As I walked into the parking lot, it hit me: it’s 2010. My son’s birthday is in 2010. I froze in my tracks momentarily, losing my balance and almost falling into my car. Nauseated and dizzy again, I was lost, physically lost in space and time.

“How is it 2010? It’s 2004, right?”

That question echoed in my head while standing in the parking lot as the morning sun hit the pavement. The birth of my son should have been the ultimate “system reset,” a reason to end the war that had been raging inside my head for six years. Instead, it was just a mirror that showed me the war was still going on. I had been operating in a loop for six years, only I did not know it. Here I was, given a beautiful, innocent life to protect. And no one, including me, realized that I was standing in the middle of a burning building. – Fragmented: The Crossroads of Trauma, Addiction, and Recovery

This wasn’t the first time, and it was far from the last. From January 6, 2004, until February 16, 2018, I lived in the same moment in time over and over and over, but on most levels, I was completely unaware.

Life had moved on, and if you were casually looking at me from the outside, you would have assumed that I had as well. I had remarried, and I had a career, children, and friends. I started a business and played in bands, and traveled. I went to college a few times, in fact (I’ll finish that one someday). I wrote, bought and remodeled homes. I buried both of my parents, divorced, and became a single father. I learned new work skills, new life skills, went to therapy, relapsed, got sober and relapsed again, several times. I lived more in that fourteen-year period than some people do in a lifetime.

And I did it all in a functional blackout.

The places and faces changed, and that was perhaps the most jarring part of it all. I would be talking to someone and realize that I was in IL, or TX, or MN, or IA, or LA or MS and on and on, and then I would realize what year it was, and it was too much to process. So I would shut back down. Or more specifically, shut that part of me back down. The nausea and headache that would accompany these unwelcomed revelations made me want to drink, drink and never look at anyone again. It was as if I could suddenly feel the world spinning underneath me, and I would fight to keep my composure. It happened when I was standing in front of groups of 300 to 400 people, speaking, or sitting on a bar stool by myself.

The places changed, the people changed, but the experience never changed. The reason never changed.

She died on Tuesday, January 6, 2004, and my internal calendar became a system based on knowing where I was relative to Tuesday, and always hypervigilant of the day before the 6th of any month. And then someone would ask the date, or it would casually come up in conversation as these things do, and the dissonance would happen again. Where am I, and how did I get here?

I didn’t have a word for any of this for a very long time. I just knew I couldn’t trust my mind to keep a calendar. I built my whole life around compensating for that without ever admitting that’s what I was doing. I would eventually learn about dissociative amnesia, gating failure, spatial disorientation, PTSD. Clinical terms for a very unclinical experience. As an insider with firsthand experience, however, I would say that when a mind is under enough sustained pressure, it stops recording. At work, I would describe it as buffer overload. I didn’t stop living; I stopped recording. I just kept walking, talking, closing deals, changing diapers, and showing up to work. And the tape, the record of it all, the tape just runs blank. My memories are not real. I’ve learned most of them since 2018. There are things I genuinely remember. It’s not all lost, but most of it is something I’ve learned, a story I’ve studied in case there was a test.

And nothing can change that. 

Most of 2006 doesn’t exist for me at all. The memories are not “fuzzy” they are gone. I have writing from that year in my handwriting that I do not remember producing, thoughts I apparently had that read like they belong to someone I’ve never met. I lost a promotion in Denver during that stretch for a job I’d clawed my way up to from the bottom to get. I have no memory of what I did that cost me that promotion. Just the hangover the next morning, and the quiet way it disappeared from my desk by Monday. I have tens of thousands of photographs on hard drives and in boxes, and in a real number of them, I am looking at a stranger’s life. I know it’s my kids. I know it’s me. I know the house, the trip, or the birthday. I do not remember being there. And the pictures are how I’ve remodeled my mind, my memories. The same way I would remodel a home.

My daughter’s early childhood exists for me almost entirely as an inherited story. I was there, and I have the pictures to prove it. Again, I do have some memories, but so much of actually raising her in those first years is a color I can’t quite see, a room I know I stood in but couldn’t draw. I will spend the rest of my life a little heartbroken about that. I’m mainly at peace with it, however, as much as I can be. I’ve had to learn to give myself some grace. Grace and forgiveness cannot be earned. They can only be given, and the work begins entirely from within. 

I was standing in a parking lot in Colorado on January 6, 2004, and everything since has just been scenery moving past a man who never actually left that spot. Writing this today, twenty-two years later, after having spoken about it all in great detail so many times, I still can’t make eye contact with you when I tell the story. 

February 16, 2018, broke that loop for me, and it did not break gently. I was standing outside a jail, barefoot, in a cold I couldn’t feel because my body had bigger problems to deal with that night. I was abruptly, violently, and without medical care detoxing from an 18-month binge. The shaking, the shame, the certainty that I’d finally become the thing I’d spent fourteen years hating weighed on me so heavily that I could barely breathe. I felt like I was underwater and weighted, trying to walk through a pool. For the first time since that morning in Colorado, I knew with total clarity that it was not 2004. It was 2018. I had missed fourteen years, and I finally knew it. I was completely broken, with nowhere to go and nothing left to hide. 

I was also relieved.. There was nothing left to hide. I could ask for help now. I could lay down my weapons and come home from the war. That was the start of a long journey. 

I still notice the 6th. I probably always will. I still feel a particular kind of quiet on Tuesdays that I’ve never bothered explaining to anyone. But there’s a difference now between noticing it and disappearing into it. 

I know where I am when I feel it.

Slowly, I’ve been learning to be in a room I’m actually standing in. And stay long enough for it to become a memory instead of just a place I passed through on the way back to 2004.

Broken things can be repaired, but only if someone bothers to pick up the pieces and only if there are pieces left to gather. I had burned my life to the ground. The tape was blank, so I started over. 

This is the shape trauma takes when a mind decides survival matters more than staying present for its own life. I’m still gathering. I expect I will be for a while yet. But I’m gathering in real time now, in the room I’m actually in, and that’s the part that used to feel impossible.

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