David Izor

Exploring the Humor and Absurdity of Life

Category: Discovery

  • Prelapse and the Art of Disappearing

    There’s a peculiar skill some of us develop in recovery: the ability to be surrounded by people and still live like a raccoon under a porch.

    People invite us in. They save us a seat. They say, “Good to see you.” and they mean it. Someone texts. Someone notices when we’re gone. Someone from church shakes your hand and remembers the thing we told them three weeks ago, which is both deeply kind and mildly alarming because now we have evidence we were noticed.

    After engaging for a while, after smiling and nodding and doing our best impression of a functioning adult with a calendar and appropriate footwear, something in us quietly backs toward the exit.

    Not physically at first, we disappear mentally.

    We’re still in the room, but we’re no longer available. We start interpreting faces. We read pauses like court transcripts. Someone’s tired expression becomes an indictment. A delayed text becomes abandonment. A short reply becomes proof that they’ve finally discovered what we’ve always suspected: that we’re exhausting, disappointing, unstable, or one confession away from being returned to whatever emotional warehouse defective people come from.

    Nobody says this, of course.

    That’s what makes the whole thing so effective. We don’t require evidence, we’re more than happy to manufacture it in-house. Shame will take ordinary human behavior—silence, fatigue, distraction, busyness—and produces a custom-made verdict: They’re judging me.

    And once that verdict is reached, we do what seems reasonable, we retreat.

    We’ll stop texting back. We miss church. We skip the meeting. We tell ourselves we need space, which sounds healthy and mature, like something a therapist might say while holding tea. But not all space is rest, sometimes space is just isolation wearing linen pants.

    Then physical isolation follows mental isolation like a faithful dog.

    We go dark.

    At first, it feels like relief. No expectations, no explaining, no one asking how we’re doing, no one seeing the inconsistency in our life. No one questioning the gap between what we say we want and how we’re living. Isolation has a terrible habit of becoming a room with no windows.

    The shame grows louder and the old comfort begins to clear its throat. Resentment pulls up a chair. Self-pity opens a bag of chips. Fear starts narrating the documentary of our failure. Eventually relapse appears, not as a monster, but as a comforter.

    That’s the danger.

    Relapse rarely begins with the drink, the pill, the screen, the secret, or the escape. It begins when we become unreachable and distant.The substance or behavior simply enters a house we’ve already abandoned.

    The painful irony is that many of us don’t isolate because nobody loves us, we isolate because people do.

    Love feels dangerous when we don’t trust it. Acceptance feels suspicious when shame has been our native language our whole life. Community feels exposing when we’re accustomed to surviving by hiding.

    So we do this strange thing: we long to be known, but panic when people get close enough to actually know us. We want brotherhood, but we also want an emergency exit. We want grace, as long as it’s delivered without eye contact.

    This is where recovery and faith meet on common ground. Recovery tells us we can’t heal alone and the gospel tells us we aren’t saved by presenting a cleaned-up version of ourselves. Both truths are offensive to the isolated self.

    Because the isolated self wants to control.

    It says:
    “I’ll return when I’m stronger.”
    “I’ll answer when I’m less ashamed.”
    “I’ll show up when I can explain myself.”
    “I’ll be known after I become impressive and stable.”

    But grace doesn’t work that way.

    Grace isn’t God saying, “Clean yourself up and then you can come.” Grace is God coming near while we’re still hiding behind the bushes, sewing together whatever emotional fig leaves we can find. Grace isn’t sentimental softness, It’s the terrifying kindness of being seen and known completely and not being cast away.

    That’s what makes it so hard to receive.

    Many of us can believe in discipline. We can believe in consequences. We can believe in accountability, restitution, meetings, routines, prayer, fitness, work, and becoming useful.

    Those things are easier to trust because they give us something concrete to do and hold on to. Discipline has handles we can grip. Love has open hands, and that’s what frightens us.

    Because love is harder than discipline.

    Love asks us to hold still while someone blesses us without the need for us to earn it. Love asks us to believe we’re more than our worst chapter and to stop cross-examining every act of kindness as though affection or fellowship must have a hidden clause.

    When we have hurt people, destroyed trust, disappointed our families, embarrassed ourselves, or lived for years with a divided soul, receiving love can feel almost offensive. Some part of us says, “Don’t let them be kind to you. They don’t know you enough yet.” However, maybe they know more than we give them credit for. Maybe they actually know enough to know we’re not finished and we need help. Maybe they’re not as naïve as we project. Maybe they’re genuinely showing mercy and generosity simply out of genuine love.

    This doesn’t mean everyone is safe, it doesn’t mean every person deserves access to our inner life. Wisdom matters and boundaries matter. Not every handshake is brotherhood, and not every smiling person should be handed the keys to the cellar.

    If we treat all love as a threat, we’ll eventually protect ourselves into loneliness.

    So the work is simple, but not easy: stop disappearing.

    When the thought comes—They’re judging me—we pause, and we don’t crown it king. We ask for evidence and consider other explanations. We remember that feelings are real, but they’re not always reliable witnesses.

    Then we do one small brave thing.

    We send the text. “I’m starting to isolate. I don’t need you to fix it. I just need you to help not disappear.”

    That’s not dramatic it’s warfare.

    We go to the meeting and sit in the back if we must. We go to church and let the awkward handshakes happen. We accept the invitation to coffee even if we feel like a badly folded napkin. We tell a trustworthy person the truth before shame turns it into a novel.

    The goal isn’t to become emotionally needy, the goal is to stay reachable.

