It was the word value that came to me when Michael died. My son had valued me. Why did I not value myself?

The sword of truth that cut this Gordian knot had two edges: one side freed me from the prison of my own mind, while the other left gaping wounds on my children—wounds that ultimately led to my son’s death.

Despite decades in AA and therapy, I couldn’t function. My life was a shit show.

Hypervigilance. Rage. Fear. Unresolved childhood trauma. I couldn’t hold a job and gave dysfunctional a bad name. I was a pattern of self-loathing trying to make myself feel better. My relationships with myself, my children, partners, money, people, work, and food were deformed. I had no agency, crippled by a self-hatred so deep I couldn’t even see it. I told therapists and sponsors that my mother claimed I was broken from birth. She never liked anything about me. I was too big, too sensitive, and too serious. The fuck-up of the Brady Bunch. She looked at me like I was moldy, rotten fruit—something disgusting, lost in the back of the refrigerator. And although I denied it and fought against it my whole life, I believed her narrative.

I believed I was defective, worthless, garbage—someone who deserved the treatment I received. I believed I had no value. That belief shaped my identity, and who I thought I was. Fifty years of dissociation, self-loathing running through my veins like sepsis. In AA, they called them “whack-a-mole problems”—money, relationships, weight, failure, popping up randomly. But it wasn’t random. It was rot. A slow, festering poison, seeping into everything.

I thought if I could save myself, I could save my son.

That morning, I came down the stairs of our VA-funded townhome. I had lost another job and faced another eviction. I found Michael cold and lifeless on the couch. It felt like a baseball bat to the head. He had stopped taking the antipsychotic Zyprexa prescribed to him for anxiety and opiate addiction. He couldn’t urinate. His legs swelled with bipedal edema while I brought home coconut water from Trader Joe’s, hoping it might help. The hospital said he was fine. They handed him crutches, wheeled him to the door, and pushed him out. I iced his legs as he lay on the couch. Michael consumed enough opiates in his life to take out an elephant. It was the antipsychotic they gave him for anxiety that took him out.

I found him dead on the couch in the morning. Michael was twenty-three years old.

One of my last AA sponsors once said, “You want Michael to stand, but he has no legs.” She was right.

Michael’s love had saved me, even before he was born. I saw him as the answer to the disaster that my life was. His older sister Tara lived in fear of my rage, invisible in the shadows while I latched onto Michael, feeding off him like some reverse Godzilla with X-ray eyes. He gave me everything—his love, his legs, his life.

I couldn’t see my children because I had never been seen.

The pain of harming your own children, and the death of one, is a wound that never heals and cannot be taken away. To spend your life searching for help, only to be misdirected, is a cruel experience that extends suffering. The meaning attached to the manifestations of my self-hatred and feelings of worthlessness were misinterpreted. I came to believe that I was different from others and that selfishness and self-centeredness were at the root of my problems, a narrative I found in AA. A uni-level loop that kept me trapped. It was a story of brokenness that mirrored my mother’s influence.

Everyone in my life was a projection of my own fear, lack, toxic shame, and self-hatred. A break so deep I couldn’t even see it. I had no empathy, no compassion for myself, and in turn, none for them. I was incapable of nurturing them, just as I had never been nurtured. I betrayed them both.

Imagine electromagnetic light, trapped in darkness, starved for light, desperate for balance. I looked to have my self-worth reflected back to me externally through others and things. It was a bottomless hunger, a frantic attempt to feel okay in my own skin. I searched for something that had never been missing, except in my own mind: Value, a thirst for wholeness.