Six days after the request for a trial separation, I got home from rehab. Not long after I walked into the house we owned together, Andrea and I tried to have a conversation, but it didn’t really go anywhere. It was the small comments more than anything that made the separation feel real. They told me I had no chance of rebuilding what we’d had.
I had said that I could move into the basement, but she did not seem comfortable with that, so I told her I would move out of the house. Pretty quickly, I found a small rental apartment in the Heartland part of town. I took some furniture and clothes. I had a lot of stuff from my years of working out of town, but once I got to the new place, the sadness I could feel in my gut 100% of the time prevented me from unpacking. Most of my shit stayed packed in boxes, sitting all around the apartment, disorganized.
I didn’t even want to make the place feel like home. It felt like I was back in fucking camp life. A place to sleep, but nothing I found beneficial. I couldn’t drink. At least that held up for a while. Looking back, it felt temporary, like I was waiting for something before I started living properly again. That was still my habit of avoidance, like I’d always done, but now I was sober, so sleeping was not easy, lots of tossing turning, reading through social media bullshit on my phone.
This avoidance of feelings had been my strategy for years, and it did not disappear just because I stopped drinking. In most ways, it got louder, because now I was stuck having to face the negative parts of my life without that old school escape. Yes, I had removed the booze, but that did not automatically help remove the pattern that made getting drunk useful in the first place.
The pressure in my belly was constant. I didn’t cry, but goddamn, was I angry at her, and I could not reduce it even in the slightest. One evening, I was sitting in that fucking apartment, surrounded by boxes, with no motivation to open any of them. I was not building a home where I felt comfortable. I was existing in a place I had not accepted yet.
My mind went back to the trip to Kamloops, and I did the one simple thing I had read about in Jack Carr’s The Terminal List, a way SEALs reduce their pressure with breathing. I had also been taught a bit about how to use it at rehab, probably more important there, but the novel is what I thought of. It’s called box breathing. It is exactly as simple as it sounds. I would inhale for a count of four, hold it in for four, exhale fully while counting to four, hold with the air out for four, then repeat.
When I started trying something from, what’s honestly, a pretty violent novel, it felt mostly pointless, especially holding after the exhale, I just wanted to gasp in the next breath. That was the hardest part for me, and in hindsight it could be the thing that kept my mind from running away. Kept me from over defending myself, justify my behaviours, argue with reality, or sink into feeling sorry for myself. The last thing I wanted to do was stop and do specific fucking breathing, but the counting helped me stay focused on the breath over all the other shit. Thanks, Jack. Turns out that it works.
Eventually, something… shifted. My reactions slowed down. The pressure I could feel in my belly and the noise of the negative thoughts in my head softened. It wasn’t some kind of peace or comfort, like some guru in a romantic comedy movie. It was just a little bit of space.
Over time, within that tiny space, things calmed down and I could see things more clearly, with less of the stress and anxiety that had accompanied it up until this point. Clarity had already shown me a lot about what I had done, even how it had cost me the trust and the love from my wife. While doing the breathing I could look at it without the feelings becoming overwhelming. Sitting there in that little apartment, breathing in the middle of all that mess, something else clicked into place beside it, yet another thing we talked about in rehab. Integrity.
The first thing I should make clear for anyone reading, is that this is not a nice idea. I don’t treat it like a personality trait, or something I say about myself just because I wanted it to be true. With time and practice, it became a requirement. Seeing things with Clarity, was the refusal to distort reality. The concept of Integrity was a basic idea of calmly finding out what I had to do after I saw things clearly.
The easiest way for me to build on it was to start writing things down. When this started, I wasn’t trying to write a blog or come up with some brilliant insight. I just needed to get some of the fucking noise out of my head and onto a page where I could actually see it. I began to write, by hand, things I had done, what I had avoided, and the lies I had told myself about why I had done all these things. Afterwards, I’d wait an hour or so, then I would read it back and ask myself whether I had been fully honest on paper.
A lot of the time, I wasn’t. I could write something that was technically true while leaving out the part that made me look bad. I could explain why I had lied without actually sitting with the fact that I had lied. I was pretty fucking good at making my behaviour sound understandable to myself. So I would go back through what I had written and take out the excuses, my eyes shooting from the last write down of the problem to the next, trying to make it more accurate, no matter how much it pissed me off. Often, I had to do that more than once.
It was uncomfortable, and there were plenty of times I would have preferred to close the notebook and watch something stupid on TV. I had spent years avoiding the truth when it made me feel bad. Now that I wanted anything in my life to change, I had to stop doing that, even when nobody else was there to call me on it.
