Choices.

I remember the evening vividly. I had just told my now ex-girlfriend the day before that I was using heroin. She had made the ultimatum: it was either her or the brown powder, and while she was a thought, she was a fleeting one at best.

After leaving her company, I went over to a friend's, and we picked up our goods as usual, pills filled in my pocket. I pulled them out in childlike glee with an expectation of a great evening. Breaking each pill open over a bowl while pondering the conversation in my head with my girlfriend at the time, 'it's either me or heroin.' I wish I could tell you that I sat in disbelief, regret, or any of those negative emotions typically surrounded by letting go of someone that you had spent a year and a half building a life together, but I thought of the ultimatum and chose in the moment to let her go.

Pouring the brown powder into the bowl, putting the classic snub-nose straw up to my nose, and with a quick inhale, that pale brown powder slightly numbing but also sticking to the back of my nose and throat. I knew she was gone at this point, and I wish I could tell you I cared more.

I don’t think it was a lack of care; I think I lacked any serious notion that life was a single-quarter pinball machine, a single-race kind of event. There are no do-overs, no replays, and no try-agains. Often I found myself on the edge of oblivion, carrying around the anti-overdose drug for heroin in my pocket, in the case that I OD’d... Grim? Well, not as much as you’d think because, while it may have been a thought in my head, it was never a weight on my soul or conscience.

How could this be?

Well, I suppose this is where it’s borderline interesting. I never had any sense of consequences or failure in my life. Whenever I would get to that point where I was supposed to experience consequences, my mother would swoop in and alleviate the failure to whatever extent she could. Thinking it was to my benefit, but ultimately it was creating a child who felt invincible, but the exact opposite was the case. I was a frail, useless excuse for a human who spent every dime he had on powder to fix the next five hours of his life while throwing away the people who cared about him most.

Okay, kind of grim Charles… What’s the takeaway?

Subscribers, life has no do-over button, no replay, no on-and-off switch. You can’t remove the disk while playing to avert the save state. Whatever decisions you make, you are going to have to live with, and while it’s sometimes grim, it’s actually beautiful.

Eight years ago today, I was snorting powder from bowls, iPads, phones, and desks for five hours of ________ (fill in the blank).

Without getting to that very brink of death, I would have never called out for help and begun the journey back to sobriety, marriage, writing, growth, etc. Yes, I would have loved to learn consequences before having to bear the hard weight of extreme drug addiction, but I can tell you the man I am today knows the weight of decisions and their lasting impacts on not only myself but, most of all, those around me.

If I could wrap all this in a bow, I’d say I chose me for a long time, but the indisputable wake of my decisions was hard to miss when I turned around to look at those behind me. You will fail in life, and it will be hard, difficult, and sometimes more than you think you can bear, but I want you to know you can fail and not be a failure. You can know you missed it by a mile, but there will be a better you on the other side, that’s smarter, wiser, and in time, brimming with hope for the next come around the mountain because you have one more misstep to avoid this time around.