The floor

September 2024. Eighty dollars to my name, a high floor in Las Vegas, and around $10K earned across the whole year. Every year since I was eighteen I had made six figures. That contrast is the entire picture.

The only thing left in my life I could tell the whole truth to was a camera, so I hit record and told it the truth. I admitted that some nights I had looked at that balcony longer than a person should. Then I said out loud that it was not an option, that I was never going to do it, and I said it into a recording on purpose so it would sit on the record somewhere outside my own head. Then I kept talking, because the silence after a sentence like that will eat you. Saying the second half out loud is what made the first half survivable. If you are anywhere near that floor, say the second half too, and say it to something that keeps a copy.

Two other things happened that same month, and neither felt like a rescue at the time.

I decided to take a break from the weed I had smoked every day for fifteen years, and from the caffeine I had been eating to punch through it. Both in the same week, mostly out of spite. Within days the fog I had spent a decade calling brain damage started to thin. Ten years of being certain my mind was broken, and a real piece of it turned out to be chemistry.

And I turned to God. No lightning, no voice. It was arithmetic. I had tried every method, every substance and every reinvention available to a person, and that was the only door I had never once opened. So I opened it, and I read the Bible front to back. I prayed, He gave me another chance, and I respected that.

I am not here to sell you my faith. I am just not willing to tell this part without it.

Nothing was fixed that September. The money was still gone, the year was still lost, and the fog took months more to clear.

But it started to thin, and for the first time in a decade I could hear myself think over it.

That is what a floor is actually for. It is the first thing in years that holds.