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Nine years ago, my two-year bender abroad ended. And not because I wanted it to. By then, tina and GHB were running the show.

Now I’m sitting in window seat 2A on a one-way flight from Los Angeles to Cancún with clear eyes, a camera, and the possibly insane idea that going back might help me make a few things right.

Cancún is not random.

It was the first place I ever visited outside the United States. High school senior trip. Alcohol. Sun. Whatever the guy on the beach sold me.

Also, the first place abroad where I blacked out and threw up.

The signs had started earlier. The first time I ever drank, at 13, I puked all over my bedroom and could not wait to do it again.

Cancún was more of that, but with a passport.

The date matters too.

August 9 was my sister Melissa’s birthday.

She died of an overdose.

We were so close classmates often asked, “Y’all twins?” even though we were a year apart. Growing up, she made it abundantly clear that nobody was allowed to fuck with her very obvious gay little brother.

After I came home crying because someone called me a faggot at a party, she peeled out of the driveway to find him. The story got back before she did. She had flipped tables, demanding a name. That was when everyone suddenly forgot how to speak.

I miss her.

I don’t know what I believe about signs, but some things become hard to ignore. Since I lost her, August 9 shows up in receipts, screens, addresses. Flashes, over and over. I still FaceTime my nieces when it happens again.

So when leaving on August 9 became a real possibility, it was settled.

Melissa was always going to be part of this.

Years after that senior trip, I became a self-help television producer.

Go figure.

The title Dear World, I’m Back is a nod to the thousands of letters I once read that began with “Dear Dr. Phil,” back when I was a producer on the show and still believed work could save me from myself.

It could not.

As a teenager, I watched Dr. Phil, wishing someone could make the screaming and 911 calls stop in my own family. I never imagined I would end up working there.

I came to Los Angeles trying to outrun my childhood and become a somebody. I wanted to succeed so badly. I did not understand how much wreckage I had brought with me.

Even before Dr. Phil, I worked on A&E’s Intervention. Sadly, I got fired for getting high in the office while helping cast addicts for the show.

Smh.

My bosses helped get me into rehab. I made a comeback. Then I produced at Dr. Phil for five seasons, where I kept my past drug addiction secret.

I almost blew my cover one weekend when I relapsed, barely dragging my ass out of it before driving through the Paramount gates on Monday. They had always looked inspiring. That morning, they looked like the entrance to hell.

I could not lose another self-help TV job because of drug use!

At Intervention, I had brought drugs into the office. At Dr. Phil, I left them at home. Progress, I thought.

And in a way, it was.

Work became my Higher Power. The thing that kept me sober.

And once that contract ended, I was left with guess who.

Me.

Not good.

The cover story was Rio de Janeiro. I told myself I’d earned it after making it through five seasons of daytime talk, which in TV years felt like surviving a war. I insisted Ipanema would mean beach in the morning, writing by afternoon. A pilot. Maybe a movie. Fun and productive.

I was sure I had conquered my addiction. Addicts love that one. We hear the warning. We nod. We do whatever we want anyway.

I had learned hard lessons. I had lost a great job. I had gone to rehab. I had helped put stories about addiction on national television. There was no way I would let it get that bad again.

Smoking tina in the bathroom at the Intervention offices had to be rock bottom.

Right?

No. Not even close.

By the first weekend in Rio, I was twirling.

At first, it felt like old times. A bitter ecstasy pill. A dose of GHB that tasted like kerosene. The nastier the better.

I felt so good it is hard to put into words. Like I was put on this Earth to bless it with my presence. I was suddenly quicker-witted, my eyes somehow bluer, carrying a confidence I hadn’t earned. Euphoric in a way nobody is really supposed to feel.

It is not normal. And once you know that feeling exists, you can throw away everything in your life desperate to get back to it.

I would have sold my soul if I could have packaged that feeling up. The chase becomes mandatory. It’s the only thing that makes sense anymore.

And chase it, I did.

Through 16 countries on four continents.

GHB was my drug of choice, and tina was how I cranked it way, way up so I could stay conscious enough to ping-pong through crowded foreign streets until I either found what I was looking for or forgot what it was. Or just faceplanted and started snoring like a chainsaw on a sidewalk.

I knew I was not managing the combination well, but I kept acting like the perfect balance was one dose away.

