Full-Spectrum Disordered

The first time I wrote publicly, I wrote about Grey Matters.
About the forces that pull us — shame and empowerment, isolation and connection, cause and effect.
The world wanted black and white: sober or not, fit or unfit, stable or unstable.

But I’ve always lived in the gray.
If I’m honest, I always will.

And maybe that’s why they’ve called me disordered.

The Gray Was Never Empty

In the gray, I tried to make sense of contradictions: drinking and not drinking, recovering and creating, feeling isolated yet aching for connection.

But the gray was never empty.
It was saturated with the whole spectrum — colors, tensions, truths that don’t fit into clean categories.

Carrying all of it has been both my gift and my undoing.

Anger Wasn’t the Disorder

For years, I was told not to poke the bear. Keep my head down. Don’t be “too much.”
When I got angry, I was told it proved I was unstable. Disordered.

But anger isn’t disorder. Anger is protest.
It’s the signal that something is wrong, the sign that I can still feel.

The real disorder wasn’t in me. It was in the silence.

The Silence That Took Everything

What nearly destroyed me wasn’t the anger. It wasn’t even the mistakes. It was the silence.

The silence of being told to shrink.
The silence of professionals who stayed “neutral.”
The silence of people who stepped back and said “too much.”

That silence disordered everything. It left me carrying the weight alone, forced to live inside someone else’s version of who I was.

Reclaiming the Word

So maybe this is the freedom I’ve been asking for all along: the right to name what I see, even when it doesn’t fit the binary, even when it disrupts the script.

If that’s “disordered,” then I’ll wear it.
Because full-spectrum disordered doesn’t mean broken.
It means alive. Awake. Unwilling to shrink into silence.

The Rage Beneath

A few years ago, Mike and I were joking around. Someone said something about how some people have rage, and I laughed and said, Oh, I’m not a Rager.

Mike openly giggled. Because he has always known what I hold down — the rage at someone caring more about annihilating me than simply moving on.

That’s what the drinking has always been: rage bottled as survival. Rage at not having the tools to change the very thing that makes me sick.

Psychological pursuit. The strange experience of someone delighting in your demise.

Overstating? Maybe. But here’s the thing: you ain’t lived what I have lived, right? Either I’m crazy, or that’s the truth.

Alcohol was never the thing waiting in the parking lot.
The real danger has always been what would happen if I ever used my words.