She was bleeding. I was sure she would need stitches, so I got her a towel and called 911. I knew I was going to jail. I knew it as I dialed 911, but I called them anyway. It wasn’t even a question. She needed help, and she needed away from me. I opened the front door, sat on the couch, and waited for the police to arrive. The same phrase just kept repeating in my head: There’s something fundamentally broken in you.

Accountability without excuses. It sounds good, honorable even, but try it on for size and you’ll quickly see it’s suffocating. And depending on the grievance, it’s almost unbearable.

My divorce was final in June 2016, and by September of that same year I had decided there was no more point in trying to stay sober. There was no fight left in me, no defense. I’m not suicidal and I’m not sure I’ve ever really been, but I’ve thought about killing myself a lot. You can only be under pressure for so long before you look for an escape valve. Like a pressure cooker left unchecked, the clock is just ticking and at some point, death seems like the easiest option. And I had been in this state of mind for twelve years by 2016.

But as a friend of mine says, I’m a devout coward and afraid of pain, so chemicals were my only choice.

And so began my prolonged public suicide attempt.

I was seeing six different doctors to get the amount of Vicodin I needed to keep moving. And I was seeing six different women at any given time to avoid spending enough time with any of them for them to actually know me and leave, because I couldn’t risk being alone. If I did not have my kids, I was on a date, and I was sloppily drunk and usually high. For the next eighteen months, in fact, I was never sober, not completely. It was alcoholic math: sure I had been drinking or smoking or popping pills, but I had a higher tolerance than you. I was a professional. I wasn’t wrecking my car, or beating my kids, or getting into fights, so it was fine. And that’s what I would have told you if you had asked.

But I was waking up and wondering how I got home, or wondering whose home I was in. I was terrified to look at my car, hoping there would not be any signs of a crash. The last thought that would go through my mind as I was heading towards the floor involuntarily was frequently, “Don’t let my kids find my body.” I was throwing up blood from time to time and was close to 280 pounds but still proudly yelling “functional” back at people when they would call me an alcoholic.

I hated every waking moment of my existence.

You didn’t need to tell me I had failed as a father. I knew it. You didn’t need to tell me I was one mistake away from losing my job and my home. I knew that, too. You didn’t need to tell me I had no business dating anyone or that I was a walking disaster. I was aware.

Still, I asked her out. Because someone needed to find my body.

On the morning of February 15, 2018, I took my kids to school, as I did every day. Instead of coming back home and seeing what was going on at work and passing out at my desk, I went straight to the bar. I stayed there drinking until around 5:00pm. I left to meet her and some friends for dinner before a concert. I drank all the way through dinner, and I do not remember getting to the show. To this day, I do not know what the show was. I remember getting to our suite. We had a fully stocked bar and met some friends there. I vaguely remembered an argument there that led us to leaving early.

She was driving my truck and slammed it into a wall. I completely lost my cool and started yelling at her about how I was completely wasted and could still drive better than she could, sober. So, I took over and drove us home. I don’t remember getting there, and I don’t know how long we were in the house, but I’m pretty sure the fight never stopped.

At some point, she was getting her stuff to leave. I pushed her away from me. The realization of what I had just done brought me out of my blackout. It did not sober me up, but it snapped me back to reality. I knew I had pushed her because I could feel it in my hands. It was the same feeling I had in 2004, when I was trying to scrub the blood from Stacy’s wedding ring from my hands. That got my attention. I saw the pain in her eyes and the realization of what I had done. I was horrified.”

I opened the front door, sat on the couch, and waited for the police to arrive. The same phrase just kept repeating in my head:

There’s something fundamentally broken in you.

Then I woke up in a jail cell, where I belonged.

I was in court every three weeks. I tried to plead guilty right away, but no one would let me.

I didn’t know if I was going to jail or not, but I knew at a minimum I was going to have some consequences. I checked myself into outpatient treatment; I didn’t know if it would be required, but I knew I needed it, so I was in IOP (Intensive Outpatient) three days a week and attended two to three, sometimes four AA meetings a day, all while holding a full-time job and raising two kids.

I never had a moment of downtime. From 5:00am until 11:00pm, seven days a week, I was on the move. I needed every second of that. If the pace slowed for even a moment, I was crawling out of my skin. There was no pink cloud for me. I’m not sure that such a thing even exists. Sobriety just made the voices louder, and I wanted to die.

Every three weeks, I would stand before a judge and wonder if today was the day I went to jail. I had never committed a crime in my life, but I knew how serious this one was. I wasn’t fighting it, though my lawyer was trying. I was told most people received a deal or an offer for a first offense; I did not. My options were to plead guilty and throw myself at the mercy of the court, or serve three years if it went to trial. The problem was that once you plead guilty, it is 100% up to the judge, and I could still have served three years. It’s one thing to say you’re okay with whatever the outcome may be; it’s another thing to prove it, and at eleven months sober, I would have to prove it.

Finally, I walked into court for the second-to-last time on my eleven-month sobriety date. At that point, I had completed all the community service and domestic violence classes. I had finished outpatient treatment and carried a log with over 1,200 signatures from chairpersons for the 1,200-plus AA meetings I had attended to date. I had completed more community service than I would end up being asked to complete, and none of that changed my guilt. None of it made me feel better. None of it was a “get out of jail free” card.

I stood in front of the judge and did what I’d wanted to do from day one: I pleaded guilty, and I did it scared. When I did it, I did it not knowing if I would ever see my kids again. I had dropped them off at school that morning and never said a word; they never knew about any of this. Protecting their innocence was a higher priority than putting my mind at ease. I was shaking, sweating, and terrified.

The judge sentenced me to one year of non-reporting probation, community service, domestic violence classes, fines, restitution, medical bills, outpatient treatment, AA meetings, and a domestic violence survivors’ conference. He said he had rarely seen anyone’s actions more clearly show that they felt guilty than mine had immediately following the incident, and that he wished more people would follow my example.

This was the part that hurt more than anything. There, in the middle of being sentenced for the thing I was most ashamed of in my life, someone, and a judge at that, was complimenting me. I’ve never felt so low and ashamed, but I thanked him still. I paid my fines and all the restitution before I left the courthouse, and I completed my last class one month later.

I would like to say things got better at that point, and in some ways, they did. I no longer had the legal threat hanging over my head, not really, and that helped some. But I was not free, and I was miles away from “okay.”

However, this is where my story begins.

There was nothing left to hide, no pretense left to keep, no walls that had not been toppled. Just a blank slate and a question: Who do I want to be now?

Accountability without excuses is exactly as suffocating as I said at the start. I had spent four years in and out of a courtroom arguing that PTSD and childhood trauma didn’t excuse what Espinoza did; I wasn’t about to stand in front of a different judge and ask for a pass because of what I’d survived. Several of my doctors and court-ordered counselors wanted to make that same argument on my behalf, and I asked them not to. I could have told him about fourteen years of missing time, about a marriage and a business and half a decade I don’t actually remember living. All of it would have been true. And none of it was a valid reason, and none of it excused me. I knew the difference.

It didn’t fix anything by itself. It didn’t stop the shaking, and it didn’t make the judge’s compliment feel like anything but a gut punch. What it did was clear the ground. Every excuse I refused to make was one less wall I’d have had to live behind for the rest of my life.

I didn’t have the energy left to build more walls. So I didn’t. That’s the rub: when you give up believing that you’re owed an explanation, you get an actual shot at finding out who you are without one.

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