Lord, Have Mercy

A Report from Sobriety

I never wanted to write a beautiful story. This is not a healing fairy tale. It is closer to a record of what remains when the smoke clears and the excuses fall silent.

For a long time, I believed love would save me. Today I know how dangerous that belief was for me and for the people I projected it onto. The shock was not that others were broken. The shock was realizing how much of that chaos belonged to me.

I grew up in a house where words rarely meant what they said or were not spoken at all. My father’s promises lasted about as long as the beer in his glass. My mother disappeared into bottles, into threats, into forests she thankfully always returned from.

I learned early to read the tensions in a room long before anyone raised their voice: how tightly a jaw would clench, how a gaze would drift into nothing, how the air thickened when a boundary was about to be crossed. This is how you become sensitive and how you become addicted long before the first substance ever enters your body.

When addiction entered my life, it felt less like temptation and more like relief. It didn’t make me “high” in the classic sense. It pushed the noise aside, sorted the chaos, allowed me to breathe for a moment without fighting battles on every front at once.

It felt as if someone had turned the volume down inside a mind that had never been quiet.

I knew the price would eventually be my life. I chose it anyway. I owe myself that honesty now.

Within that logic, chemsex was not excess but continuation: not a space for intimacy, but an attempt to force closeness where trust had never been learned. Bodies became places where I could disappear. I called it “connection” because I didn’t yet have the word for escape.

You can fuck yourself empty and still never feel full.

There is nothing romantic about that.

I began to see people less as people and more as possibilities. I gave away money, time, attention, control and told myself it was love. Every “good morning” message was a small high. Every minute of silence a withdrawal.

I wasn’t just in love.

I was dependent.

The day I struck someone was not a “slip.” It was the moment when everything I had never been allowed to say found a body to move through.

It was violence and it came from me.

The shame remains. It had to. Because it forced me to see the part that no drug, no childhood story, can excuse.

The lowest point was not some cinematic collapse. It was the silence afterward. Walks far too long for the condition of my body. Headphones in my ears. Tears on my face.

The absurd wish that some sign would fall from the sky and tell me who I was when I had neither substances nor a project to hide inside.

Nights with a journal, putting more truth onto paper than I could tolerate during the day. Cold showers at three in the morning where I repeated sentences like mantras:

I am safe.

I am more than this story.

I can let go.

Some days they sounded hollow. Other days they carried me for a few more hours.

Healing did not begin with light. It began with exhaustion. With the moment I stopped persuading myself.

No grand resolutions. No solemn rebirth.

Just ten seconds after another:

don’t use

don’t write

don’t call

don’t lie.

Just breathe.

Ugly, shaking, but present.

Between two breaths there was eventually a fracture a very brief moment in which I saw myself at the same time as a child and as an adult.

The boy who had learned that silence meant safety.

The man who realized it was slowly killing him.

I would love to say everything got better from there.

It didn’t.

But from that point on, I could no longer convincingly lie to myself.

Today I sit here writing this sober. I am not “over it,” and I am not an inspiring example.

I am someone rewriting his own code slowly, imperfectly, full of errors.

I practice saying no when the old itch returns. I sometimes let shame simply exist without burying it under a new high or a new project. I am learning the difference between someone needing me and someone actually seeing me.

This is no longer about other people.

It is about me.

About the child who believed that adaptation was love.

About the adult who, for the first time, does not silence his own voice when things become uncomfortable.

I do not want to be a label anymore

not “addict,”

not “toxic,”

not “too much.”

I want to be as real as I can tolerate.

Even if it bleeds.

Even if it unsettles people.

Maybe especially then.

If there is an arc to this story, it is contained in a single sentence:

I am still here.

Not cleanly drawn, not redeemed but present.

Breathing.

Writing.

Awake.

And for the first time in my life, that is enough for a moment.

Samu