A few things about me

I am a husband to my wonderful wife, Lisa; fur-daddy to my cuddle-monster, Juniper; a dutiful son, brother, and uncle. I am a recovering drug addict who has been sober for just under 19-years. There was a time when I weighed well-more than 300lbs, and today, having lost and kept off more than 100lbs, I am an avid cyclist and gym enthusiast. My story is one of zigs and zags, with my failing kidneys being just the latest twist in a life trajectory that has rarely followed straight lines. When I reflect, I see that my story is not so much about “change” or “transformation,” but rather about the act of “reinvention.” It’s something I’ve had to do more than once.

I started my adulthood as a chain-smoking, morbidly obese, over-achieving journalist who over-compensated for his deep insecurities with arrogance and illicit drugs. On January 1st, 2006, just a few days after my 30th birthday, I entered recovery from addiction. I have been clean and sober ever since.

My addiction had destroyed my journalism career. In sobriety, a series of coincidences landed me a role as an addictions’ counselor, which soon inspired me to get my master’s degree in counselling psychology. Today, I am a sought-after psychotherapist with a thriving private practice, where I get to spend my professional life helping people suffering from mental illness and addiction. I take pride in the fact that so much of my life is devoted to helping others the way that so many others helped me.

For the first 10 years of my recovery I did a much better job caring for others than I did for myself. I continued a sedentary lifestyle that was filled with comfort eating of really bad food. By the time I finished my master’s degree I weighed 315 lbs and was chain smoking two packs a day. It took me until my 40s to start getting healthy. I learned everything I could about nutrition, hit the gym and fell in love with being on a bicycle. In the summer of 2019, weighing 200lbs, and cigarette-free, I cycled 100km in a single day. Next to marrying Lisa in 2023, it was the greatest moment of my life.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard discussed how true life-transformation requires facing the terror of taking an existential leap of faith into the unknown. The notion speaks to the primary obstacle to the reinvention of self — not knowing what awaits you on the other side of the transformation. Bill Wilson, one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, once wrote that giving up drinking and, more importantly, the personality traits that drive and reinforce alcoholism, leaves recovering alcoholics feeling like “the hole in the donut.” What if we take these leaps of faith only to find there is nothing there when we land?

My first leap was getting sober. It’s somewhat unnerving to remember what life was like in active addiction. There is much that still seems familiar: the people, places, chaos, exhilaration, and despair were so much a part of my life that those realities feel as familiar to me as a faded tattoo. There are countless memories of the things I did to buy and use drugs, including crack cocaine, that still haunt me. And yet it also feels like I am watching a movie of myself from an alternate reality — a parallel version of me who I no longer recognize.

Reinvention of self is not about “finally” doing things differently, but about coming to believe things about yourself that would have seemed impossible in your previous manifestation. Most people are trapped in the question of how to change behavior. This is what New Year’s resolutions are all about: I’ll go to the gym, spend more times with the kids, spend less money, eat better, etc. are the classic examples of an outcomes-driven approach to change. We are pre-occupied with what we do, and how we can do it better. What I have learned in my journey is that doing things differently might be an important part of the process of reinvention, but that reinvention is fundamentally about seeing yourself and your place in the universe differently.

The concept of “self” is a difficult psychological idea to define. We can think of “self” as a set of laws written in invisible ink that we use to govern ourselves. These rules lie outside of conscious awareness but nevertheless determine how we make decisions, relate to others, and function in our day-to-day. More than anything, self is our own predictor of what we see is possible and what isn’t. You can think of self as a psychological electrical fence that we fear will zap us into oblivion if we try to cross it.

A single flight of stairs best highlights the limits my sense of self placed on what I could expect from my body back when I weighed 315lbs. Every week, I would visit my clinical supervisor at her office on the second floor of an office complex. And every week I would face the dilemma of how to get to her office: I could go through the main entrance and take the elevator to the second floor. Or I could more conveniently park in the back where I could climb a small flight of stairs that went directly to her office. It’s amazing how stressful that decision was every week — spend an extra 10 minutes so you can take the elevator or climb the 20-or-so stairs and show up winded and sweaty. The only time I took the stairs was when I was running late for the appointment.

If you were to tell me at that time in my life that I would ride a bicycle 100kms (while wearing spandex cycling clothes, no less), I would have thought you were on drugs. The thought that one day I would see myself as an athlete seemed far more impossible than the thought that I could quit drugs and alcohol. The impossibility of physical health was the most pronounced element in my sense of self. Countless people told me that I needed to eat better and exercise; I.e. change my behavior. What no one told me was what I actually needed to do was change my relationship with my sense of possibility.

In terms of evolution, self is an adaptive process that functions like a sheep dog herding us towards our strengths and protecting us from disappointment. But it can also function as an overbearing gatekeeper forbidding you from dreaming of better. Reinvention of self is the art of getting past that gatekeeper, which is not a straightforward task, nor one that can be done by sheer will alone. Douglas Adams in his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy wrote that flying is as simple as jumping from a height and missing the ground. Reinvention is similar in that it asks you to drop your existing state of self knowing only that you don’t want to land in the same place you left. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe the process of reinvention as walking forward with only the ability to look backwards to guide to you.

I consider launching this website in search of a kidney donor as the first leap of my next reinvention. This is my leap of faith into the unknown of what my life will look like in the coming years. Dialysis would mean finding a way to make the most of a life constrained by the need to have my blood filtered artificially by machines. A kidney donation would mean that I could continue the happy path in life I am on with few constraints. This campaign seeking a living kidney donor is by far the most emotionally vulnerable thing I have ever done. The process asks me to place my “possible” in the hands of an anonymous universe with the hope that there is a person out there that will help me past the gatekeeper of my failing kidneys. This is me jumping and not knowing where the ground is. This is me, once again, starting the process of reinvention.