A few months after my breakdown I read a book on Complex PTSD. There's a concept in it called the 4F responses — fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. The ways a person learns to manage threat when they've grown up inside it. I read the descriptions of each one and felt, with the particular unease of recognition, that I was reading about myself. I'd been in one of the four almost my entire life. I just hadn't had a name for it.

The spring of 1996. I'd just turned eighteen, playing baseball, staying at a farm outside a small Saskatchewan town for a tournament. One night someone suggested going to a place called High Hill, where the local kids went to smoke marijuana. I'd never tried it. That changed at High Hill. I got extremely high. Almost greened out. And then I got in my car and drove back to the farm on dirt roads in the dark, completely out of my mind. I made it back. I shouldn't have.

What I remember most about that first time isn't the paranoia. It's the quiet. For a few hours, the noise stopped. I don't mean literal noise. I mean the noise that had been running in my head since I was old enough to understand that my house wasn't safe — the constant low-level vigilance, the loop that ran on its own regardless of what I was doing or where I was. For those hours at High Hill, the loop stopped. I existed in something close to peace for what felt like the first time in years.

I'm going to say something here that I know doesn't sound responsible, and I'm going to say it anyway because this book is supposed to be honest: I love drugs. I love what they do. I love how they take away the pain and the anxiety and the noise and give you a moment where the world is just bearable. I know that's not a healthy thing to say. But when you grow up the way I grew up, and you don't have any other tools for managing what's inside you, and someone hands you a tool that actually works — you use it. That's not weakness. That's survival with the resources available.

I am, I think, an addict. I say that plainly, without shame but without pretending otherwise. I never went to the harder things — I saw what they did to people I knew and it frightened me enough to stay away. But the softer things, the ones that would eventually crack something open in me that changed everything, those I reached for regularly for years.

One of the biggest lies that men are told is that being a man means shoving everything down and just getting through it. That feelings are weakness. That asking for help is failure. I know this because I lived inside it for decades. The things I couldn't say, couldn't name, couldn't ask for help with — the things I stuffed down and reached for drugs to quiet — were the same things that eventually put me on a basement floor at forty-four, cracked open and drowning. If this book reaches one person who recognizes himself in it and decides to ask for help he didn't think he was allowed to ask for — that's enough. That's the whole point.

I mentioned Scott earlier — the boy whose RCMP father was hard on him in ways I noticed but didn't fully understand. He taught me how to throw a curveball, patiently, for no reason except that he believed I could be better than I was. We drifted apart the way school friendships drift. By Grade Ten we'd stopped talking entirely. I was eighteen when I found out he was dead.

I was out having lunch with my mother. She told me that Scott and his father had both passed away. I didn't understand what she meant. People don't just both pass away. From what she told me, and what I pieced together later, there had been an argument, a gun involved. Scott confronted his father, they struggled over the weapon, it went off. Scott was killed. And then his father took his own life.

The thing that has stayed with me longest about this isn't the grief, though there was grief. It's the parallel. Scott didn't know what was happening in my house. I'd made sure of that. And I didn't know what was happening in his — I knew his dad was strict, I knew there was pressure there, I didn't know it was that bad. Two kids, sitting next to each other, each one invisible to the other in the ways that mattered most.

What I wish most, when I think about it, is that Scott could have made it through. That he could have gotten to the other side of whatever was happening in that house and found out what I eventually found out — that there is a life beyond the thing you're in, that it gets different if not always easier.

He didn't get that chance. I got it. I don't take that lightly.

My mother's message, delivered in various ways over the years, was that women were bad news. Trouble. Not to be trusted. The effect on a growing boy was that I became almost completely incapable of talking to girls. Nervous in a way I couldn't explain. And then my friends met three girls on Albert Street, and one of them was Laura, and everything I'd been taught about women ran directly into everything I felt the first time I saw her.

She was fifteen. Long curly hair, a sweet smile she gave freely. She noticed me crumpled in a corner at a friend's kitchen, nervous and trying not to show it, and she asked me if I was okay. Just like that. Like it was a reasonable thing to do. Nobody had done that in a long time. Asked me if I was okay like they actually wanted to know. She was dating one of my best friends. And that was that. For the next year, more or less, I watched from close enough to feel everything and far enough to do nothing about it. I kept my mouth shut and my face neutral and told myself that was what decency required. It was. It was also the hardest thing I'd done that didn't involve a basement.

The summer after Grade Twelve, I gave her a ride home. She asked if I wanted to come in for a bit. We went down to her basement, sat at opposite ends of the couch, and the night went quiet in a specific way I'd never experienced before. She asked me what was going on. I told her I wanted this but didn't think it was a good idea. And then the heart wants what the heart wants, and eventually I stopped arguing with myself.

We kissed.

I've thought about how to describe what that felt like a hundred times and I still don't quite have it. Not just electricity — though there was that. Something more specific. The feeling of being chosen by someone who knew enough about you to choose you anyway. It was possibly the most consequential moment of my life up to that point. Not because of what it led to, though what it led to mattered. Because of what it told me. That the verdict I'd been carrying about myself — not enough, not worth it, the boy from the basement, the one nobody stays for — wasn't the only verdict available. Someone had looked at the evidence and reached a different conclusion.

I want to say something here about what Laura was and what she wasn't, because I spent the next twenty years getting this wrong. She wasn't perfect. But she was the first person who ever made me feel like I was enough. Laura looked at me — knowing my history, knowing the quiet and the guardedness and the walls — and chose me anyway.

I put her on a pedestal that night in her basement and I kept her there for two decades. I was looking for the feeling she gave me, and I kept looking for it outside myself, in other people, because I didn't understand yet that it wasn't hers to give. It never had been. It was mine to find. That understanding took another twenty-five years.

But it starts here. With a girl with long curly hair asking a nervous boy in a kitchen if he was okay.