The Week was my go-to Saturday night party in Rio. I swooned every time a carioca pronounced it “The Weeky.” Even standing in long bathroom lines, breathing in humid air thick with the scent of human waste, felt thrilling. Then I would enter the atrium and disappear into a sea of furry and slick bodies glistening under strobe lights and moving to bass.

Sometimes I still miss it.

One night, I climbed onto the dance box in the middle of the floor. I wanted everyone to see me. The next thing I knew, I was waking up under a ten-gallon bucket of ice water. I had overdosed on G. I put on a show, all right. Just not the kind I wanted. Plus, I was banned.

Then came nearly two years of airport smuggling, hotel bans, blown-up romances, crying mothers, missing chunks of time, and madness I kept pretending was adventure.

In Barcelona, I got the bright idea to propose to a guy I barely knew. While shopping for rings, it hit me.

He’s hacking me.

And trying to get me killed.

WHY?!

I was afraid of imaginary things. Hackers. Stalkers. The government listening in. Every man I met was somehow a CIA-level hacker. I couldn’t understand how I was the one who couldn’t figure it out. I switched phones a hundred times trying to evade no one.

But the things I should have been afraid of barely fazed me. Police. Walking into traffic in a fugue state. Foreign prisons. Overdose. Disappearing.

I was seeing the world and missing almost all of it.

When I landed back in West Hollywood, it no longer felt like home. I had burned through my Dr. Phil money, maxed out my credit cards, and had no idea how I was going to pay rent.

Other countries felt less wrong. Safer, maybe, because disappearing had started to feel like safety.

Absurd, because I was anything but safe out there.

I had convinced myself my world tour on drugs would not end. Or I forgot it would. Either delusion fits.

I lost my apartment. My brand-new electric car got repossessed. Everything in my storage unit went up for auction. And still, I could not or would not stop.

Eventually, I ended up in New York, where I crash-landed in a homeless shelter on the Lower East Side, eating meals in a dining room where Dr. Phil sometimes played on the television. Not long before that, I had been booking guests for the show who thought I was the stable one.

Now I looked up to watch with a tray in my hands, wearing a name tag and cringing every time another locker slammed shut down the hall.

I should not be here.

But I am.

Nearly five years ago, my desire to use was lifted. It sounds miraculous because it is. But I’m not the only one. I’ve heard that story from countless recovered people who finally had the cravings removed.

It’s one of the promises.

The old-timers were right all along.

Keep coming back. The door is always open. Try again. Eventually, yes eventually, the thing that once screamed at you every day gets quiet.

That did not happen because I figured everything out.

Please.

I kept going until I was covered in infections, wearing taped-together glasses, and becoming the kind of person people crossed the street to avoid.

Choice had left the building.

Then, on October 6, 2021, I woke up in a cheap hotel blocks from the White House after days of the kind of panic tina creates when it turns on you.

For reasons I still do not fully understand, the desire to use was gone.

A dealer I had arranged to meet was already waiting in the back stairwell. Instead of creeping down to meet him, I used my last $150 to buy a last-minute one-way ticket on Priceline.

Then I unbarricaded the door and ran.

I flew back to LA for detox.

That morning did not fix me. I still overreact. I still have debt. I still get in my own way.

But I am awake now. I’m learning to pause before I wreck things.

Sometimes.

I’ve built something real since then. A stable life. Deeper friendships. A relationship with myself that isn’t trying to hurt me.

I used to think getting high was a treat. Turns out I was punishing myself. Now I know who I am without it. It has been exciting to meet me.

And I never stopped yearning for the world.

Thinking another degree would turn the longing into a plan, I earned a master’s in Tourism Management.

Classic me.

But it was not for nothing. Those two years gave me structure in early sobriety. They also made something painfully clear. I had no interest in planning other people’s vacations.

I had to go back into the world myself.

So I left West Hollywood with a backpack, a camera, and no guarantee that any of this will work. I turned in my apartment keys, left my job, and sold my car.

Better than a repo.

I donated or sold everything else except for what fits in my 80L backpack.

I already know how little I actually need after losing it all before. But this time, I’m letting go on purpose.

There are people and places that deserve acknowledgment from me. In recovery, we call that an amends. I’ll do that where I can.

And where I cannot make direct amends, I’ll show up differently this time.

