Three Returns

Recovery, Cello, and Code.

These things have each shaped my life in a major way, and each has been lost along the way as I took a more dystopian and darker path away from these things I love, and my own core values.

Above all else, perhaps Recovery is at the top of my list. For without it, the other two are not even possible. And more, without Recovery, nothing good is possible in my life.

The other two, Cello and Code, have each shaped my life since childhood. I remember the days of lugging my school-owned cello to and from school, and evenings spent practicing and learning to read music I checked out from the public library.

And an equal amount of evenings and weekends were spent falling in love with programming. My hardware setup was a hand-me-down Apple 2 computer from my father's friend, and again, checked out books from the library.

So perhaps it's no surprise that both childhood passions followed me into adulthood—one into my career, and the other into years of rehearsing, performing, and making music.

However, through a myriad of philosophy and perhaps of inherited DNA, I struggled with addition from the early age of 14. For a very long time, my addiction existed alongside—and sometimes seemed to fuel—a successful career in programming and an after-hours obsession with rehearsing and performing. Eventually, whatever I thought it was giving me began taking everything instead.

One-by-one all of the people and things I once loved, fell to the side as my addiction deepened.

Now, I am bringing them back. I have made many attempts at sobriety over the last decade, and twice made it nearly a year. Yet even during those periods, I didn't return to the things I once loved. I was sober, but I wasn't rebuilding... I still didn't feel connected to a purpose. In a way, perhaps I knew that I had not learned enough of what I needed to learn to make a true return even possible.

I want to share this new journey with you. It is a complete rebuilding of a life burned to scorched earth, with hopefully, a beautiful, yet still somehow fierce, phoenix rising from the ashes.

It is my hope and intent that you might find some common ground in what I am doing. Either a reminder here from something that feels true to you. Whether you're still in addiction, in recovery, or never experienced those challenges but are sympathetic towards them.

Maybe you once played an instrument or sang in a choir group, and have a desire to return, but feel it is simply too daunting to resume. Or you are curious about technology and enjoy reading about an old-school coder returning to modern day tools.

And if none of those things resonate with you, that's okay too. We all have things we're trying to understand, rebuild, overcome, or simply live with. In time, I hope Utopidy becomes more than my voice alone. I hope to open it to contributors and conversation, where others can share some of their own experiences, ideas, failures, and discoveries.

For now, though, I have three very powerful and compelling subjects I am returning to; physically and mentally. They all relate to each other in such a beautiful way that inspires me to pursue them with a renewed sense of purpose.

In a way, I will be chronicling my life and exposing it in a very vulnerable and intimate way. I will be solving problems in real time, and finding solutions.

I once had hope and lived in a life full of light, and maybe I flew a little too close to the sun.

As I share the rebuilding of these three things, I anticipate encountering new and exciting paths and opportunities will appear in front of me. I have always been a person who has gone where the winds push me the strongest, be it Utopian or Dystopian.

I don't know what paths will appear as I rebuild these three parts of my life. I've always been someone willing to follow an unexpected opportunity when it presents itself—for better or worse.

I don't know where this one leads.

But for the first time in a long time, I feel like I'm moving back into the light.