What if recovery isn’t a return, but an exile with a smile stitched on?
Analysis Paralysis
Where Transient immerses the reader in the lived experience of addiction, psychosis, and recovery, Analysis Paralysis steps back to examine the cultural myths, institutional structures, and philosophical underpinnings that shape these experiences. These essays serve as the intellectual counterpart to my memoir—a dissection with nerve endings still exposed.
This collection doesn’t seek resolution or offer redemptive frameworks. Instead, it unmasks the illusions society constructs around recovery, identity, surveillance, and survival. These pieces are philosophically engaged, emotionally precise, and culturally confrontational. They examine what happens when systems meant to heal instead control, when narratives meant to inspire instead conceal, when identity fragments and refuses reassembly.
Selected Essays
Below are excerpts from essays that reflect the core themes of Analysis Paralysis. Each interrogates the terrain we’re culturally conditioned to bypass—uncomfortable, unspeakable, and unresolvable.
All essays are currently under consideration at literary outlets.
Recovery Isn’t Real—At Least Not For Me
The institutional theater of recovery often bears little resemblance to its sanitized public image.
The fluorescent lights in the drug court bathroom cast everyone in the same sickly pallor. I stood at the urinal, pants around my ankles, while a court-appointed observer maintained clinical distance behind me. This was routine now—the choreographed humiliation of supervised urination, performed three random times a week for thirteen months.
I remember thinking: This is what recovery looks like?
Most people imagine recovery as a triumph—support group celebrations for sobriety milestones, tearful family reconciliations, the prodigal addict returned to society’s embrace. What they don’t picture is this: a grown man exposing himself under fluorescent lights, monitored like a prisoner while producing bodily fluids for state inspection. They don’t imagine what it feels like when your autonomy is reduced to proving, repeatedly, that you haven’t put certain molecules into your bloodstream.
The Performance Of Gratitude In Recovery
Institutional recovery settings often equate silence with noncompliance. What begins as a suggestion quickly becomes a demand.
The counselor prompted again, her voice softer this time, professional warmth deployed like a tactical weapon. “Would you like to share what you’re grateful for today?”
The question unfurled in the air between us, a test disguised as an invitation. In thirteen months of drug court, I’d learned that “would you like to” actually meant “you need to.” Recovery, I’d discovered, was less about healing and more about performance—a peculiar strain of theater where the price of admission was your authenticity and the script was already written. All I had to do was recite my lines.
The Digital Closet: Meth, Recovery, And The Isolation Of Queer Sobriety
For gay men in recovery from meth, sobriety often requires exile from the very digital spaces that define modern queer connection.
The Grindr icon sits in digital limbo on my phone—not downloaded, but never truly gone. One tap is all it would take to summon it back into existence. If I did, I’d immediately fall back into that familiar world of fragmented bodies—headless torsos and disembodied parts, the digital dismemberment of desire. And within fifteen minutes, I’d find what I was really hunting for: profiles marked with that telltale capital T, the lightning bolt emoji, men whose carefully coded language (“looking to parTy,” “to the poinT”) signals exactly what they’re offering. These digital breadcrumbs don’t lead toward safety but back to the crystalline cave I’ve spent years crawling out of.
I’ve been clean for over a year. The word “clean” itself feels like a mockery—as though what came before was somehow dirty or impure. My sobriety comes with no gold stars, no inspirational recovery story on social media, no tearful family reconciliation shot in soft focus. Instead, I live with a brain permanently rewired to connect gay sex with crystalline dissolution, a sexuality I can no longer access without risking destruction, and a community I cannot rejoin without confronting my addiction in every digital interaction, every exchanged glance, every moment of potential intimacy.
When You’re A Drug User, You’re Always Being Watched
Paranoia during active addiction contains a kernel of truth: the architecture of surveillance is not imaginary.
The first tap came from inside the wall—sharp, deliberate, cutting through the stillness of my apartment. I froze, pipe still in hand, listening. Another tap followed, softer this time, but no less intentional. Then another. And another. A pattern emerged: three quick taps, a pause, two slow taps.
It wasn’t random. It never was.
I set the pipe down and pressed my ear against the drywall, trying to locate the source. The wall felt warm—too warm—like something inside was generating heat. I ran my fingers along the surface, searching for inconsistencies, for the telltale bulge of a hidden device.
This wasn’t the first time. For weeks, I’d been documenting these sounds: timestamps, durations, patterns. The taps followed me from room to room, responded to my movements, anticipated my thoughts. Sometimes they came as knocks, other times as clicks or faint electronic hums. But they were always there, always watching, always listening.
The Unfillable Void Meth Left Behind
Recovery literature rarely acknowledges what cannot be restored: the irreversible neural rewiring that leaves ordinary pleasures permanently altered.
No one tells you that sobriety won’t make you feel alive again. They just tell you it will keep you from dying.
This is the truth that recovery evangelists won’t admit – that what waits on the other side of addiction isn’t enlightenment or fulfillment or even happiness. It’s just absence. The absence of destruction, sure. The absence of that spiraling chaos that threatened to consume everything. But also the absence of that electric aliveness that made every moment feel like it mattered.
When I was using meth, a crack in drywall wasn’t just damage. It was a universe. The serpentine path of it contained stories, mysteries, mathematical perfection. Light hitting a countertop wasn’t just physics – it was revelation, each refraction exposing the hidden architecture of reality itself. Music didn’t just enter my ears; it rewired my nervous system, each note carving new neural pathways that ordinary consciousness could never access.
I was completely immersed in life—while being systematically destroyed by it.
These aren’t essays for polite applause. They’re ruptures—crafted to linger.
Full manuscript of Analysis Paralysis available upon request.