The YouTube channel will follow the trip as it happens. The conversations I do not see coming. The ones that don’t happen. Even the mistakes I make in public, because I am new to this.

This Substack is for what won’t fit neatly on camera. The backstory. The aftermath. The things I may only understand once I sit down and write them.

I’m not leaving because I figured my life out.

I’m leaving because I finally got one back.

And I do not want to spend it working for someone else’s dream while mine sits and waits.

First stop: Cancún.

Dear world, I’m back.

And this time, you won’t have to hide when you see me coming.

No laughs. No claps.

Then I ran.

Every morning, I knew Mrs. Parovsky would be late. Clack. Clack. Clack. Her stilettos echoed down the hallway, getting louder as she jogged toward our classroom.

Always breathless, she carried her pink-frosted doughnut with sprinkles and her coffee to her desk, eased into her chair, and set a timer for five minutes. Five minutes. No talking. If anyone so much as made a peep, she’d cut them off with a sharp “Shhh!”

Sometimes we tested her just to hear it.

“Shhh!”

Then the giggles.

She sipped her coffee. Nibbled at her doughnut, smiling as she looked each of us in the eye, one by one.

I thought she and her little black two-door Mercedes were perfection.

One day, Mrs. Parovsky gave us an assignment: pick a song and perform it for the class. No lip-syncing. No singing. Act it out, like charades or interpretive dance.

Avant-garde for a high school communications class.

Classmates called out their choices.

Britney.

N’SYNC.

Sisqó.

Blink-182.

I sat back and judged them, naturally. A year earlier, I probably would have picked something similar.

I was too cool for that now.

Freshman year, at Bremen, Charlene was digging through the locker across from mine in a KoRn shirt.

At that point, KoRn was just a few seconds of screaming on Q101 before I changed the station. The backwards R in the KoRn logo on Charlene’s T-shirt sent me.

This band was dumb.

I made fun of her shirt and rolled my eyes. She defended them.

Poor her, I thought.

After almost getting expelled from Bremen for fighting and telling teachers off, I chose to transfer to Shepard High School. I wanted a fresh start. I wanted to try not to scare teachers. The operative word was try. Really, I wanted to make it to graduation. No need to make new friends. Most people I cared about were still at Bremen.

My new classmates thought I was a quiet, friendless nerd. I kind of liked that.

Just before the bell rang, a girl walked up and peeled a note off my back.

She held it up in front of me with a look that said, Fuck these kids.

FAG.

I gasped, grabbed it, and crumpled it in my fist.

All the proof whoever taped it there needed. They were probably watching.

I was trying to fly under the radar, not become a target. My lisp and limp wrist had betrayed me. I had plenty of resentment. I just did not take it out on kids I could overpower. I saved it for teachers I thought needed a lesson.

Take the white-lab-coat-wearing anatomy teacher. He made the mistake of comparing us to his honors students. Maybe he didn’t say we were stupid. Maybe he did. What I heard was that we were.

I needed him to regret it, so I gave him a piece of my mind. His hideous ponytail got one too.

I got suspended for ten days. In exchange for a D, I agreed not to set foot in anatomy class again. The only D I remember getting. Certainly the only one I got by striking a deal.

Still, it felt like a reward. No more stringy ponytail.

At home, I learned how to say the thing that hurt most.

From Mom.

My sister and I nicknamed her SugarBeast because she could go from sweet to mean in an instant. “Don’t fuckin’ call me that!” she’d screech.

We said it more. We said it louder. Then we ran.

One minute she was smoking a blunt with my sister, me, and our teenage friends like she was one of us.

The next, Beast.

There was the time Mom socked me in the nose. “Faggot,” she hissed.

Mom too?

Blood ran down my chin.

I called 911.

They were on speed dial.

When the police got there, Mom told them I was the aggressor. They believed her.

“Cuff him.”

The next day, she picked me up from court, got the charges dropped, and took me shopping.

We acted like nothing had happened.

For us, it was normal.

I started hanging around a guy named John. Rumors were going around about me, but he treated me like one of the guys.

Despite my faggotry.

John was a huge KoRn fan. If he was giving me a chance, I figured I could give the screaming lunatic a chance.

“Listen to this,” he said.

