I don’t know why I was so angry that night. But I was, and I wanted someone else to hurt as much as I did.

I stumbled into my buddy Cooper, a gentle giant twice my size and one of the kindest people I knew. Something about him wasn’t sitting right with me that night. Maybe it was his shirt. Maybe it was the way he looked at me. Maybe it was that he wasn’t drinking as much as I was. Whatever it was, he became the target.

I tightened my fist and swung. Square in the face. He stumbled backward, dazed. “What the hell was that for?” he said.

I didn’t have an answer. “Sorry, I don’t know, man,” I said. “I don’t know what got a hold of me. I’m so sorry.”

I took a giant gulp of that sweet, sour, throat-burning whiskey, stumbled back to the couch, and passed out.

I don’t remember most of that night. But I do remember the cost: I lost my core friend group. Over the next few months, I filled that hole with more drinking. I was eighteen, and alcohol had already become a daily habit and a real problem.

It would take over ten years, sobriety, treatment, sober living, relapse after relapse, before I got a hold of the thing that was running my life into the ground.

I thought quitting would fix everything. Instead, when I took the drink and drugs away, I was more miserable than I’d ever been.

Years of meetings, introspection, and therapy taught me why: alcohol and drugs were the most effective solution I’d found for the actual problem, suffering. I was suffering from things I didn’t have words for yet. Later I’d learn to call them by name: craving, hatred, and confusion.

Alcohol did for me what I couldn’t do for myself: it gave me a way out of that suffering, even if only for a few hours. Drunk, I didn’t have to think about what I was doing with my life. Or about calling a bartender a “nasty, selfish bitch” for cutting me off. Or about my parents lying awake, wondering if I’d make it home.

It let me forget my problems, my suffering, and the world around me. And it let me be someone else entirely, not the shy, nerdy gamer who never knew what to say to a girl, but someone who could talk to anybody and not care what they thought.

Alcohol was my social lubricant and my liquid courage. It solved the one problem I could never drink away: being myself, sober.

I really didn’t like who I was without it. Boring. Dull. I didn’t know how to hold a conversation, let alone connect with someone. I definitely didn’t know how to love myself, or take care of myself, or be kind to myself.

It took years to learn how to enjoy life without the booze.

Twelve step groups are the gold standard for a reason, and they were mine for most of the last twelve years. I still show up sometimes for the people. But after working every step of Alcoholics Anonymous three times over, with three different sponsors, across a decade, I knew something was still missing.

Six months sober in my early twenties. Relapse. Eighteen months. Relapse. Three years. Relapse again.

Why did I keep going back to the bottle that kept wrecking my life? Why couldn’t I just quit, the way everyone around me seemed to?

I was in sober living. I called my sponsor almost daily. I volunteered at meetings, helped newer people find their footing. And still, a piece was missing.

I was unhappy. Unfulfilled. Still hunting for that feeling of belonging, even after a thousand meetings.

I needed a real change, though I didn’t know what shape it would take. Then I found Recovery Dharma.

I’d been drawn to Buddhism since senior year of high school, when I first read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I’d spent most of my life surrounded by Christianity, and while parts of it stayed with me, none of it ever fully landed. Something in Siddhartha did. The idea that spirituality could be a personal search, not something handed down through dogma or ritual, cracked something open in me.

Recovery Dharma, a Buddhist approach to addiction, felt like finding a rare, iridescent jewel. I started attending online meetings daily, and it felt like coming home. Most meetings share the same shape: meditation, a reading, group sharing.

Here was a community of people in recovery from all over the world, learning to live peacefully through the teachings of Buddhism. Community, the inquiry questions, the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path: for the first time, this was a solution that worked. The three words from earlier, craving, hatred, confusion, are exactly what the Buddha named as the root of suffering. Naming them was the first time I started loosening my grip, letting go of years of self-hatred built up from all of the relapses and unsuccessful sobriety.

I started to feel at peace, to feel real joy, and to find my voice again. This Substack came out of that. I want to hand over what I’ve learned to people who’ve never heard of this community, and show them there’s another way through.

I really needed people who were kind, generous, and compassionate. I found them in Recovery Dharma.

