250 Days Booze Free: Through Hell And Into The Light

Toward Completeness With Jay Woodford

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One of the hardest things over the last eight months of really diving in and dealing with mental health, addiction, trying to figure out why things became the way that they became was understanding that, in spite of the fact that I had a capacity to see life as an absolutely incredibly beautiful thing and having the capacity to experience unbelievable gratitude, joy and love, there's always this overhanging shadow in my life that life was fundamentally a futile, pointless fucking tragedy.
And here's the thing about that.
I'm looking at that as recognizing, "that's not true" and that's not how I want to live my life, but that's not a belief that was just, I woke up one day and said, "hey, let's look at life in the most bleakest form that we possibly can. That sounds good."
What I've come to learn through this process is that that happens through trauma, through unresolved things. A lot of it had to do with shit that happened when I was a kid, and this is the reason I'm saying this. A lot of this stuff happens to a lot of people.
A lot of this stuff may have happened to you. It doesn't matter what it is. I don't compare traumas. My childhood was dark. It was dark for me, but it was a fucking cake walk compared to the shit that a lot of other people have gone through.
But nonetheless, for two, three, four, five, six year old Jay, it was fucking traumatic and that's what I have to deal.
I'm saying this because I want to give people that space and talk about these things so that people can say, "wow, me too. I'm not the only one." I'm not saying this because I need you to come and console me. I'm not saying this because I need anybody to feel sorry for me. That's the last thing I need or want.
When my dad died and people tried to feel sorry for me and they pushed it too far, I fucking lit them up because I wanted no part of that and I let them know. "I'm not going to become a victim to this and I'm trying to do my best to get through this as strongly as I can. I don't need you making me feel sorry for myself. That's not helping the situation."
So way aside from that, I know that people are going misunderstand and misrepresent me all the time. I'm putting my shit out anyways.
Aside from your bullshit, instantaneous headline, reading assumptions about what my intent might be, I'm not here to get anybody feel sorry for me. I'm fine with being quiet and living my own life.

But I know that there's a lot of people who don't have the ability to do this (speak out), who are sitting there suffering all alone and my message, whatever I'm going to say - might be the single thing that's going to stop them from taking their own life, might be the single thing that stops them from getting addicted to hard drugs and completely shipwrecking their life because they're dealing with internal fucking torment that nobody else is willing to sit down and understand.
I get that.
And this is something that's been coming to my mind lately a lot and that is unless you have been in that place where you have felt such darkness that you can understand that you can actually understand why it is that somebody would inject heroin into themselves or why somebody would take their own lives. You don't understand.
So when it comes to matters of mental health and suicide and addiction, until you understand that, do everybody a favor who's suffering through that and keep your fucking mouth shut and keep your thoughts to yourself because you don't understand and that's on you. That's not on the people that are suffering with it. And for you to put forth your projections onto people of how life should be when you have no understanding of what their life is like is bullshit.