He handed me Follow the Leader, and we went for a drive. The first time I really listened, something in me broke wide open. Jonathan Davis’s screams felt like mine. It was eerie, like he had found me and put it on a CD. His screaming finally gave my rage somewhere to go.

From that moment on, KoRn’s first three albums were on repeat. I replayed the same tracks so many times people got sick of hearing them, or maybe me. I was offended.

How could anyone not feel what I was feeling?

I was not just listening. I was studying. I was letting them take me over.

Then KoRn dropped Issues, their fourth album.

Mrs. Parovsky’s song-performance assignment was one of my final projects before Christmas break, which also marked the end of my stint in high school. I had made sure I could graduate early.

KoRn’s catalog was packed with songs that sounded pulled from scenes in my own life, including “Faget,” “No Place to Hide,” and “Freak on a Leash.”

I could have picked any KoRn song. But I could already see myself doing the new song I had memorized the day Issues came out.

“Falling Away from Me.”

Because I was me, I had been suspended for telling my Spanish teacher, “Cállate, puto.”

I missed my assigned time to perform. So much for trying not to scare teachers.

Bless her, Mrs. Parovsky offered to let me make it up in one of her later classes. I could not decide what was worse. Performing for people I had spent the semester with, or performing for strangers without Mrs. Parovsky’s heels, doughnut, and morning shush ritual to warm me up.

Either way, I had KoRn with me.

I walked in gripping my CD. Its cover showed a stitched-together doll with one button eye missing, tossed away like trash. Rows of unfamiliar faces turned toward me. Mrs. Parovsky sat at a student desk with a pad and pencil, ready to scribble. I darted for the boombox.

I can still see the densely woven burgundy carpet beneath my size elevens. I looked down and got into position.

The first eerie notes filtered through the speakers. When the guitars kicked in, I started stepping to the riff. When the lyrics mentioned suicide, I pretended to cut my wrists.

I knew exactly what I was doing. I refused to look at anyone while I did it.

Then came the chorus. I had planned to beat on the floor to the words “beating me down,” but I did not know I would lose control. I ended up on my hands and knees, pounding the floor and raking my nails through the carpet fibers.

I threw myself into the cinderblock wall more than once. Hard.

By the time it was over, my fists and forearms were vibrating and blotchy. I could barely catch my breath.

No laughs. No claps.

I had never seen Mrs. Parovsky speechless outside her five minutes of 8 a.m. silence.

Then I ran.

The next morning, I debated skipping first period.

But I did not.

For the first time all year, Mrs. Parovsky was early. She was waiting for me in the hall. Before I could step inside the classroom, she pulled the door closed and put both hands on my shoulders.

I do not remember her exact words. I’ll never forget what they did to me. She told me that in all the years she had given that assignment, she had never seen anyone do it the way I did. She saw raw emotion and courage in it. She loved it. She thanked me.

I hated the chaos in my life. I hated how close I was to admitting I was gay. I hated high school, the fuckers in it, and almost every teacher.

I thought I was doing an assignment.

I had not meant to tell her any of it.

Stephanie Parovsky, if you’re out there, thank you.

If you went to Alan B. Shepard High School in Palos Heights, Illinois, in the late 1990s or early 2000s and remember Mrs. Parovsky, maybe even the song assignment, help me find her. If you know her, please send this her way or help connect us.

Hairy muscle men. Loose basketball shorts. The shadow up one leg. The imprint.

Then, right before I came, switch to girls. Rewire the body by lying to it at the finish line.

I started hanging around boys who played sports. Boys who liked girls clearly and easily. Boys who made straightness seem like something you could catch.

I wanted to be one of them as much as I wanted them.

Then I went home.

Our little house on Karlov was the party house. My parents were the cool parents. My mom smoked weed with us. We were in high school. They said it was safer that way, keeping us all under one roof.

Maybe it was.

Maybe my mother just did not like being alone.

Either way, the house filled up.

Ten, twenty, thirty teenagers on our dead-end street. Cars lined the curb. Trunks packed with subwoofers and beer bottles. Blowout, blackout, cops-are-getting-called parties.

The neighbors hated us. We hated them back.

I loved getting fucked up.

Mostly, I hated me.

My cousin Will was one of the born-again Christians in my family. He was my age. Around my cousins, I could almost feel like one of the guys.

