My Story

I never thought of myself as a dependent person. I thought I was doing life right.

My belief was simple: you should depend on the things that make you happy. Friends. Relationships. Feeling wanted. Nobody told me that the same sentence describes an addiction.

I grew up rescued before I ever had to struggle, and it quietly taught me that I could not do things on my own. By thirteen I measured myself entirely through other people’s eyes. People called it charisma. It was survival.

At fourteen came the substances. By eighteen, in my senior year, my habits cost me my home, and every couch and relationship I landed on after that was another dependency. I just called it being loved. Then I lost my best friend to an overdose. What finally got me clean was quieter than grief: I got tired of being tired. One ordinary morning, I stopped.

And here is the part nobody warned me about, the part this entire project is built on: getting clean did not end my dependency. It just took away the costume. The void reattached itself to people. To approval. To being needed. Over-giving does not look like addiction. It looks like kindness. I did not see any of it until my life came apart, at the highest cost I have ever paid.

Getting out was years of small decisions. At nineteen I wrote myself a schedule, and I have kept a version of it ever since. I started reading, writing, and training when I had never liked any of the three. I showed up to my first real job with no car, almost no money, and no idea what I was doing, and every job since, I started at the bottom and climbed. Nobody taught me this. No classroom, no friend who studied it. I built it out of my own life, and out of thousands of hours listening to people who study the mind.

I’ve had almost ten therapists in my life. The one in my corner now, forty years in, is the only one who told me the truth, even when it was hard to hear. It took her hours of sessions before I could see the traits of codependency in myself. I had never even heard the word. Everyone hears about depression, anxiety, and ADHD. Nobody had ever told me about this. A lot of what I know, I learned sitting across from her. I am not a clinician. I am the person who lived it, did the work, and had the right help checking it.

That is why The Dependency Project exists. Not from a textbook. From a life. I built the thing I wish someone had handed me at fourteen. A place that makes the invisible visible. That is what you will find in Seeing the Pattern, in every book that follows, and here at thedependencyproject.com.

I am still in the middle of my own story. But for the first time, I can see the pattern. And once you see it, everything can change.