survive.

And when I didn’t—
when I finally stood upright,
found my own voice,
claimed my own opinions—
you hated it.

But that is not a lesson
either of us needs to keep learning.

I need to learn to love myself
in the places you never could.
To respect what you couldn’t see.
To heal what you broke first.
To unlearn the patterns
you're still trying
to beat into me.

Maybe they were beaten into you.

Maybe you have changed.
Maybe I just can’t see it
while staring so hard at the past,
trying to rework the present.

But today,
saying *I love you*
means not saying anything at all.

Respect means restraint.
Accountability is foreign.

So silence—
not anger,
not punishment—

silence will become comfort.

#MightyPoets #MightyTogether #MentalHealth #Addiction #PTSD #Grief #Abuse