I knew born-again meant you could start over. There were rules. I wanted rules. I wanted a do-over.

I could feel my lust for boys refusing to go away.

So when Will started going to youth group, I asked if I could go.

Youth group was on Wednesdays. The first time I walked in, I thought, This is crazy. I’m in.

A live band. Kids who raised their hands when they sang. Speaking in tongues. Club lights. Pizza.

Then I saw the youth pastor.

My stomach dropped.

Handsome in the exact way I had come there to stop noticing.

So I stayed.

I pretended not to notice him. I needed more practice.

My transformation was immediate and annoying. I went from a foul-mouthed, drug-using detention regular to the kind of kid who corrected other people’s language overnight.

I told my sister Melissa she could not swear around me. Jesus did not like it.

She looked at me like someone had kidnapped her brother and sent back a narc in his place.

Stunned.

Waiting for her brother.

Praying this wasn’t permanent.

My friends were drunk and stoned in my living room, asking, “What the fuck happened to Nick?”

I had found God.

I was better.

I was willing to turn my back on every single one of them.

One day, one of my friends asked, “Nick, do gay people go to hell?”

Everyone went still.

Eyes lifted. Smirks held back.

They were not asking what I believed. They were asking what I would do with myself.

“Yes,” I said.

No one knew what to say.

My parents least of all.

They bought us kegs for high school parties and hoped no one died in the utility room. They did not have doctrine.

Of course they knew enough.

They would have preferred gay.

Gay they could handle.

But a sanctimonious little Christian?

Hell no.

I threw away Tupac. I threw away Biggie. I stopped listening to Madonna and Mariah Carey, my go-to divas, for God’s sake.

More evidence that something had gone terribly wrong.

Rap songs about the rapture. Ballads about purity. Songs about Jesus as friend and judge, over beats that tried too hard to sound like music I could enjoy.

I listened to it like it could change me.

I thought if this did not work, nothing would.

I needed to pull my best friend in.

Jessica and I were so close I called her parents my other Mom and Dad.

We got high. We stole my mom’s car for joyrides. We made demented VHS home videos we thought rivaled Saturday Night Live. We egged houses.

We were awful together. Perfect together.

She had no idea why I had been distant.

I introduced her to my new friends. They put us in the front row.

Special treatment for the recruit.

Then everyone stood up and moved toward the stage.

I pulled Jessica’s hand and pointed at the floor. She gave me a dirty look but knelt with the rest of us.

The prayers started as murmuring, then turned to begging and shouting.

She leaned over and whispered, “Nick, what the fuck is going on? Is this a cult?”

She asked if we could leave.

I acted offended.

“No,” I said.

She got up and ran out.

I did not call her after. I did not ask if she got home okay.

I thought she had rejected the thing that was going to save me. She was the one who had failed the test.

I kept going.

A megachurch service. A baptism pool. Carpet meant for falling on.

They cleared the chairs with choreographed precision. The pastor’s prayer posse moved through the crowd, placing hands on people’s heads.

All around me, people went down, weeping.

They covered the fallen with white sheets.

It looked like a morgue.

They called it being saved.

I stood there waiting my turn.

I needed it to work.

When the pastor touched me, my knees gave out.

Tears slid down my temples beneath the white sheet.

I stayed there, frozen and embarrassed, not sure what was supposed to happen next.

Hoping the Holy Spirit had moved through me.

Believing I could stand up different.

I still do not know why I fell.

I stayed gay.

But I did not stop believing I might wake up straight tomorrow.

Or next week.

Or after the next prayer.

Or after I became the right kind of Christian.

If I still lusted for men, I had not surrendered enough.

If my erection still told the truth, I had not hated it properly yet.

So I tried harder.

I did not know there was a place for me as I was. I did not know about Boystown.

I knew jokes. I knew slurs. I knew “God Hates Fags” signs on the news.

I knew the way people looked at me when they wanted to hurt me and did not have to be creative.

They had one word.

It worked every time.

After months of trying to pray myself into someone else, I got into an argument with my sister’s boyfriend.

I do not remember what started it.

I remember what ended it.

He called me a faggot.

There it was.

I went to my bedroom. I slammed the door.

I pulled out KoRn’s first CD and skipped to track 6.

“Faget.”

Enraging.

Comforting.

