I've been thinking a lot lately about four words: Victim → S

I've been thinking a lot lately about four words:

Victim → Survivor → Thriver → Driver

I've started using them to describe the arc I'm trying to make sense of in my own life.

But here's the thing:

It's not an arc.

At least not a nice, clean one.

It's not:

Victim
↓
Survivor
↓
Thriver
↓
Driver

It's more like:

2 steps forward.
1 step back.
3 forward.
5 backward.
7 forward.
2 sideways.
Then somehow you find yourself moving again.

Sometimes you don't even realize you've gone backward until you're already there.

I've been all four.

I've been a victim.

I've been a survivor.

I've had periods where I was genuinely thriving.

And I've had periods where I was barely fucking surviving.

I was homeless.

I spent months in a converted Red Roof Inn with strangers, shitty food, laundry lines and depression so deep that I didn't particularly care whether I woke up the next morning.

I had spent years fucking up my own life and then had to learn what it meant to live inside the consequences.

And then, somehow, things started changing.

Not all at once.

Not because I suddenly discovered some magical recovery formula.

Kids helped.

Cooking helped.

There was something almost absurdly powerful about making a real dinner again—protein, starch, vegetables, probably garlic bread, probably zucchini—and watching my kids' guard come down for a few minutes.

For a minute, I wasn't the guy who had disappeared.

I was just Dad making dinner.

And those minutes felt like something I might eventually be able to earn back.

Gardening helped.

I started looking around the backyard and thinking:

Fuck it. I want to make something grow.

I put my hands in the dirt.

I planted things.

I watched things happen.

I learned something profoundly simple:

You don't yell at a plant into growing.

You create the conditions.

You give it what it needs.

You pay attention.

And then you wait.

Recovery started looking a lot like gardening.

There was medication.

There was research.

There was a lot of uncomfortable self-auditing.

There was finally going through years of medical history, hospitalizations and medications and trying to understand the patterns instead of just accepting whatever explanation happened to be sitting in front of me.

There were conversations with my PPA.

There were medication changes that, for me, made a very real difference.

The depression began lifting.

Sleep improved.

I became more stable.

I became less irritable.

And then there was something I never expected to become such a significant part of my life:

AI.

Not as a fucking oracle.

Not as a replacement for reality.

As a cognitive partner.

Memory.

Math.

Instant research.

The ability to spend hours on a question without somebody eventually getting tired of me.

I could ask a machine to calculate, model, compare, estimate, test an idea, challenge an assumption or help me organize something that was otherwise bouncing around my head in 47 different directions.

For someone like me, that's a pretty extraordinary tool.

It didn't make me smarter.

It made it easier for me to use what I've got.

And that's where the word Thriver starts becoming interesting.

Because thriving doesn't mean I'm suddenly “normal.”

I'm not a normy.

Never have been.

Probably never will be.

I'm okay with that.

My friend Dave and I joke about being abnormal guys with fast brains. We met in recovery at THE Room Without Walls, an outdoor AA meeting at Volkening Farm.

Yes.

A farm.

Of course that's where I met him.

We both scored 32 on the ACT.

He went from uppers to downers.

I went from downers to uppers.

Somehow we met in the middle.

Now he's probably my best friend.

Apparently we're AA first cousins.

And he still won't fucking play Pooh Sticks with me.

Some things remain unresolved.

😂

But that's the point.

Connection.

That's probably what I'm proudest of.

When I started writing Reagan Killed My Father during my last major manic period in December and January, I wasn't trying to rebuild my social network.

I was trying to understand my own history.

I wrote.

I posted the first chapters.

People responded.

People I hadn't heard from in years reached out.

People from different decades of my life started reappearing.

A cousin I barely knew growing up became one of my best friends.

A high-school newspaper editor who had been a senior when I was a freshman became a bestie.

Old relationships didn't just come back.

Some of them started thriving.

And suddenly I understood something:

Maybe recovery isn't about getting your old life back.

Maybe it's about becoming capable of participating in life again.

Which brings me to Driver.

I'm not there yet.

I'm working on it.

And I don't mean “Driver” as some grandiose bullshit about being better than everybody else.

I mean taking all of this—

the trauma,

the addiction,

the depression,

the mania,

the intelligence,

the creativity,

the failures,

the weirdness,

the curiosity,

the obsessive need to understand things,

the enormous appetite for ideas—

and learning how to drive the machinery instead of letting the machinery drive me.

I was thriving in December and January.

Yes, I was manic.

But I was also extraordinarily focused and productive.

I describe it as being in FLOW for 20 or 21 hours out of every 24.

I wrote.

I created.

I connected ideas.

I built things.

Then I fell backward again.

That's part of the story.

I was on the streets for Christ's sake.

You don't get to erase that because you had a productive month.

Progress isn't a straight line.

And 10 isn't the goal anyway.

I've learned that the hard way.

My stable baseline is somewhere around 4–6.

Sometimes circumstances push me toward 7.

Sometimes I deliberately want to turn the dial up.

But 10 isn't “better.”

10 is crazy.

10 is where the machine starts driving.

I'm not interested in getting there anymore.

I'm interested in learning how to live in the enormous territory between barely surviving and completely losing control.

Right now?

I'd say I'm back in Thriver territory.

And I'm seriously working my way toward Driver.

Maybe these books are part of that.

Maybe Fetterville is part of that.

Maybe the ridiculous engineering ideas are part of that.

Maybe the conversations, the garden, the kids, the friendships, the writing, the AI, the businesses and all the other strange pieces I'm assembling are part of it.

