There is a moment in every life where the pain gets too loud. You know that moment. I am going to share it with you now so you can feel it, hold it in front of you. I am here and I am holding the space for it.
For some it is the divorce. For some the job that stops working. For some simply a Tuesday evening alone at home, where suddenly everything is too quiet. I have had all of these moments.
And in that moment we reach. For the glass. For the powder. For the screen. For the next dopamine hit, whatever it is. Not because we are weak. But because we never learned how to hold ourselves.
Or did someone explain to you how to deal with silence? Nobody did for me. I was born in 1987 and was allowed to learn thirty years later that silence is the master. In stillness lies the power.
I know this moment of restlessness better than most people. Not from books, but from my life. Cocaine. Alcohol. Gambling. Porn. Pills. Techno parties until morning. Everything that promises fast dopamine, I tried it. Not once. For years. Almost my whole life. And the whole time I thought I had everything under control. Sure, I had income, a marriage and always something to eat, well, almost always. I often lived at my mental limit and physically completely done, but somehow it worked and from the outside it still looked ok.
The Mask of the Functioning Man
This is the most dangerous lie of addiction. And when you read the word addiction now, you do not feel addressed, right? Because you are not the man under the bridge. You deliver. You work. You laugh at parties. You are not broken, you are busy.
But at some point the mask stops holding. Because your marriage is actually not going as well as it seems and the business is cracking too. What used to be crises becomes the permanent state.
I survived everything, but that one thing, nothing worked anymore for me. That was game over. For me it was the divorce. When everything I had built collapsed, I suddenly stood in front of a truth I had been pushing away for years. None of it had been real. I was simply one big lie. A little piece of dirt on a shoe, and honestly, that was the best feeling in the world.
Why? Because I was finally freed from that dirty lie. I could let the mask drop. And the crazy thing: I was still alive, I was still standing. The world kept turning.
Why We Run
Most people think addiction is a question of the substance. You stop drinking or using or going to the brothel, you are healed. That is wrong. Addiction is an answer to a question that was never asked. You avoid it because you are afraid of the stillness and the silence that comes with it.
Who am I really? And can I live with this person? Do I love this person inside me when I look closely?
I started running in school. Big nose. Laughter. The feeling of not being seen, of not belonging. Nobody told me back then: you are enough, exactly as you are. Sure, my mother, yes of course, but who really listens to their mother. You take your parents for granted, the recognition you want from the outside and not from the inner circle of the family. But that may of course only have been my way, I do not want to project that onto you, I do not know you at all. Not yet.
So I searched. Outside. In substances, in recognition, in everything that could cover the pain for a moment. What pain? The pain that arises when the silence is there and asks: what are your values, who are you really and why are you here my friend?
Now you could say it is because our system was not built for it, or you can be honest with yourself and admit: I had no interest at all in learning to live with silence. Give me the porn, give me the weed and give me the lines of coke and blast me techno and let us forget the world, I live now and who knows what comes. That is how I lived from 13 to 23. Few people will have experienced everything I experienced, because I could have died twenty times. But life wants me here, which is why I now stroll through the world and say what I feel: being allowed to live is so incredible, I am so grateful to still be here.
I write this with a gratitude that is the strongest emotion. The combination of clarity and accepting reality is the strongest drug and the high that comes naturally is a true experience. Better than anything you can consume artificially.
What Actually Helps
I jump to the moment that broke me. After the divorce I did not stop right away. First came more consumption. I did everything, from the prostitutes to lines off women's breasts and the afterparties with people who were just as broken as I was, but not broken in a bad sense, rather so wounded by their own actions. The actions they did to themselves so they would not have to experience this silence in life. Refugees like me. When we all numbed our lives together, it almost felt like it was right. Do you know that feeling? Back in school that was called peer pressure, when you are an adult it is simply called: that is just how it is done.
Then came the enduring. And that was a school with no entrance exam and no graduation. It was however the most important station in life.
I trained. I looked closely. I began to ask who I really am when everything is taken away from me. And everything was taken from me, because I had lost everything. Not just money, that does not matter, it comes and goes. But my dignity I had taken from myself and my self-respect I had flushed down the toilet piece by piece throughout the marriage. Then it arrived. The brutal silence. It does nothing at all, which is exactly why it is so hard, because it does nothing, nothing at all. And yet it changes everything in your life.
Suddenly I found joy in the chair I was allowed to sit on. I touched my hair and laughed because I still had some. I felt my tears on my face and truly realized that I am still allowed to live. After everything I had been through, I am really still allowed to be here? That question was answered with yes and that yes became my guide in life.
Even in my darkest moments, even when I no longer wanted to live, there was something in me that knew: life is a gift. Even that constant pain belongs to it. Today I know that precisely that pain is the true reason for deep growth. Without it I would not be sitting here today happy, content and in alignment with my life.
This gratitude did not save me. Not at all, it was my own work and my intention to believe in love, to never give up. But this gratitude showed me that there is still someone there who is worth saving. Namely my true core. That little boy with the big nose who really just wanted to play with ants in the garden, climb from tree to tree and maybe later become a healer or teacher. Because his mother showed through her example that you can help others and find peace of soul in that. Serving was always my core, but I took a wrong turn and far from my core in Berlin, it was about destroying and poisoning, the healing would come later. Now you are reading about it, so everything in the past was right, because I feel that what you have read serves you. I am therefore a kind of servant, so that your destruction may find its end.
An Identity Nobody Can Take From You
Today I could lose the company. My parents. Everything. I would still be me. That is simply how it is, take it all from me now. I have lost nothing because I have nothing on the outside, everything exists within me. I will walk naked into the streets and within two hours have everything I truly need in life, because I know how to look life straight in the face. Anywhere in the world, in any environment on this earth.
That is not arrogance. That in my eyes is the only real freedom a person can reach. Nothing I write here is meant to judge you. I write everything because I share it with you out of love for life. Please be aware of that.
What This Means For You
If you are running right now, from whatever it is, that is not failure. That is not a loss, that is your greatest gain. Why? It is a signal. A signal that a part of you has not yet been heard. Not yet seen. Not yet held.
That is the work. That alone is all the work. And I firmly believe that this is the only relevant question in life. It is relevant because when you find answers to it, you will experience entirely new levels of yourself. You will understand why I stand in public today and say: reality is your strongest drug and the greatest high is your clarity in life.