Hello everyone, my name is Kevin….sharing my story on this platform and asking for help through this hard time has been both an eye opening and humbling experience. While I have been known as a doer and a supportive friend and son through the years it has weighed on me heavily and and I come here now asking for not a hand out, but a hand up.

I am trying my best to see and shape myself as a survivor, advocate, and lifelong learner, but my journey hasn't been a straight line. It has been shaped by the heavy reality of deeply traumatic adolescent emotional and sexual abuse that started at 6 years old and lasted well into my late teens. When put into that situation as a child you do not have the mental capacity to properly handle those emotions so what do you do? Push them down as deep as they can possibly go and survival mode takes over, which is what happened decades to follow to just get through the enormity of it all and make it over to the next expansion of life. 

 Big chunks of time and details of my childhood were missing from my memory, which I found unsettling so I began therapy 3 years ago to work through it that is when everything changed and things took a turn for the worse and kick started my drug use into a tailspin, because such painful memories and realizations were being unearthed. For the first time I ever I was feeling the emotional impact of these traumatic moments and had to face them for how insidious they really were. I now have a new comprehension of the phrase “Dancing with the Devil” because that is what it feels like, and if you take aim at him…..don’t miss.

This has been a battle that is a constant push and pull with addiction involving not alcohol, but pain killers, muscle relaxers and a variable of tranquilizers that in that moment would ease the heavy emotional pain and make me feel “something” in that moment of emotional distress. It has cost me what feels like every thing….my relationships with my friends, family, my ex who put up with more than anyone should have to in a relationship, and of course the financial impact.

I am proactively doing the work to remain sober (30+ days and counting ) I go to group meetings every week in the Castro area in San Francisco, I see My personal therapist weekly and I am on my prescription anti-depressant to keep me focused and motivated.

However this journey while necessary and beneficial, it has also been financially devastating and all of my savings and funds have gone to bouncing back from my irrational decisions, so I ask of you my friends to please help me where you can, there is no amount to big or too small and I would appreciate it much and owe a lifelong debt of gratitude and reciprocation if you ever find yourself in a tough position in your life.

I am still in the midst of reclaiming my life from those shadows, but they are teaching me more about courage than any success ever could. I’m here to share the messy, honest truth about healing and to remind anyone still in the thick of it that recovery is possible, one day at a time, but you have to want it for yourself and give yourself some grace, if I didn’t I’d be in a much worse place than I am now.

Thank you for reading my story and assisting in my healing.

love yourself, and each other

X,

Kevin