Fear
While my bravado helped me do many things and achieve ambitious goals in life, my fears drove me further and further away from knowing, and therefore, loving myself. Substance addiction to alcohol and marijuana, which started in my mid teens, seems to have maintained this strange equilibrium, and enabled me, for many years, to remain functional. Seen from afar, my life was a model of success when I finally crashed and burned in the year 2003, at the age of 42…
