Preparing To Move After 25 Years, With One Year Sober

I’m coming up on a new chapter in my life as I get ready to move from the apartment I’ve lived in for almost 25 years, which is most of my adult life. Before I moved here, to this building right outside of Boston, I lived across the street from here, in the bedroom of a “clothing optional” house called “The House Of Clocks,” with my fiancé at the time, and a few roommates, most of whom were transgender with multiple personalities. My fiancé was not trans, but I am, and she had multiple personalities, a diagnosis called Dissociative Identity Disorder, which I had not yet been diagnosed with, but have been since. We were there for over a year before we both got Section 8 vouchers and found this one-bedroom apartment together, in a building across the street. Since we were both disabled with Section 8 vouchers, at a time when those were easier to get, we qualified for a decent-sized place, and we moved here during the summer of the early 2000s, right before we got married and I began my gender transition. My wife didn’t like losing her queer status when I transitioned. After I started living as a man, we appeared to be a straight couple, so she left me, not before cheating on me with several cis men, ironically. We were only here together for a year or two before she left and moved back to the House of Clocks, and I got to keep this great apartment for myself.

I was very lonely here without her at first, and I was spending a lot of time in The Pit in Harvard Square, which was right down the street, on the bus line that comes here. I was there all day, buying and doing drugs, and becoming friends with homeless kids and gangsters who got my drugs for me. I let them stay with me on my couch for years. I spent most of my mid-20s to late 30s hanging out with and taking care of some very toxic people, and it led to a lot of trauma, as well as self-neglect. I was in and out of psych wards and day treatment programs, smoking cigarettes and weed, drinking, and occasionally doing other drugs, for years. My friends and I spent most of our time here, watching movies, listening to music, smoking, drinking, eating, and partying. I had a car and would drive us places on occasion, often while under the influence, and I had a cat named Moo, who I got from a trans woman crack addict down on the South Shore who I met in the hospital and used to buy bad quality weed from.

My life was a disaster for a long time, and the people in my life used and abused me, although I know I was using them too, to some degree, because they were the only people I knew to get weed from, back when it was still illegal. I was desperate, so I let them back into my life over and over, even after they did unforgivable things, including one of them raping me. It was obviously not very good for my mental health.

Somewhere around the age of 38 or 39, nearly a decade ago, I finally had the sense to kick them all out of my life and get a medical marijuana card so that I didn’t have to depend on them anymore, and weed was legalized in Massachusetts not long after that. I have not gone back to those people since. The medical card and legalization of weed gave me a great opportunity to turn my life around and to start meeting new and mostly better people. I started dating in my late 30s, for the first time since my wife left. Most of the people I was dating were still pretty toxic, as I had not learned to love myself yet, and I had not figured out how to set boundaries or anything like that, but it was at least a little better than when I was hanging out with gangsters. I met a gay cis man online who was a hacker and an alcoholic and not the best fit for me, but in the time we were together, he introduced me to a local art gallery, where I began to show my art, as well as rap and read poetry, and I had shows all around Boston and became a bit of a local celebrity. I became part of the local art community, and in doing so, it gave my life a sense of purpose. Up until then, I mostly considered myself to be a professional psych patient.

I began showing with the gallery almost a decade ago, and while I was still smoking weed and occasionally drinking, I quit smoking cigarettes eight years ago, and I was working hard on my recovery, as well as writing several books. I self-published my first book in 2020, during the pandemic, and that gave me a real sense of purpose as well. It wasn’t widely read, but the people who did read it mostly loved it, and it inspired me to keep going and to keep writing, doing art, performing, and working hard on my recovery.

I was doing quite well, for the most part, but I’m Bipolar, and the large amount of strong weed I was smoking led me to have periods of extreme psychosis. My first one was in 2008, and my second was in 2010, in my early 30s, and I didn’t have another until I was 40 years old. I just came out of my most recent one a couple of years ago, which resulted in me overdosing on my medication and almost dying, not because I was suicidal, but because I wasn’t thinking clearly. The overdose was about two and a half years ago, and it was caused partially because of all the weed I was smoking while being off of my medications. It was also partly due to having Walking Pneumonia, which I caught because there was no heat in my building and I was taking several baths a day due to OCD symptoms and drying myself off with cold, wet towels.

