Introduction to Clarity

A lot of people, mostly those who haven’t truly had it happen to them in my opinion, think that a life falls apart all at once. While I do believe that can happen, I think it is extremely rare. For the most part, what looks sudden from the outside is the result of unseen things that have been building in the background for a long time. Looking back, a person can usually see how poorly things were developing, even if they couldn’t see it while they were living through them. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.

While I’m sure a life falling apart can feel sudden to someone standing on one side of it, I don’t believe it is sudden to everyone involved. It cracks slowly, a little at a time, much like poorly reinforced concrete. Small fractures appear first. They are easy to ignore, easy to explain away and easy to cover with another layer of effort or distraction. Eventually, though, those cracks spread until the structure underneath can no longer carry the weight being placed on it.

I have spent most of my adult life working in construction, and when you build things for a living, you learn a simple rule: structures fail when the framework underneath them is weak. A beautiful surface might hide the problem for a while, but it cannot correct it. Paint doesn’t strengthen a wall, and new flooring doesn’t repair a failing foundation. You can make something look good from the outside while everything underneath it is slowly coming apart.

Looking back at my life before the changes became obvious and painful, I realize I was trying to build without any real support underneath me. I talked about being responsible and genuinely believed that I was. I talked about being a good husband, a good father and a reliable man. On the surface, I believed all of those things about myself, and perhaps parts of them were even true, but I wasn’t looking closely enough at whether my actions were supporting the things I claimed to value.

Words alone are not enough. Promises are as easy to make as they are to break, and without something solid at the base supporting them, they don’t hold much weight. Eventually, my life cracked. I can blame a lot of that on alcohol, which I had slowly allowed to take control of my evenings, but alcohol wasn’t acting by itself. It worked alongside my avoidance, dishonesty and unwillingness to look too closely at what I was doing.

I started drinking when I was thirteen years old, and for most of the next thirty years it felt relatively harmless. Drinking was social, it was fun and it was simply something everyone around me seemed to do. Later, it became a few drinks after work to take the edge off and quiet my mind before going to sleep. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to become dependent on alcohol. It happened slowly enough that each increase felt small compared with what had come immediately before it.

During the final few years, my drinking grew substantially. My love of a couple of beers turned into several drinks of my favourite Irish whiskey. For years, a 26 ounce bottle would last me about three nights, which didn’t seem much different from the six packs of beer I had been drinking before. Then, gradually, that stopped being enough.

For much of my career, I worked camp jobs. At one time, it was common enough to have a beer after work, but over the years the camps became dry. At the time, I probably viewed that as an inconvenience. Looking back, I can see that those dry camps were one of the few remaining guardrails preventing my drinking from completely taking over.

When I worked a fourteen days on and seven days off schedule, I still drank heavily during those seven days at home, but every time I returned to camp, I was forced into fourteen days of sobriety. I had no real difficulty sleeping once I was there, the routine was helpful and I rarely missed a day of work. Because I remained reliable at work, I could point to that part of my life as evidence that I didn’t have a serious problem. I was still showing up, still earning good money and still getting the job done, so I told myself everything must be fine.

When my son Andy was born, being gone for nearly seventy percent of his life stopped feeling acceptable. I wanted to be closer to home and more involved in his life, so I eventually accepted a position with Teck Resources at the Fording River coal mine near Elkford, British Columbia. The shift was four days on and four days off, which seemed like it would give me a much better life. I bought an old motorhome and stayed in it near Elkford during my shifts.

What I didn’t understand was that I had just removed the last remaining guardrails around my drinking. I was no longer staying in a dry camp. I was alone in my motorhome after work, with nobody around to notice how much I was drinking and no rule preventing me from doing it. Over the course of the first few months, the 26 ounce bottle disappeared from my routine and was replaced by a 40 ounce bottle that lasted only two days.

What had once been a 26 ounce bottle every three nights became roughly twenty ounces of whiskey every night. Sometimes it was more, especially when I bought a 60 ounce bottle and used its larger size to convince myself that I hadn’t consumed as much as I had. At the time, it still felt manageable. It still felt like something I was choosing and could control whenever I finally decided to do so. But fuck me, with that perfect 20/20 hindsight, I can now see how little control I actually had.

