Tonight, I cried for my kids.
Really cried.
Not the kind of crying that comes from being overwhelmed, angry, abandoned, or afraid. Not the tears that come when everything becomes too much and your body finally gives up trying to contain it.
I cried because I love them.
And somewhere inside that grief was something I haven’t felt clearly enough for a long time:
Direction.
For two years, I have been surviving.
There is a strange thing that happens when you spend long enough in survival mode. You start confusing movement with direction. You keep going because stopping feels dangerous. You build things. You fight things. You love people desperately. You lose people. You try to understand what happened. You search for answers. You numb what cannot be answered.
And eventually you can travel an enormous distance without actually getting any closer to where you want to be.
I don’t want to do that anymore.
I want to get sober.
Not because sobriety magically repairs everything I’ve damaged or returns everything I’ve lost. It doesn’t.
I want sobriety because I want to be present for whatever remains possible.
For my children.
For myself.
For the man I still have time to become.
That distinction matters to me.
This isn’t erasure.
I am not trying to kill the person I was yesterday and manufacture somebody cleaner in his place. I know what that man survived. I know why he reached for certain things. I know how badly he wanted the noise to stop sometimes.
I don’t hate him.
But he cannot keep driving.
That is redirection.
You don’t have to burn the entire map because you took the wrong road. You recognize where you are. You decide what matters. You turn toward it.
And then you walk.
Maybe resurrection isn’t some enormous moment where a person emerges completely transformed.
Maybe resurrection is smaller.
Maybe it is waking up tomorrow and making the same decision again.
Choosing presence over numbness.
Choosing responsibility over escape.
Choosing the uncomfortable truth over the comfortable lie.
Choosing to feel grief instead of anesthetizing it.
Choosing my heart even when my heart hurts.
Choosing my kids even when missing them feels unbearable.
Choosing myself when disappearing would be easier.
I have spent a lot of my life looking outward for something powerful enough to change what was happening inside me.
Tonight the direction reversed.
My heart is not something I need to escape from.
It is the compass.
And when I cried for my children, I understood exactly where it was pointing.
Home.
Not necessarily a house. Not a city. Not even the restoration of everything exactly as it once existed.
Home as a way of being.
Present.
Accountable.
Alive.
Someone my children can know.
Someone I can recognize when I look in the mirror.
There will still be grief. There will still be consequences. There will be mornings when resurrection feels considerably less poetic than it sounds tonight.
That’s fine.
I don’t need this to be poetic.
I need it to be true.
So this is not a declaration that I have conquered anything.
It is a marker.
A glyph scratched into the wall so that if I become lost again, I can find this place.
REDIRECTION → RESURRECTION
Not who I was.
Who I’m becoming.
Not shame.
Responsibility.
Not numbness.
Presence.
Not disappearance.
Life.
My kids.
My heart.
Me.
I choose me.
I choose us.
I choose life.