Hi, I’m TJ: A Recovery Story
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The Weight of Small Choices
Every day we move through hundreds of tiny decisions some we notice, most we don’t. But each one sends out a ripple that shapes not only our tomorrow, but the tomorrow of everyone around us.
Think of it like this:
You pull a dish from the dishwasher without checking it. It looks clean, so you put it away. But maybe there’s a spot you didn’t see something that should’ve been wiped, something that could’ve been fixed with just a moment of awareness. When you slow down and take that moment, you’re not “earning” more life. You’re building a habit of intention, care, and responsibility.
And that matters.
When you make the right choice, even a small one… you add something positive to the pattern of your life.
You create order instead of chaos… You keep someone safe instead of risking harm. When you ignore those moments, the pattern loosens. Things slip. Other people feel the effects, even if they never know it came from you.
Even mistakes have choices hidden in them. A word typed wrong. A sentence that didn’t come out perfect. Sometimes fixing it cleans up the message but sometimes leaving it in keeps the truth honest and clear. Integrity doesn’t always look polished.
The point is simple:
Our lives are shaped stitch by stitch, decision by decision.
Small choices become habits. Habits become character. Character becomes destiny. the universe meets you where you stand.
Walking Through the Fire With a Higher Power
Coming out of addiction feels like being dragged out of the pit and tossed to the wolves. Your body’s worn down, your spirit’s bruised, and life has already taken its swing at you. But when you start listening — really listening — you notice something:
You’re not walking alone.
Most of the time, you only hear one set of footsteps because your higher power is carrying you through the flames. Not judging you. Not punishing you. Just holding you up while you fight your way back.
What I learned in that fire is this:
There is a higher power, and the universe does love you.
You might think it hates you.
You might swear it’s out to get you.
But that’s just pain talking.
The universe responds to what you put out. Energy flows through the river of existence — positive, negative, all of it. Here in this life, that river only flows one direction.You’re not here to suffer.
You’re here to grow, to rise, to shine — and the universe meets you where you stand.
The Beauty of Not Knowing
Edward Teller once told a story about going to an Albert Einstein lecture on relativity and electromagnetism. He sat in that room excited and ready, and for a perfect thirty seconds he understood every single thing Einstein was saying.
After that, it all left him behind. Too huge. Too brilliant. Too far ahead of the rest of us.
Teller walked out heartbroken, thinking he was stupid. His fellow physicists saw his face and asked what was wrong. He told them he did not understand. One of them smiled, patted his shoulder, and said:
“Yes, that is a very common human trait.”
That moment was not proof of failure. It was proof that even giants in science feel small in the face of something bigger than themselves.
Carl Jung talked about the difference between believing and truly knowing. When understanding finally hits you deep in your soul, it makes you look back and ask yourself:
Why didn’t I notice this earlier?
Why did I make the choices I made?
The answer is simple.
If we were fully aware of every outcome and every lesson our higher power placed in front of us, the game of life would be dull. There would be no mystery, no challenge, no growth, no reason to rise.
The confusion is part of the journey.
The clarity arrives when we are ready, not a moment before.
And that moment of awakening is the gift.
Careful what you ask for.
Understanding Why Step 2 Through 6 Prepare You for Step 7.
When I started working my 12 Steps, I had no clue what was really coming. I knew I was powerless — not just over drugs, but over everything that had its claws in me. My life was unmanageable in ways I didn’t even recognize.
It wasn’t until I hit Step Two — Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity — that things started to shift. I didn’t know who or what that Power was. I just knew something was there. That tiny bit of belief cracked the door open, but I hadn’t yet decided to turn my will and my life over. That came later.
Step Three made me choose. It wasn’t about saying, “Yeah, there’s a Higher Power.” It was about trusting it — handing over the control I thought I had. That’s where surrender started.
Then came Step Four, the hardest mirror I ever had to look into. Taking a fearless moral inventory? Man, that step stripped me bare. I thought I was just writing down my past, but really, I was facing my own patterns — the lies I told myself, the blame I tossed at everyone else.
Step Five forced me to speak that truth out loud. Admitting to God, to myself, and to another person exactly what I had done — no filters, no pity — that’s when I started understanding where the real insanity came from.
By Step Six, I finally saw what was broken inside me. It wasn’t about feeling bad anymore. It was about being ready for change — ready to let go of the parts of me that kept dragging me back into chaos.
And that’s why Step Seven hits so hard. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. You can’t really ask for that until you understand what those shortcomings are. You can’t skip straight from believing in a Higher Power to asking that Power to fix you — because then you’ll never understand what the hell went wrong to get you to Step One in the first place.
Those middle steps — Two through Six — they’re the prep work. The digging. The pain. The honesty. That’s where humility is born. Not from asking to be humble, but from realizing you can’t do any of it without help.
When I reached Step Seven, the universe didn’t just hand me peace — it showed me the wreckage I’d left behind and said, Now you know why you’re asking. That’s when humility became real.
Everything after that — prayer, meditation, making amends, daily inventory — it all flowed from that one moment. Step Twelve wasn’t some finish line; it was the proof that the work I’d done actually meant something.
When I look back now, Steps Two and Seven stand out the loudest. Because believing in a Higher Power and humbly asking that Power to remove what’s broken — that’s the whole journey right there. But the steps in between? That’s where you learn why you’re asking, and what you’re really ready to let go of.
The race we choose
Everything is a damn race.
We race the alarm clock.
We race the traffic.
We race deadlines, dinner, dishes, and daylight.
We race to live a normal life — whatever that means anymore.
And when addiction shows up?