I had lied to Andrea about money. I had hidden and minimized my drinking. I had promised I would do better and then failed to follow through. I was there physically for much of our marriage, but I wasn’t communicating with her properly, and I wasn’t really there for her in the ways that mattered, especially after our little boy was born. Writing those things down, sure as fuck, didn’t make me feel better. What I saw as painful at the time became, once again in fucking hindsight, a benefit. It made it harder to keep pretending that my intentions somehow cancelled out what I had actually done.
I was still very angry with her. I think it would be dishonest to write this as though one evening of breathing and a few pages in a notebook made that disappear. It didn’t. However, the anger no longer gave me permission to ignore my own part in what had happened. I could feel hurt about the separation and still admit that I had damaged our relationship through losing her trust. Both of those things could be true, whether I liked it or not.
I think this is where integrity started becoming something real to me. It wasn’t enough to recognize what I had done and feel awful about it. Feeling awful is easy to mistake for doing something useful, especially when you’re sitting alone in a messy apartment full of boxes. I had to decide what I was going to do differently the next time I had a chance.
In the beginning, that meant embarrassingly small things. If I said I would call someone, I called. If I said I would show up, I showed up. If I fucked something up, I tried to say so without immediately launching into a speech about why it happened. That last one was harder than it sounds. My brain could produce a defence before I had even finished hearing the criticism. Yes, I’d take a fucking breath to slow down the lizard part of my brain, trying to justify instead of analyze.
I didn’t always get it right. There were times I caught myself making excuses after I had already started talking. But I could stop, admit what I was doing, and try again. The point wasn’t to suddenly become a man who never made mistakes. I needed to become someone who could be honest about a mistake and then do what I could to fix the results.
Over time and with lots of practice, I started to trust myself a little more. I don’t mean that I felt confident and better than other people. I mean that when I said I would do something, I began to build more reasons to believe I might actually do it. That had been missing for a long time. Every time I kept my word, even in a tiny thing, it gave me a bit more evidence that my words could mean something again.
There were still days when I slipped back into old habits. Sometimes I would avoid a difficult conversation or leave something undone and then feel so ashamed of it that I wanted to avoid everything else too. I had to learn to catch that spiral. Beating the shit out of myself, (mentally not physically, I hadn’t lost it that badly) might have felt like accountability, but if it ended with me doing nothing, it was just another way to avoid dealing with the problem. I needed to start admitting what happened, correct what I could, and return to what I was trying to do.
Andrea and I did not get back together. I want to be clear about that, because I don’t want to turn this into a story where I learned an important lesson and got my marriage back as a reward. That isn’t what happened. Over time, our conversations became steadier, and we got better at working together as parents. We have a son to raise, and that matters more than me winning an argument or protecting my pride for five minutes.
I still think about that apartment and all those boxes. I wish I could tell you I finished the breathing, got up, unpacked everything, and made the place feel like home. That would be a nice ending for the scene, but it wouldn’t be true. The changes were way slower than that. I had to keep finding the places where I was avoiding reality and make a different choice, sometimes several times in the same day.
Clarity helped me see what I had been doing. Integrity was the first tool that meant trying to live differently once I saw it. I needed both, because seeing the damage clearly didn’t repair any of it on its own.
Making It Easier to Follow Through
I don’t think that anyone can read a blog entry like this and suddenly become honest with themselves about everything. I certainly didn’t. What helped me was finding a way to notice when I was bending the truth and then doing one small thing about it.
For me, writing was useful because I could read my own words later and spot the excuses I had missed the first time. Box breathing helped when I was angry or anxious enough that I couldn’t think clearly. Also, following through on small promises gave me something practical to do with what I was learning. None of those things fixed my life on their own, but I could repeat them, and that made a difference.
You might have a different way of doing it. Maybe you need to write things down. Maybe you need a reminder on your phone because you keep promising to do something and then forgetting. Perhaps there’s an apology you’ve been putting off, a bill you’ve avoided opening, or a conversation you already know you need to have. I don’t know what your thing is, but you probably do.
If you’re anything like me, waiting until you feel motivated or ready could take a long fucking time. Pick one thing small enough that you can actually keep doing it. Keep one promise. Deal with one thing you’ve been avoiding. Then, if you don’t follow through, be honest about that too and just try again.
That’s what integrity looks like in my life right now. I see something I don’t like about what I’ve done or how I’m behaving, and I try to bring my actions closer to what I know is true. Some days I do it well. Some days I have to catch myself and start over. Either way, I have to keep coming back to it.
If you’ve found something that helps you do that, I’d genuinely like to hear about it. I’m still figuring this shit out myself, and sharing what works is part of why I started writing The Rebuild.
