3,287 Days

A love letter to myself.

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Dearest One,

June 22 arrives and I find myself thinking less about the drugs and more about the years. Nine years is a long time to be alive. Long enough for entire worlds to disappear and new ones to emerge in their place. Long enough to become several different versions of yourself without fully realizing it is happening. Long enough to look back at a person you once were and feel both tenderness and astonishment that you survived them.

If someone had shown you a glimpse of the next nine years on the day you decided to put down the needle, I doubt you would have believed any of it. Not because the future would have looked especially glamorous, but because it would have looked impossibly full. You would have seen grief arriving in waves you could not yet imagine, with the loss of your grandfather to suicide and later your grandmother, whose death would come exactly three years and one day after his. You would have seen yourself navigating family court, spending twenty thousand dollars fighting for your children only to discover that effort and love do not always alter outcomes. You would have seen yourself surviving sexual violence, living through a global pandemic, enduring two serious car accidents, moving four different times, and carrying loneliness for years longer than you believed you could.

And yet that is only part of the story, because life has always been strangely unwilling to contain itself within tragedy. While grief was unfolding, other things were quietly unfolding beside it. A cat named Lucy would arrive in October of 2017 and become woven so thoroughly into your daily existence that it would become difficult to remember life before her. You would spend years without a license and years without a car, learning how much pride can be swallowed when survival requires it and how much resilience can be discovered when there are no other options. You would slowly rebuild your credit from a number that reflected every mistake and hardship of your past into something that reflected persistence instead. You would create homes in places that were unfamiliar and learn how to live alone, which is a different skill altogether than merely being by yourself.

There were six years in which you remained single, and I think those years deserve more credit than they are usually given. It is easy to celebrate the day someone falls in love, but much harder to appreciate the long seasons spent learning how to sit with yourself. Those years taught you how to make decisions without consultation, how to endure silence, how to survive holidays and illnesses and disappointments without a partner standing beside you. They taught you that loneliness can be survived, which is perhaps why, when love finally arrived in 2022, you were able to recognize it for what it was. Not a rescue. Not a miracle cure. Simply another human being choosing to walk beside you, and you choosing the same in return.

What moves me most, however, is not the story of your relationships or your losses but the story of your honesty. Somewhere within these years you stopped negotiating with yourself about who you were. You found language for your identity. You came out as nonbinary. Some people left because of it, and that loss was real. There is no virtue in pretending otherwise. But what emerged from that season was something far more valuable than approval. You gained a deeper relationship with yourself, and unexpectedly, a deeper relationship with God. Many people are taught to believe that authenticity and faith exist in tension with one another, but your experience has been the opposite. The closer you moved toward truth, the closer you found yourself moving toward the sacred.

Perhaps that is why I struggle to describe these nine years as a recovery story. Recovery is certainly part of it, but it is too small a word for everything that has happened. This is a story about grief and endurance, about identity and faith, about loneliness and companionship, about all the ordinary and extraordinary ways a human being can continue after believing they might not. The remarkable thing is not that you stopped using methamphetamine and heroin. The remarkable thing is that after everything that followed, after every disappointment, every funeral, every setback, every heartbreak, and every reason you were given to give up, you continued participating in your own life.

When people speak about recovery, they often speak as though it is a destination, a place someone arrives and remains. Your life tells a different story. Recovery, at least in your case, was never a finish line. It was the decision to keep returning. Returning to yourself. Returning to love. Returning to faith. Returning to hope. Returning to life even when life had become complicated, painful, and uncertain. For nine years, through every season, that has been the thread connecting everything else.

And when I look back across those 3,287 days, I find that I am less impressed by your strength than by your willingness. Strength suggests certainty. Willingness suggests courage. Again and again, life asked more of you than seemed fair, and again and again you answered by remaining present for it. You stayed for the grief, stayed for the healing, stayed for the questions, stayed for the love, stayed for the ordinary mornings and the difficult nights. You stayed long enough to become someone your younger self could scarcely imagine, and long enough to discover that a meaningful life is not built from grand victories but from thousands of small decisions to keep going.

With love and admiration,

Someone who has watched you return to life, over and over again,

Lindsay

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