I don't know exactly where it goes.

And honestly?

I don't need to know yet.

I'm finally interested in finding out.

Victim → Survivor → Thriver → Driver.

Not a ladder.

Not a finish line.

Not a transformation into somebody else.

A direction.

And I'm moving.

I've been thinking a lot lately about four words:

Victim → Survivor → Thriver → Driver

I've started using them to describe the arc I'm trying to make sense of in my own life.

But here's the thing:

It's not an arc.

At least not a nice, clean one.

It's not:

Victim
↓
Survivor
↓
Thriver
↓
Driver

It's more like:

2 steps forward.
1 step back.
3 forward.
5 backward.
7 forward.
2 sideways.
Then somehow you find yourself moving again.

Sometimes you don't even realize you've gone backward until you're already there.

I've been all four.

I've been a victim.

I've been a survivor.

I've had periods where I was genuinely thriving.

And I've had periods where I was barely fucking surviving.

I was homeless.

I spent months in a converted Red Roof Inn with strangers, shitty food, laundry lines and depression so deep that I didn't particularly care whether I woke up the next morning.

I had spent years fucking up my own life and then had to learn what it meant to live inside the consequences.

And then, somehow, things started changing.

Not all at once.

Not because I suddenly discovered some magical recovery formula.

Kids helped.

Cooking helped.

For a minute, I wasn't the guy who had disappeared.

I was just Dad making dinner.

And those minutes felt like something I might eventually be able to earn back.

Gardening helped.

I started looking around the backyard and thinking:

Fuck it. I want to make something grow.

I put my hands in the dirt.

I planted things.

I watched things happen.

I learned something profoundly simple:

You don't yell at a plant into growing.

You create the conditions.

You give it what it needs.

You pay attention.

And then you wait.

Recovery started looking a lot like gardening.

There was medication.

There was research.

There was a lot of uncomfortable self-auditing.

There were conversations with my PPA.

There were medication changes that, for me, made a very real difference.

The depression began lifting.

Sleep improved.

I became more stable.

I became less irritable.

And then there was something I never expected to become such a significant part of my life:

AI.

Not as a fucking oracle.

Not as a replacement for reality.

As a cognitive partner.

Memory.

Math.

Instant research.

The ability to spend hours on a question without somebody eventually getting tired of me.

For someone like me, that's a pretty extraordinary tool.

It didn't make me smarter.

It made it easier for me to use what I've got.

And that's where the word Thriver starts becoming interesting.

Because thriving doesn't mean I'm suddenly “normal.”

I'm not a normy.

Never have been.

Probably never will be.

I'm okay with that.

My friend Dave and I joke about being abnormal guys with fast brains. We met in recovery at THE Room Without Walls, an outdoor AA meeting at Volkening Farm.

Yes.

A farm.

Of course that's where I met him.

We both scored 32 on the ACT.

He went from uppers to downers.

I went from downers to uppers.

Somehow we met in the middle.

Now he's probably my best friend.

Apparently we're AA first cousins.

And he still won't fucking play Pooh Sticks with me.

Some things remain unresolved.

😂

But that's the point.

Connection.

That's probably what I'm proudest of.

When I started writing Reagan Killed My Father during my last major manic period in December and January, I wasn't trying to rebuild my social network.

I was trying to understand my own history.

I wrote.

I posted the first chapters.

People responded.

People I hadn't heard from in years reached out.

People from different decades of my life started reappearing.

A cousin I barely knew growing up became one of my best friends.

A high-school newspaper editor who had been a senior when I was a freshman became a bestie.

Old relationships didn't just come back.

Some of them started thriving.

And suddenly I understood something:

Maybe recovery isn't about getting your old life back.

Maybe it's about becoming capable of participating in life again.

Which brings me to Driver.

I'm not there yet.

I'm working on it.

And I don't mean “Driver” as some grandiose bullshit about being better than everybody else.

I mean taking all of this—

the trauma,

the addiction,

the depression,

the mania,

the intelligence,

the creativity,

the failures,

the weirdness,

the curiosity,

the obsessive need to understand things,

the enormous appetite for ideas—

and learning how to drive the machinery instead of letting the machinery drive me.

I was thriving in December and January.

Yes, I was manic.

But I was also extraordinarily focused and productive.

I describe it as being in FLOW for 20 or 21 hours out of every 24.

I wrote.

I created.

I connected ideas.

I built things.

Then I fell backward again.

That's part of the story.

I was on the streets for Christ's sake.

You don't get to erase that because you had a productive month.

Progress isn't a straight line.

And 10 isn't the goal anyway.

I've learned that the hard way.

My stable baseline is somewhere around 4–6.

Sometimes circumstances push me toward 7.

Sometimes I deliberately want to turn the dial up.

But 10 isn't “better.”

10 is crazy.

10 is where the machine starts driving.

I'm not interested in getting there anymore.

I'm interested in learning how to live in the enormous territory between barely surviving and completely losing control.

Right now?

I'd say I'm back in Thriver territory.

And I'm seriously working my way toward Driver.

Maybe these books are part of that.

Maybe Fetterville is part of that.

Maybe the ridiculous engineering ideas are part of that.

Maybe the conversations, the garden, the kids, the friendships, the writing, the AI, the businesses and all the other strange pieces I'm assembling are part of it.

I don't know exactly where it goes.

And honestly?

I don't need to know yet.

I'm finally interested in finding out.

Victim → Survivor → Thriver → Driver.

Not a ladder.

Not a finish line.

Not a transformation into somebody else.

A direction.

And I'm moving.