My psychosis and overdose two years ago got me sent to the psych ward for four months, which was the longest I’d ever spent in one of those places. It was extremely traumatic for me and led to my inner children taking over my personality, my Autism traits becoming much more severe, and I started drowning myself in alcohol to cope when I got out, when before that, I had not been drinking much in years, but after the trauma, I couldn’t stop myself. I spent another month in a respite group home after getting out of the hospital, while trying to stop drinking, and I began writing the first book of my Godchildren series, “The Godchildren: An Ounce Of Recovery,” while living in the group home, exactly two years ago. I just published that a couple of months ago, while getting ready to move out of this apartment. As I mentioned, the broken heat in my building had been a partial catalyst for my psychosis and overdose a couple of years ago, when I got pneumonia, and the last two winters have been freezing as well. Boston is not a place a person should go without heat in the winter. For the last few years, it’s been breaking here and there, but it would get fixed, and it may have been annoying, but it wasn’t enough to convince me it was time to move. I’ve lived here for nearly half of my life. My parents still lived in my childhood home when I moved here, so I have 47 years’ worth of stuff in this apartment. I’m a big collector of physical media, including books, records, CDs, DVDs, video games, t-shirts, action figures, and art. Also, because I got this place with my ex-wife, we qualified for a bigger place, but I knew if I had to move, I would not find a place nearly as big, and was most likely going to have to settle for a studio apartment, which I absolutely didn’t want, so I told myself that I would stick it out here and pray that my building manager fixed the heat, but as of late March of this year, I found out that they have no plans to fix the heat, which had pretty much completely broken in mid-February, so I have to move. It took a lot of radical acceptance and a lot of faith, but I told myself I could do it, especially now that I have a year clean from weed and almost two years sober from alcohol. I’ve spent practically every day since the end of March cleaning and taking out a bag or two of trash. I’ve gotten rid of so much of the stuff I’ve been collecting for years, and as of a month ago, I found an apartment that is actually not all that much smaller than this one, and it has a lot of plus sides to it, although it’s not perfect by any means, but I’m mentally preparing myself to move there. Whenever I start to panic about it, I say a mantra to my higher power that a friend in recovery suggested to me. “I know you are putting me where you need me to be.”

I finished writing my most recent memoir, “The Godchildren: A Family Of Healing Parts,” on June 26th, the day after my one-year clean and sober anniversary, and I read the whole thing in just three days, then moved on to reading the book before it, “The Clean And Sober Godchildren.” The one I finished writing the other day starts in December of 2025, a little over six months ago, a couple of days after my six-month anniversary, and much of it was about the nightmare of a winter I had with the heat breaking about forty times and the temperature being in the 50s for weeks at a time. I talked a lot about what a nightmare it was to deal with the maintenance people in this building who were jerks to me, and having to go stay with my parents when it got too cold to function. I was losing hope and faith and was thinking about giving up on life again, but then I made the decision to accept that I had to move and gained the willingness to do what needed to be done. My faith came back over time and got even stronger, as did my resilience. It was good to re-read my recent memoirs right now. Since it’s summer and the freezing cold isn’t a problem, I’ve been pretty happy here. That’s been making it harder to part with this place that has been my home for such a long time, and which I have so much love for, but as I read over the book I just wrote, I was quickly reminded of why I need to get the hell out of here before next winter. Reading the book before it has been helpful too. “The Clean and Sober Godchildren” began almost a year ago, about two weeks after I stopped smoking weed, so I’ve been reading about what it was like in the early stages of quitting, as well as being reminded of all of the hot days and heatwaves we went through last summer, which has helped me feel a little more confident about my fear of it being hot as hell on moving day. I just saw today that it was 95 degrees on the day I had my deep scaling dental appointment last summer, and I managed to get to that. As scared as I am to move, I was more scared to get the deep scaling done, as there was a possibility that I was going to lose a few front teeth in the process. (Luckily I did not, however.)

I’ve been trying to prepare myself the best I can for this move. I have Autistic meltdowns that sometimes lead to fits of rage when I get burnt out, stressed, or triggered, and moving is the most stressful thing a person can do, which is another reason I’ve avoided it for the last 25 years, but I know I can’t take another winter in this place with no heat. Now is maybe the best time I could move, because I’m clean and sober and have proved to myself in recent years that I can get through anything, but I’m still struggling to have faith that everything is truly going to be okay.