Six months have slipped by since I signed the sale papers and—without ceremony—walked out of a business that had swallowed every holiday for fifteen years.
The first proof this was the right decision arrived on Thanksgiving 2024. For the first time in my adult life no email or phone call interrupted the aroma of turkey and mashed taters. I pushed back from the table, collapsed onto the couch, and let the low hum of post-meal football lull me into a relaxation so deep it felt almost illicit. My nervous system, Pavlov-trained by fifteen years of emergencies, kept waiting for a siren that never came.
From Sedation to Signal
Two months after selling, the silence began speaking.
I woke each dawn to an anxiety clamp so tight it flattened birdsong into static. Nights ended in bourbon-thick oblivion: eyes open, conscience vacant. I was a shell—meat and heartbeat, nothing else. No husband for my wife, no father for my kids, no son for God—just a human signal tower stuck on “busy.” Alcohol wasn’t the problem; it was the counterfeit answer I swallowed because the real question—Where is your peace?—was too sharp to face.
The drink offered comfort: a chemical hush that felt merciful in the moment. I fell for it every damned day, trading twenty minutes of warmth for twenty hours of residue. The silence, though, kept prying. One night it finally cracked me open: If you keep numbing the ache, you’ll never hear the call. That wasn’t conscience; that was God, and He didn’t whisper—He leveled the room.
So I quit—quietly, the way a man signs a cease-fire with himself. No prizes, no hashtags, no confetti tweet. Just a midnight visit to the kitchen sink, the bottle tilted like a broken compass, the last finger’s worth of bourbon circling the drain. The only witnesses were the refrigerator hum and the small, stunned voice inside me that realized the war was over. It wasn’t triumph; it was a jailbreak—one slow exhale as I reached for the invisible cords, cut them clean, and rubbed the ridges they’d burned into my wrists—fresh welts where strings had tugged for years.
The payoff continues to show up after just a few months.
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20 lb. of storm-weight shed
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My cognitive gears finally bite again
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Mood that climbs by itself instead of hitchhiking on ethanol
In a world where “normal” means numbing, non-conformity became my Stoic rebellion.
The Four Beams I’m Re-Activating
Every day I’ll log the miles, the pages, the revenues, and the laughs—because what is measured draws its own map.
Pillar Focus for the next 90 days
Body • Keep the sobriety streak unbroken.• Eat nothing that doesn’t walk, swim, or fly—strict carnivore plates.• Three-day strength training per week.
Being • One hands-on service block each week at church or in the community.• Read every single day—paper, not pixels—stacking one book per month until the shelves bow.
Balance • Quarter-lay our backpacks on new ground: one family trip every few months.• Turn up the amps together—tickets in hand for at least one live concert every quarter.
Business • Test cash-flow plays: watch flips, AI vending, wholesale bots.• Offer my CTO brain as a fractional tech consultant—strategy sessions that pay for the experiments.
Four beams, four scorecards.
Miss one and the lighthouse dims; hit all and the coastline glows.