Not every meeting gets it right. We’re still people in recovery, carrying our own unhealed wounds on top of everything else. But the emphasis on self-care, respect, and wisdom runs through nearly every meeting I’ve been to.

I still think about that fist sometimes. Not the one I threw at Cooper's face, but the one that lived in my stomach for years after, clenched around every feeling I didn't want to experience. Some days, I still feel it tightening up, trying to control the way I feel. These days, I know how to hold my hand open and let myself feel whatever's there, without reaching for a drink or a drug to change it.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for addiction. I’ve learned that much over the years. Twelve step groups work for a lot of people, but there are other doors too, ones I didn’t know existed until I needed one badly enough to look.

If you’ve been throwing yourself against a wall trying to force sobriety to work, I know that exhaustion. I’ve lived inside it for a long time. It takes time, and it might take more than one door before you find yours. Keep going anyway.

If any of this landed for you, I’d love to have you here. We’re figuring this out together, and I hope some of what took me ten years to learn gets to you a little faster.

With peace,
Wes

I’m out doing my daily DoorDash deliveries when I see a group of young men, maybe in their twenties, wearing red bandanas, all dressed in black, walking into the McDonald’s where I’m supposed to pick up my next order. I catch one of them looking back at me. Suddenly I realize, this is the gang that's been hunting me down for the past few weeks.

Panic shoots through me. My palms go sweaty. My heart starts pounding. They found me, and they’re not here for a Big Mac and fries. They’re here for me.

I reverse out of the parking space and hit the gas. I need to get away. In my rearview mirror, a red SUV with blacked-out windows is right behind me. I know these are the men who are after me, and I know they won’t stop until they get me.

I start swerving through the lanes, trying to shake them. I turn off the GPS on my phone, certain that’s how they’re tracking me. Erratic right turn. Spontaneous left. Eventually, I lose them.

I pull into the back alley of a shopping center and let out a deep breath, but I’m too afraid to drive home. I don’t want them knowing where I live. After sitting with it a while, I decide the only safe place left is the hospital. There, at least, I’ll be protected.

Forty-five minutes later, I check myself in. I already know where this is going, back into the psychiatric ward for the third time. While I’m filling out the paperwork, a man in his mid-forties, wearing a Pink Floyd shirt, keeps looking at me like he’s trying to put his thoughts into my mind. Given the shirt, I figure he probably knows what he’s doing. And what he’s telling me is to get out, that they know I’m here, and that they’re coming for me.

I knew I shouldn’t have come here.

I bolt back to my car and speed to my dad’s house as fast as I can. Once I’m home, I fall apart. Panicked. Crying. Certain my life is in danger. My dad is worried, and I don’t know what to do anymore. After a long back and forth, I finally let him drive me to the hospital himself.

We never made it to miniature golf that day.

This wasn’t the first time I’d lived through a manic episode or experienced psychosis. It had been happening, off and on, for over five years.

It took a lot to get to a place where I could find a semblance of sanity in all the madness: medications, long-term treatment, sober living, therapy, meditation, retreats, and recovery meetings. Eventually, I felt like I had some grip on what the psychiatrists call a dual diagnosis: Bipolar I disorder with psychotic features and a substance use disorder.

The Middle Way Home is where I’m going to share all of it. Addiction. Living with bipolar disorder. And finding something like peace through the teachings of the Buddha.

I’m starting this now because I’m finally at a place where I can manage my symptoms, where I feel good in my sobriety, and where I want to share what I’ve learned. Not because I have it all figured out, but because I might be able to help someone still walking the path I’ve walked.

These essays won’t be filled with slogans or easy answers. I don’t want this to be preachy or prescriptive; I’ve had enough people try to help me that way, and it never worked. What helped me was people telling the truth about their own recovery and their own minds. That’s what I want to offer here.

I never expected Buddhist teachings to help me manage bipolar disorder or stay in recovery. But over the years, they’ve turned out to be exactly what I needed. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” never worked for me. What I needed was a gentle guide, one that actually understood my condition, its causes, and a way through it.

So if any of this speaks to you, I’d love for you to subscribe. I’ll be sharing new essays regularly on addiction recovery, bipolar disorder, and finding the middle way home.

I’ll see you on the other side.

With peace,
Wes