by Robbie Goldman
I sat with a friend the other day. We’ve been around each other for more than twenty years through Dry Bones. That kind of history changes how you talk with each other. You stop doing the standard catching up and you just wait to see what surfaces when you’re both willing to be present and honest.
He said something early on that set the tone: “I am going through a brand new thing.”
He’s been sober for a long stretch now. He’s been stably housed even longer. He’s learning that sobriety isn’t just about not drinking, it’s also about dropping your shield. Underneath that shield are the thoughts, the mental health struggles, and the feelings that he numbed out for a long time. Now they are all slowly asking to be felt.
One of the first things he said, almost like he needed to get it out, was this: “I want people to know I am not a threat to myself or them.”
That’s a heavy sentence. When your head feels chaotic, you start to worry that people only see the chaos. You worry they’ve already decided what you are before you’ve had a chance to show them who you are becoming.
He told me that when he vents, it’s not because he thinks he’s the only one with problems. It’s because he’s trying to make things better and he needs help to do it. Venting isn’t a spiral for him, it’s movement. He’s trying to turn all that confusion into something real and non-destructive. But he said it plainly: it’s hard.
He doesn’t know how to respond to people in this new way. He’s sober and present, but he doesn’t have a script. “I don’t even have the answer to how I’m doing,” he told me. “I may not have the answer to any question except… I don’t know yet.” When he says “I don’t know,” he feels blank. Sometimes he doesn’t answer at all. He worries the silence makes him look like he doesn’t care. But he does. He cares a whole lot.
Then he said something I haven’t stopped thinking about since: “When I used to tell people, ‘Don’t give up on me,’ I would go home and drink. I was actually giving up on myself.” We sat with that for a minute.
Today is different. He hasn’t given up on himself.
He also said something important about asking for help. He had to find specific people to ask. Not just anyone. Not to be mean, but because safety and timing matter. Recovery isn’t just about being willing to reach out. It’s about figuring out where that help can actually land. You need people who can hold the truth with you without flinching or trying to “fix” you.
He described this season as a lonely, scary middle. That’s exactly what it is. You aren’t who you were, but you also aren’t yet who you’re becoming. You don’t always know what’s happening inside your own body and mind. The “inside” is what scares him most right now: the stress, the racing thoughts, and trying to figure out what is mental, what is spiritual, and what is physical. It’s a lot to be alone with.
So he’s learning to write things down. He’s putting the thoughts on paper so they don’t run his life. He talks to himself sometimes to stay grounded: “Remember when you were on the streets and had nothing.” He remembers he survived all that. He believes God met him there. But he still wrestles with it: “I have to talk to myself, but can I believe the voices I hear? Is that the Spirit or something else? What if I communicate wrong?” That isn’t him being unstable. That’s a man learning how to listen without numbing out.
I didn’t leave that day with a tidy conclusion. I just left with respect. I have respect for this man choosing not to hide from what’s rising inside him. I have respect for someone willing to say “I don’t know yet” instead of pretending. And I have respect for the honesty it takes to admit that he used to ask people not to give up on him even as he was secretly quitting on himself.
There’s a lot of guts in just staying in the middle. You don’t rush toward clarity and you don’t run back to the old ways of coping. You just stay there. You learn to live in the gap between the old you and the new you. He is learning to ask for help with intention. He is learning to sort through his own thoughts instead of being ruled by them. He is learning to live without the shield.
What I saw clearly that day is this: he has finally stopped asking everyone else to do the believing for him. He’s doing it himself now. He hasn’t given up on himself, and that’s the real turning point of the whole continuing story.
