I'm not proud of it. I'm not bragging about it. But I'm not hiding it anymore either, because hiding it kept me sick longer than anything else.
I used to get arrested all the time. Drunk and disorderly. Public intoxication. DUIs — more than one. Fighting. Being where I had no business being, doing things I'd promised I wouldn't do again, becoming someone I didn't recognize and couldn't seem to stop being.
Each time, I was certain this was the bottom. Each time, I'd promise myself and anyone who'd listen that it was over, that I was done, that I understood now. Each time, I was back in the same situation within months. Sometimes weeks. The consequences kept escalating and the cycle kept running and I genuinely could not figure out why.
The reason it took so long to understand was that I was looking at the wrong thing. I kept thinking the problem was the drinking, the behavior, the choices. Fix those and you fix the person. But the drinking was just the method. The actual pattern was the running — from feelings I didn't have tools to process, from a version of myself I couldn't stand, from a military veteran who'd come home and had no idea how to function in ordinary life, from the scared kid who'd been running since childhood and had just found more effective ways to do it.
Jail couldn't stop the running. It just temporarily removed the options. The moment I was out, the running resumed because nothing inside had changed. I'd done the time without doing any of the actual work, because I didn't know the actual work existed.
What stopped the arrests was learning to sit still. Not meditation as a concept or a self-help strategy — but the literal daily practice of sitting down, stopping, and staying present with whatever was there. The shame. The craving. The accumulated wreckage. The voice that said this is just who you are. All of it, without running.
That turned out to be the thing. Not willpower, not consequences, not promises. Just learning that I could be with myself — this specific, complicated, imperfect self — without needing to escape.
I still haven't been arrested since I started sitting. That's not coincidence.