I played it in the dark.

The pretending broke.

The first time, I barely said it.

“I’m gay.”

Then again.

Louder, but not loud enough for anyone outside my door.

“I am gay.”

Oh my God.

Snot-slinging.

Breath-catching.

Relieved.

Destroyed.

Free.

Not safe.

I had spent months asking God to change me.

He did not.

So I told myself the truth.

Not long after, my dad asked.

“Nick, are you gay?”

I could not say it out loud yet.

He waited.

My silence was the answer.

Then he said, “Because if you are, you’re my son. And I love you.”

I was perched on a dance box on the beach in Koh Samui on New Year’s Eve 2013, wearing all white, pain pills racing through my blood, backing my thang up for strangers who had started pointing.

Pointing, I decided, meant admiration.

Laughing, I decided, meant joy.

I had fans.

I knew something about fans.

At work, they were usually Dr. Phil’s.

These were mine.

Or close enough.

Three months earlier, his audience became mine for a moment. Dr. Phil pulled me onstage during a segment and publicly praised me.

After five seasons working on the show, I finally got approval from the guy who ran the whole thing.

I was being seen in exactly the way I wanted to be seen.

What no one knew, as he called me a bright and dedicated producer and put his arm around my shoulders on national TV, was how close I already was to blowing it all up.

I was still coming down from a weekend meth binge.

Nobody at work knew I was in recovery.

By design.

I could have told my coworkers.

But then they might have watched me like someone who could relapse.

Like someone who had done meth and might do it again.

Like I belonged on the show, not behind the camera.

They wouldn’t have been wrong.

I hated that.

I was not recovered.

I was white-knuckling it through producing other people’s transformations while wearing a tailored suit.

Then came Christmas hiatus.

Thailand.

Koh Samui.

I told myself I deserved it. This was the kind of trip a Dr. Phil producer took.

I brought two sober friends as insurance.

International relapse prevention.

They were there to keep me honest. I had already packed the lie.

A secret stash of pain pills.

In case of… injury?

For two weeks, those pills burned in my mind. I knew exactly where they were. Which sock. Which pocket. How deep I had buried them. What they would taste like.

On New Year’s Eve, my addiction started negotiating.

Perfect place.

Perfect timing.

At least it was not meth.

At least it was not alcohol.

Did this even have to count?

Was there a way to hurt myself just enough to make this okay?

My mouth watered.

Fuck it.

I popped the beautiful pills.

Relief.

Immediate and obscene.

My hotel was on the sand, so I walked outside into the thick scent of smoke, wilting phuang malai garlands, and pineapple fried rice piled into hollowed-out pineapple halves.

The smoke hit some old switch in me.

The pills came on harder.

The inside of my head wobbled.

Then came the grin.

Music pounded from every direction. Fire shows. Open-air dance floors lined the shoreline. Everyone got the memo: wear white. Dance boxes waited for Western tourists fucked up enough to climb onto them.

I moved down the beach, ocean rushing over my feet, salt spray hitting my legs and lips, until I found the perfect empty dance box.

I climbed.

I started dancing.

Then dancing became performing.

I was lit up, twerking in all white, thinking I had found a loophole.

A tiny baby relapse holiday.

I could fly home, keep my old sobriety date, go back to work, sit in 12 step meetings, and let everyone believe nothing had happened.

That was when a group of blond Europeans started pointing.

My fans.

I turned around and gave them the back view.

Really committed to the bit.

They lost it.

So I gave them more.

In my mind, this was success.

Proof.

My dance moves still killed.

The secret relapse worked.

I waved when I climbed down, because I am nothing if not gracious to my public.

Then came the fireworks.

They exploded over the ocean, crackling white against breaking black water.

I went back to my hotel still smiling.

Inside, the room was too bright and too quiet.

My ears were ringing.

I pulled off my shirt.

Took off my shoes.

Then the white shorts.

That was when I saw it.

A full butt-crack-length skid mark.

Up the back.

On white.

I had been so high I did not notice I had shit myself.

The pointing.

The laughing.

The fans.

Not fans.

Witnesses.

They were not cheering for me.

They were watching a drugged-out white guy twerk through a fecal event.

At least I would never see them again.

I threw the shorts away.

I loved those shorts.

When I got back to work, I told no one.

