I stood at the base of those five steps leading into the old Victorian house on the grounds of the former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. I had just finished listening to Imagine Dragons’ “Demons” and was trying to muster the courage to finally face my own.
For a while, I just stood there.
In recovery circles, it’s well known that the first step is the hardest. And here I was not just metaphorically, but physically, staring at it. One step up from where I’d been. One step closer to something I wasn’t sure I was ready for.
What I didn’t know then was that I was standing at the first of five steps that would take me from victimhood to something else entirely.
For the previous five years, I had been in a revolving door relationship with a woman that followed a strange and painful pattern. We broke up every New Year’s Eve we were together. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes explosively. Once memorably.
We were on a plane coming home from what I thought had been a great vacation in Cuba. Midnight hit while we were in the air. I turned to her to wish her a Happy New Year and steal a kiss.
She broke up with me instead.
The final time was New Year’s Eve 2017 going into 2018. A few months earlier, I had been given an ultimatum: if I didn’t “have my act together” by midnight, we were done.
That moment mattered more than I understood at the time. Because something in me didn’t just break that night.
It broke open.
I went to a psychiatrist and said, as plainly as I could, “What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I keep going back to this?” When my EAP sessions ran out, she gently pointed me toward unresolved childhood trauma and suggested I look into The Gatehouse.
Which is how I found myself standing there, looking up those steps, not knowing what I was about to walk into.
My childhood molestation was the secret I had planned to take to my grave. I had said the words out loud once before to a sponsor, who brushed it off with, “it happens to everyone.”
But it didn’t feel like nothing.
And no amount of inventories or confessions had ever touched the emotional chaos that kept pulling me back into that relationship.
So there I was.
At the bottom of the steps.
I had reached out for help.
Now I had to take it.
I didn’t know what was waiting for me inside that house. I didn’t know how much it was going to change me.
All I knew was this:
That first step wasn’t weakness.
It was my first step away from victimhood.
This was the first of five steps that changed everything.
Next, I’ll talk about what happened when I finally started to find my voice.
