Two years ago today, August 29, 2024, I went No Contact with my mother.
I wish I could tell you that exactly two years later everything is rainbows, bubblegum, and unicorns.
It isn’t.
I haven’t reached some magical point where none of it hurts anymore. I don’t wake up every morning overflowing with gratitude for my beautiful new life. There are still mornings when my first thought is basically:
“Ugh. Another day. Really?”
There are still ghosts.
There is still grief.
There are still things I’m angry about, things I don’t understand, things I probably never will understand, and pieces of a life I once thought I had that occasionally come back and demand to be mourned all over again.
That’s the part of No Contact we don’t talk about enough.
Sometimes you can know with absolute certainty that you made the right decision and still hate that you ever had to make it.
No Contact didn’t magically heal me.
It gave me somewhere safe enough to start healing.
And there is a huge difference.
August 29, 2024 wasn’t the day I stopped caring.
It wasn’t revenge.
It wasn’t punishment.
And despite the way these stories sometimes get reduced to one dramatic final argument, it wasn’t really about one day at all.
That day was simply when decades of evidence finally outweighed decades of hope.
There had been chances.
There had been conversations.
There had been boundaries.
There had been opportunities to tell the truth.
There had been opportunities to repair things.
There had been opportunities for things to be different.
Eventually I had to accept that I could not build a healthy relationship by myself.
So two years ago, I stopped trying.
And then I drove west.
A lot has happened in those two years.
I arrived in Washington carrying considerably more emotional baggage than physical baggage.
I rebuilt.
Not dramatically. Not all at once.
Piece by piece.
I eventually got my own apartment — ironically, signing that lease exactly one year to the day after going No Contact.
A year after that, I’ve just moved in to a two-bedroom apartment.
My son has been finding his footing in adulthood. He’s gotten his driver’s license, taken responsibility for his own transportation, started contributing toward the household, stumbled in some places, surprised me in others, and continues figuring out what kind of man he wants to become.
My daughter is firmly into her own adult life, building a family of her own.
And perhaps the part that matters most to me:
My granddaughter gets to grow up safe from all of it.
She doesn’t need to understand the family dynamics.
She doesn’t need to learn how to read a room before entering it.
She doesn’t need to become fluent in someone else’s moods.
She doesn’t need to inherit the responsibility of keeping dysfunctional adults emotionally regulated.
She just gets to be a kid.
If breaking the cycle accomplished nothing else, that alone would have made the fight worthwhile.
And somewhere along the way, something else happened.
I started becoming a person again.
Not somebody’s son.
Not somebody’s source of supply.
Not the family historian carrying secrets I didn’t create.
Not the peacekeeper.
Not the guy endlessly trying to solve an equation where every answer somehow ended with him being wrong.
Just me.
I started tinkering with electronics again, just because I enjoy it.
I got into amateur radio and earned my license.
I started writing.
I built The Thriving ACoN.
I started putting language around things I spent most of my life experiencing without having words for them.
Gaslighting.
Emotional neglect.
Fear.
Obligation.
Guilt.
Trauma responses.
Narcissistic family systems.
Context changed everything.
Because once I understood what had actually happened, I could finally stop asking:
“What the hell is wrong with me?”
and start asking:
“What happened to me — and what am I going to do with the life that’s left?”
I won’t pretend these two years have been fun.
They haven’t.
There have been moments of peace I never knew were possible.
There have also been lonely nights, brutal realizations, grief waves, financial stress, family worries, setbacks, uncertainty, and days when “thriving” felt like a ridiculously ambitious name for a website run by a guy whose primary accomplishment that day was getting out of bed.
But maybe that’s part of what I’ve learned.
Thriving isn’t a permanent emotional state.
Healing isn’t graduating from pain.
And freedom doesn’t mean you never look backward.
Sometimes thriving is laughing until your stomach hurts.
Sometimes it’s watching your kids build lives of their own.
Sometimes it’s discovering some new hobby and remembering that curiosity survived.
Sometimes it’s writing something that makes another survivor say, “Holy shit. Someone else gets it.”
And sometimes thriving is simply waking up on a shitty morning and deciding you’re still going to participate in your own life.
That counts, too.
Two years ago I didn’t know what was waiting for me on the other side of No Contact.
I just knew what I could no longer survive on the side I was leaving.
Today I still don’t have all the answers.
I’m still healing.
I’m still grieving.
I’m still rebuilding.
I’m still figuring out who I am without all that noise.
But there is one enormous difference between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2026:
The life I’m living now belongs to me.
Not to fear.
Not to obligation.
Not to guilt.
Me.
And knowing everything I know now — knowing how painful these two years would sometimes be, knowing what it would cost, knowing there would be mornings when freedom wouldn’t feel particularly triumphant —
I’d still get in that vehicle.
I’d still point it west.
I’d still drive those 2,000 miles.
I’d still choose my children.
I’d still choose my granddaughter.
And eventually, finally…
I’d still choose me.
Every. Single. Time.
Two years No Contact.
Not two years without pain.
Two years without volunteering for more of it.