Not about the dance box.

Not about the white shorts I betrayed.

Not about the secret relapse that had already told on me.

The flowers looked brighter. The fields looked staged. Even the cow shit seemed picturesque.

More likely, it was my state of mind.

I was on my way to be cured.

One reason I had chosen Rio de Janeiro for my three-month sabbatical was Abadiânia, a small town in central Brazil where João de Deus, known in English as John of God, ran his healing ministry.

I had seen the documentaries. The YouTube testimonials. The Oprah segment that sealed it. Every day, people from all over the world lined up in white to be healed.

Cancer. Depression. Broken marriages. Addiction. Impossible things.

Mine was addiction.

Some of the procedures looked spiritual. Some were disturbingly physical. He parted skin with a scalpel. Scraped eyeballs with metal. Prodded sinus cavities with another metal tool so deep it looked impossible, and extremely uncomfortable.

Releasing demons? Maybe. Bad energy. Dark spirits. Whatever name people gave to the thing they needed gone.

I was willing.

Thousands of people said they had been healed.

I wanted to be one of them.

I knew how woo-woo it sounded. I also knew what it was to try using spirituality to change something I could not stand about myself. When I was 18, I tried to pray the gay away. We all know how that turned out.

Still, the testimonies got to me. Something was happening there.

Or I needed something to be.

By then, I had already been fired from A&E’s Intervention for smoking meth in the office while helping cast addicts for the show. My bosses helped get me into rehab. I made a comeback as a producer at Dr. Phil. Then I secretly relapsed again.

Back and forth. Sober. Not sober. On the wagon. Off. Success. Sabotage.

I could stop for stretches. Make people believe it was over.

But I never stopped craving.

Torture.

Abadiânia was dusty and strange. Storefronts had chipped paint and missing letters. Kids tossed empty two-liter bottles like footballs. The closer I got to Casa Dom Inácio, John of God’s compound, the more polished everything became.

I booked one of a cluster of wooden cabins with glass fronts. From the path, the people waiting for miracles looked like part of an exhibit. Some cabins had white curtains drawn. In others, people moved behind the glass.

The owner was a Frenchman who started testifying before he handed me the key. He had arrived a decade earlier after a nasty divorce and stayed because he believed John of God had healed him of his bitterness.

He knew everything about the man. His powers. His history. The entities he said worked through him.

He was so sure.

I went to bed like a kid on Christmas Eve.

I woke to sun pouring through the glass and pressing warm against my face. Outside, a field stretched toward one lonely green-painted house in the distance, ringed by a white privacy fence. I always liked imagining who lived in places like that. I wondered if John of God had healed them too.

Today was the day.

Even the possibility that my addiction could be lifted was enough to make me feel high.

I took one last look in the mirror. The next time I saw myself, I thought, I would be different.

I slipped into all white and joined the stream of people marching toward the Casa.

The grounds were beautiful: white trellises tangled with vines and fragrant flowers. Catholic statues and images everywhere. Oh, and Mary. Mary was everywhere. John of God loved the Mother of God, which felt appropriate, considering I had arrived with my own desperate Hail Mary.

People had come from everywhere. Africa. Australia. Papua New Guinea. Europe. Polynesia. The United States. Some told me this was their third or fourth visit. Others were already planning to come back.

Proof, I thought.

I stood in line for nine hours.

During those nine hours, I thought about my sister Melissa, who was also struggling with addiction. I wished she were there with me. I promised myself that if I got my miracle, I would find a way to get her there too.

When I finally stepped inside the part of the Casa where John of God sat, the air changed.

Rows of people packed the pews, their thin white cotton damp at the neck and chest. Some rocked. Some mumbled. Some chanted. Some cried. Crucifixes hung on the walls. More statues of Mary watched over us with letters and wishes piled at her feet.

It seemed ridiculous.

But ridiculous had never stopped me before.

Then I saw him.

John of God sat ahead of us on what looked like a throne. He was older, heavyset, wearing glasses. Not mystical looking. No bolt of lightning. More like somebody’s unimpressive uncle.

I knew he did not speak English. I had been taking Portuguese classes in Rio, but somehow “Please remove my addiction” had not come up, which seemed like a planning failure on my part.

Still, I figured I would not be the first person to ask him for that in English.

A handler waved me forward.