It adds a whole new kind of race.
The survival sprint. The panic relay. The high-chasing marathon that never ends, where the prize isn’t a medal — it’s just not feeling like death for a few more hours.
That’s the thing no one tells you: even when you stop using, the race doesn’t stop. It just changes tracks.
Because recovery isn’t peace and quiet — it’s learning to run a different race. One where the finish line isn’t a fix, but a breath.
Some of us had to quit one race to finally start another.
Step off the track that was killing us and realize —
we were never meant to win that one.
The truth?
You don’t lose when you step out of the wrong race.
You win by finally running toward something worth finishing.
Gratitude
When I was ten, life gave me a plastic recorder and a note from the teacher that said, “You’ll need a case to protect it.”
If it broke, you’d have to pay for it.
And right there, my excitement died.
I wasn’t thinking about music — I was thinking about money.
About how Mom couldn’t afford something extra.
About how I might break it and make things worse.
That’s how fear works, even when you’re a kid — it strangles joy before it even breathes.
I almost didn’t even want to do recorder class.
But Mom said, “No problem!”
That was her thing — no matter how bad things got, she always made something out of nothing.
She was proud, even though I could see that worry hiding behind her smile — not about money this time, but about how awful that squeaky little thing was gonna sound.
Then she said the words that made my stomach drop:
“I’ll just make you one!”
Oh no.
I knew what that meant.
The poor kid’s case. The patchwork special. The one that said, “We don’t have store-bought.”
But I was wrong.
I should never have doubted her.
Mom wasn’t just a mom — she was a seamstress at the local shirt factory.
She knew how to make magic out of fabric and thread.
When she handed me that case, it was perfect.
Two colors — our school colors, of course — and a braided drawstring she’d made by hand.
Other kids had store-bought plastic junk.
Mine looked like something that should’ve come with sheet music and a spotlight.
That day I learned something I keep forgetting and keep having to relearn — even now, clean, sober, grown:
Gratitude isn’t about what you have.
It’s about who gave it to you.
Humility is remembering that your blessings don’t always come wrapped in fancy paper. Sometimes they come stitched together by a tired mom in a small house who believes in you more than you ever did in yourself.
Because love — real love — is handmade.
Teasing the Sphere
They called it The Demon Core.
A dense ball of plutonium—small enough to hold in your hands, powerful enough to level a city.
It killed two men who thought they had it under control.
In 1945 and again in 1946, scientists at Los Alamos were performing “criticality experiments.”
The goal? To test how close they could bring two halves of a plutonium sphere together before it went supercritical.
They used a screwdriver—just a damn screwdriver—to hold the halves apart.
A slip, a spark of blue light, and in less than a second, their lives were already over.
They just hadn’t died yet…Addiction works the same way.
I was the scientist.
The drug was the core.
And the screwdriver was my illusion of control. I told myself I was just experimenting. Just a little push, just a little closer. I could handle it. I was smart enough to know when to stop.
But all it takes is one moment—one slip—and the room fills with light.
Then everything you built, everyone you love, gets bathed in fallout.
I lost it all. Family. Home. Everything.
I was teasing the sphere—getting results, taking notes, feeling alive—and then bam.
Lethal dose.
Not instantly dead, but spiritually burning from the inside out.
The Demon Core didn’t care who was holding the screwdriver.
And neither does addiction.
Both are unforgiving teachers that give only one lesson:You don’t control the core.
It controls you.
Wrapped in Darkness and Noise
When I went to Wildflower, I looked up at the wall—faces of fame staring back like constellations frozen in time. Then I saw Leonard Nimoy and Buzz Aldrin.
Two space heroes.
One played the part, the other lived it.
Both legends touched the stars—and both battled the same disease. Addiction does not care if you’re a man in a rocket or a man in makeup with pointed ears. It don’t care about medals, followers, or fame. It waits in the silence behind success, whispering sweet nothings until it owns you.
Bones once said in Star Trek (2009),
“Space is a disease wrapped in darkness and silence.”
And maybe that’s the truth.
Because drugs are exactly the same damn thing—just flipped inside out.
A disease wrapped in happiness and noise.
We chase the loud to avoid the quiet, the high to dodge the hollow. But both roads end the same. Empty.
So maybe the real voyage isnt through stars or smoke—maybe it’s through ourselves. The mission is not survival. It is surrender. Because space and drugs both promise escape, but only one kind of silence heals.
The Pressure Makes the Turn
A lesson on resistance, flight, and finding your way back.
Sometimes we’re out there flailing—burning hot through life like a goddamn Starship, falling from the sky with nothing but metal, faith, and hope that something’s gonna catch us. We move our arms, we shift the wings, we hit the thrusters—but nothing bites. No grip. No feedback. Just falling.
But here’s the truth:
Resistance is what makes the turn possible.
When Starship drops from orbit, it doesn’t hit the brakes by slowing down. It hits the atmosphere sideways. It leans into the pressure. And when the air thickens—when the heat builds, and the forces start pushing back—that’s when it can bank. That’s when it finds control.
It’s not despite the pressure. It’s because of it.
That’s us, too.
Sometimes life won’t let us steer until we’re deep enough into the mess. Until we’ve felt the burn, the drag, the weight of everything trying to pull us apart. But when we finally do? When we bank into that resistance, when we stop trying to avoid it and use it instead—that’s when we start aiming for the landing pad again.
No ship flies smooth all the way down. And no heart does, either.
So if you’re feeling the weight, if it feels like everything is fighting you—maybe it’s not to stop you. Maybe it’s there so you can turn.