I tried to stop several times, and I genuinely meant it each time. The problem was that whenever I tried, I couldn’t sleep. My mind would race and my body would feel restless. I would lie awake knowing that drinking would quiet everything down, so the following evening I would start again. I kept promising myself that I would quit later, once work settled down, once life became less stressful or once I found a better way to sleep. There was always a reason that tonight wasn’t the right night.

Eventually, it became impossible to pretend that I could quit on my own. One morning, I was late for work again at the Fording River mine. When my supervisor called to ask where I was, something unusual happened. Instead of inventing another excuse or trying to explain the situation away, I told him the truth. I admitted that I had a problem and asked for help.

In June 2024, through the support of my employer, I entered a rehabilitation facility in Kamloops, British Columbia. I didn’t go there looking for philosophy or some grand new understanding of life. I went because drinking had taken control of my evenings, damaged my honesty and helped bring my marriage to the edge of collapse.

While I was in rehab, my wife asked for a trial separation. We had never discussed separating before, so in that sense it came out of nowhere, but I also can’t honestly say that I was completely surprised. Admitting to myself that I had a drinking problem forced me to recognize what my behaviour must have been doing to our marriage. I was spending my evenings drinking alone and passing out in the basement instead of sleeping next to my wife. Rehab didn’t cause the separation. Near the end of my stay, as my return home approached, she finally expressed something she had clearly been feeling for a long time. With that fucking 20/20 hindsight, I can now recognize some of the hints she had given me. Nothing was ever said directly before that phone conversation, but the fact that I wasn’t more surprised probably tells me enough.

That left me with a lot of difficult questions. What if I had stopped drinking sooner? What if I had stopped avoiding my wife instead of hiding what was happening? What if I had been honest before things reached that point? Maybe our marriage would not have cracked as badly as it did. Maybe it would have ended anyway. There is no way for me to know, and repeatedly rebuilding the past in my mind cannot change it. What I do know is that I allowed things to reach that point, and I had to face my part in it.

One of the things that affected me most in rehab wasn’t a particular lesson or lecture. It was meeting the other people there and listening to their stories. They came from different backgrounds and had lived completely different lives, yet many of them had made mistakes that looked remarkably similar to mine. The details changed, but the patterns remained the same: avoidance, dishonesty, drinking and broken trust.

For a long time, I had convinced myself that my situation was different. I told myself I could still handle it on my own, that I was functional and that I would eventually figure everything out. Sitting in those rooms and hearing versions of my own story coming from the mouths of complete strangers helped that belief to fall apart. There was nothing particularly unique about what I had done or the excuses I had used to defend it.

That realization hit me harder than I expected. For the first time in a very long time, I stopped trying to explain everything away. I stopped defending my behaviour and telling myself stories that made it easier to live with what I had done. Once I removed the excuses, the justifications and the version of myself I wanted everyone else to see, what remained was the truth.

Clarity is the first pillar of the system I am trying to build because no meaningful change can begin without it. Clarity is the refusal to knowingly distort reality. It is the willingness to look at your life as it actually is, rather than as you wish it were or as you would like other people to see it. It means examining your own actions without immediately reaching for an excuse, even when what you find is uncomfortable or painful.

When I stopped avoiding the truth, I could finally see the cracks in my life clearly. I could see how my drinking had grown, how often I had lied to myself and how much of my behaviour had been designed to keep me from feeling uncomfortable. I could see why my wife had stopped trusting my promises and why the person I believed myself to be no longer matched the person reflected in my actions.

Clarity did not comfort me. It exposed me. It stripped away the explanations I had been using to protect myself and forced me to stand in front of what remained. But that exposure also revealed something important. A cracked structure can sometimes be repaired, but only after the damage has been uncovered. You cannot strengthen what you refuse to inspect, and you cannot rebuild your life while pretending the foundation is still solid.

Once you see the truth clearly, you can finally begin to rebuild. You can decide what is worth repairing, what needs to be removed and what should never be built the same way again. Clarity doesn’t do the rebuilding for you, but it gives you an honest place to begin.

Everything that follows starts there.