John of God was looking down when I stepped toward him. Not tired. Not bored. Almost worried.

Then he looked up.

His eyes met mine.

Something in me stopped.

I can still see his expression.

Disturbed.

My intuition said no.

Not thunder. Not a voice from God.

Just no.

Something is wrong with this man.

I hated knowing that. I had not come all the way to central Brazil to trust myself. I had come there to be saved from myself.

My feet hurt. My lower back ached. I had bought the outfit, done the research, and left my drugs back in Rio, an act of sacrifice I found wildly impressive at the time. I needed this man to be real.

In the space of a second, I decided I was the problem and made my request.

He blurted something in Portuguese. Too fast for me to catch.

Then I was moved into another room. More pews. More sweating bodies. More chants. Air even thicker. I thought about walking out.

A woman beside me, with a Punjabi accent, told me not to go before the spiritual surgery.

So I stayed.

Eventually, John of God entered the room.

Everyone closed their eyes, so I closed mine too. Then I squinted one open, because I needed to see this.

He raised his right hand, palm facing us, like a wizard or a traffic cop.

He said something in Portuguese, in a voice so deep and forceful I felt it hit me.

People yelped. Someone started weeping.

Maybe, I thought.

Maybe.

And that was it.

That was the spiritual surgery.

Then he was gone.

I felt tricked. What about the knives? I’ll do it. Bring it.

But no. Instead, we were told to return to our rooms for twenty-four hours of silent meditation. That was when the surgery was supposed to take hold.

No phone. No talking. No reading.

One request.

I stopped at the gift shop on the way back and bought two hundred dollars’ worth of crystals supposedly blessed by John of God, hoping they would help the miracle along.

At least they were pretty.

Back in my glass-front cabin, I sat in silence and tried to think the right thoughts. I tried to pray correctly. I tried to want the right thing in the right way.

But the truth kept showing up.

I didn’t want to stop using drugs.

I wanted to use like a normal person. Whatever that meant.

Let me control it.

Let me be special.

Let me keep the thing that was destroying me, but remove the destruction.

Then I worried I had ruined the whole thing by thinking wrong. I may have snuck a look at my phone. Then I chastised myself for breaking another rule. I told myself if it did not work, it would be my fault.

That was easier than admitting I might have come all this way for nothing.

For two more months in Rio, I tried to control it.

Cocaine. GHB. By the end, every day.

When I got back to West Hollywood, one of the first things I did was find meth.

So much for the spiritual surgery.

So much for the pretty crystals.

So much for the one damn request.

It took two years to torch my life. By the third, I had lost almost everything, including the crystals, and was living in a homeless shelter on the Lower East Side.

One day, I was lying on my squeaky metal bed, scrolling my phone beside the one-foot-wide locker that held everything I had left, when an article about John of God appeared.

I remember the headline saying it was one of the biggest sex crime cases in Brazil’s history.

Women had come forward saying he sexually abused them during supposed healing sessions.

Then more women came forward. Dozens became hundreds. The story kept getting worse.

In the years that followed, Brazilian courts convicted him again and again for crimes including rape and sexual violation through fraud. His sentences eventually added up to hundreds of years in prison.

I read about the first allegations from a shelter bed, years after that moment in Abadiânia, the one I had tried so hard to explain away.

That is the part I still think about.

Not because my intuition was supernatural.

Because it was ordinary.

Because it worked.

Because I talked myself out of knowing.

I had done that with drugs too.

With men.

With jobs.

With danger.

With myself.

I wanted the answer to be outside of me. In a healer. A church. A country. A ceremony. A crystal. A man who raised his hand and said something I could not understand.

Anything but the one thing I already knew I would have to do.

Stop using drugs.

But the miracle I wanted from John of God did eventually happen.

Not there.

Not because of him.

Years later, in a cheap hotel blocks from the White House, after days of meth panic and barricaded doors, the desire to use left me. I still do not fully understand it.

I have nearly five years sober now. I no longer wake up every day bargaining with the thing that was killing me. That freedom is real, but it did not come from his hands.

Back then, I did not want a life without drugs. I wanted a whole new universe where the drugs stopped being the problem.

That universe does not exist.

Thank God.

Before the headlines, before the convictions, before hundreds of women came forward, some part of me looked at John of God and knew.