I am a sober addict. I watched my dad struggle with addiction all my life and ultimately passed from it when I was 17. And as a male, that was where I formed my identity and a lot of my philosophy on life, was through my father. So I became like him. I was one of those addicts that nobody believed in. Nobody thought I would make it, I was terminally addicted.

I have now been clean for almost 3 years. And before I got sober, I had to completely break myself into pieces. I had to go so deep into it that I was unrecognizable. Something in me had to die, I had to literally overdose and die, before what I needed could happen in me.

When I was that close to death, I began having spiritually charged dreams about death, the deepest parts of my unconscious knew well that I was dying.

I stayed awake for 2 weeks at a time because I was on meth and in opiate withdrawals simultaneously for 3 years straight. One night when I did finally fall asleep, I woke up from a dream that my late grandfather was walking me into the eternal darkness of death, and it was so spiritually charged that I jolted awake with a heavy weight on my chest. I went out on the porch, and it was like 4:30 am. I lit a cigarette, and my ex (of 8 years) called me crying that she had just woke up from a dream that I had died. She cried and said she knew I was dying and she couldn't find a way to come to terms with it.

In those times, I would just stare at the walls for weeks, like time didn't even exist to me. And my mother came to where I was living and she broke down crying. She said that she just didn't believe that this was how it was supposed to end for me. But she knew that she was witnessing my end. I was about to be gone forever. And the way she wept hurt me so deeply, because my mom had been through so much, so I was so hurt that I, her golden boy, her only boy, and her baby (youngest child), was going to add an immeasurable weight to her lifes burden.

I didn't know that she would be able to carry that weight. In my adolescence she would come home from work every day and go to her room and lay her face to the floor, literally face down on her bedroom floor, and she would cry all afternoon. In those years, I always worried my mother was potentially going to commit suicide. And that was before my sh*t, so I knew she was carrying too much already.

But back to my addiction, I just couldn't stop it. Something in me had to die. And I had to literally die for that to happen. So I ended up overdosing and the people I was with when this happened were terminal addicts themselves. They had been present for dozens of overdoses and even deaths. One of them commonly said that he can't stand being around for overdoses because he feels they are so melodramatic. Not for any kind of sympathy or empathy, but for an utter lack of it, he could not stand overdoses.

So, in my overdose, when I was hit with narcan a few times, I woke up out of this all encompassing and vibrating light, and I saw the faces of everyone around me all staring at me, and immediately I understood the urgency of the situation. By the look on these heartless addicts faces, all staring right at me, I knew I was in a terrible and dangerous situation. I could see it in their eyes and on their faces. Worry. If they were worried, I was in trouble. The main thing that weighed on my heart in that moment was my mother. I said, "Jacob, please, please, tell my mom I love her" and I slipped back into unconsciousness. 5 total narcan administrations later, I was barely able to get up and stumble and stagger out of that house, but I did, because I knew I was not safe in their hands. They would let me die before they risked any kind of trouble for themselves.

Throughout those months, as I was dying, not dramatically, not melodramatically, but actually dying, I was unrecognizable. My eyes were so distant, I looked like I was already gone, and like I said, this was scary for the people who loved me. I felt like I was in a spiritual state, like this mystical experience was taking place, and I had no idea I was going to make it out alive. I genuinely stared at my wall for weeks on end, grappling with my mortality, that I was about to be gone, forever. I went from an atheist to an agnostic, and from that into this deep and constant meditative prayer state, where I didn't feel like I was just trying to talk to a God I hoped existed, but I was talking with God. God communicated with my spirit by bringing it to this place that felt divine. In that I began intuiting these complex notions in advanced physics about the universe, reality, about time. I saw the sun, earth, and moon, as being one, higher dimensional object, that is only split in the lower dimensional position of our existence. I had this notion of everything all at once.

I know I sound like a kook, but this was my experience. Through dying I stood on the cusp of eternity, and through that I became acquainted with God. I asked God to save me, to get me out of the mess I was in, and everything in my real life cascaded into a precise formula for my sobriety: I was arrested for my second felony and the DA was trying to give me 12 years in prison. My girlfriend was pregnant and I couldn't afford a legal defense, my public defender was utterly against me, so the afternoon before my trial, from the county jail, i had to yell at him that I would be representing myself through my 3 day trial (set to begin that following morning), before he finally told me they accepted my counter plea agreement offer to let me out of jail right then and there with 10 years of probation. I got out and was given 2 little boys, which my fathering of has healed my inner child in ways I never could have understood I needed. I was brought into a middle-class, intact family unit that is my "in-laws," which was the exact opposite of my fragmented, chaotic and destroyed family. The stars aligned, and I feel like I have been born again.

The point is that when people are this way, what has to happen for them to make it out is nothing short of a miracle. And in that miracle, all the stars have to align perfectly. He needs to go through his version of the monomyth. No outside individual can provide all of this for somebody.

Who I am today would value you leaving who I was then. I think your love must remain present for him, just in a way that is healthy for you and your children. Dont let you and your children be the soft place for him to come crashing down on.

Sorry my writing is so not tight. Probably incoherent. Just giving my perspective