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.
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.
Not Recovery, But Reconstruction
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.
Full manuscript of Analysis Paralysis available upon request.
