June 4th, 2026

Simple Truth that Has the Power of 

Transmogrification

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To clarify, and to say it as simply and honestly as I can:

I was in the grip of emotional upheaval, and in that state, I made a choice. I broke my sobriety. That is the plain fact of it. Not a complicated fact — a simple one. And simplicity, I have learned, is often the hardest thing to hold onto when we are hurting.

Because I could not leave it simple. Almost immediately, something in me reached for cover. I began to rationalize, to justify — the familiar machinery of a practiced mind trying to make peace with what it has done by making it mean something grander than it was. Neither the rationalization nor the justification had any rightful place in that moment. They were not wisdom. They were refuge.

And the refuge I built was this: I told myself that what I had done was not a failure but a form of atonement. That somehow, by breaking faith with my own sobriety, I was settling an old account — making right something from the past. I constructed a myth around a wound, and called it sacred.

What is humbling to admit is that I believed it. For nearly a full day, I lived inside that story as though it were true. It took considerable help — more than I would have liked to need — before I could see my actions in the clear light of day. What I had done was not atonement. I had simply been in pain, made a choice, and then fled from the truth of that choice into a story that flattered me.

When the story finally collapsed — when I stopped defending it and let it go — something unexpected happened. The truth, bare as it was, did not crush me. Instead, I found in it a kind of freedom I had not anticipated. A release. As though the lie itself had been the weight, and honesty, however uncomfortable, was the thing that lifted it.

And what came in that open space was grace. Unlooked for. Unearned. Undeserved. Unmerited — as grace always is, by definition, or it would not be grace at all. Not a reward for finally telling the truth, but a gift that seemed to have been waiting just on the other side of it.

I did not manufacture that grace. I could not have. I only stopped blocking it.