    Because a reachable man can be helped. A hidden man can only be hunted by his own thoughts.

    There’s humility in staying connected while feeling insecure. It’s admitting, “My instincts aren’t always my shepherd.” Often times they’re a drunk raccoon with a flashlight, leading me back under the porch.

    So today, I don’t have to feel secure to act securely.

    I don’t have to believe everyone understands me to let someone love me.

    I don’t have to wait until shame leaves before I walk toward community.

    I can be unfinished and still show up.

    I can be afraid and still answer the phone.

    I can feel judged and still refuse to vanish.

    And maybe that’s how healing begins—not with a grand transformation, but with the small, stubborn refusal to go dark when love is still leaving the porch light on.

  • Fear and Sobriety

    Sobriety arrives carrying a clipboard, wearing sensible shoes, and asking me to sign forms I’m fairly certain I never agreed to read.

    It wants eye contact. It wants returned phone calls. It wants court dates remembered, doctor appointments kept, bank statements opened, apologies made, and the emotional maturity of someone who owns matching towels, which seems excessive. I preferred my feelings the way some people prefer their vegetables: hidden inside something else and covered in sauce. This is alarming, especially if my previous life philosophy was mostly, “Let’s not open that envelope.”

    Getting sober doesn’t just mean putting down the substance. It means picking up reality and engaging community, which is heavier than expected and comes with terrible handles. Suddenly there are consequences to face, people to answer to, trust to rebuild, and responsibilities standing in the hallway like disappointed relatives.

    One of the quiet fears of sobriety is that people may start depending on me again. That sounds beautiful until I remember I’ve spent years being about as dependable as a folding chair at a family reunion. Being needed can feel like a compliment and a threat at the same time. What if I fail them? What if I disappoint them again? What if becoming trustworthy means I can no longer live as though my actions happen in a private weather system?

    I may fear accountability because accountability removes my favorite costumes: victim, misunderstood genius, exhausted martyr, and tragic philosopher of the couch. It asks me to stop blaming my childhood, my heartbreak, my stress, the courts, my ex, the economy, or the suspiciously aggressive moon.

    I may fear maturity because it sounds like boredom wearing pleated khakis. I may fear peace because chaos, at least, gave me something to narrate. Sobriety can feel dull at first because the nervous system is used to sirens. A quiet evening can feel suspicious, as if peace is setting a trap.

    But fear is not always a warning to run. Sometimes fear is the soul’s smoke alarm going off because something old is finally burning down.

    Today, I don’t have to become perfect. I don’t have to become the patron saint of balanced living by lunch. I only have to tell the truth, show up, do the next right thing, and resist the urge to retreat into the comfort that was slowly killing me.

    Sobriety gives me reality and community back. At first, reality feels rude. Then, slowly, it becomes a type of mercy.

    Today, courage may look small: brushing my teeth, answering one message, making one appointment, paying one bill, admitting one truth, especially staying present when I want to disappear.

    Fear may come with me, however, it does not get to drive.

  • The Quiet Mercy of the River

    The Art of Not Being Seen

    There are places where creation doesn’t simply exist but quietly interprets reality for us. The Santa Ana River Basin in spring is one of those places. It doesn’t argue or insist; it rearranges your soul. Standing there with my friend Daniel along the cold current, fly rods in hand, I realized how rarely I’m still before God. Not outwardly still—anyone can stand quietly—but inwardly, where the mind tends to hum like a generator left running too long. Yet here, among cedar and stone, the landscape refuses to cooperate with that kind of noise. It exposes it. It softens it. It begins, almost imperceptibly, to undo it.

    The river moves with a steady intelligence, slipping over granite shelves and curling into seams where trout hold in patient suspension, invisible unless you’ve learned to read the water like a language. The riffles chatter, the deeper runs murmur, and the current draws long, glassy lines that promise possibility but deliver nothing without humility and patience. The sound is constant, but it isn’t empty—it’s structured and layered, like something composed rather than accidental. If you stand long enough, you begin to sense that the river isn’t sustaining itself. It’s being sustained. Every movement, every glint of light across its surface, every insect riding the current—it all exists because the Creator continues to will it so.

    The air carries that dense, almost sweet smell of conifers and cedar, as if the forest has been steeping in itself for decades. A breeze slips through the canyon, just enough to lift the line slightly, just enough to remind you that wind can be either companion or saboteur. Too much, and your cast collapses, your drift betrays you, your fly skates unnaturally across the current like a lie that’s trying too hard. But here, the breeze behaves, most of the time. It moves with restraint, like it understands that even the smallest disruption can undo the illusion you’re trying to create.

    Fly fishing in a place like this isn’t a hobby so much as a negotiation with reality. You step into the river carefully, feeling the slick resistance of algae-coated rock beneath your boots, each step placed with a kind of reverence. The riverbed shifts just enough to remind you that you’re not in control. The water presses against your legs with quiet insistence, as if to say, You’re in my world now. Behave accordingly.

    You strip line from the reel, let it hang loose in your hand, then begin the rhythm—back cast, pause, forward cast, the rod loading and unloading like a breath you didn’t realize you were holding. The line unfurls in the air, loops tight and clean if you’ve done it right, sloppy and tangled if you haven’t. The fly lands on the water with the faintest suggestion of life, and then the real work begins—the drift.

    Because everything depends on the drift.

    Too fast, and it’s unnatural.
    Too slow, and it’s suspicious.
    Too controlled, and it’s obvious.

    The goal is something far more difficult—to let it move as if you’re not there at all.

    And that’s where the lesson begins to press in.

    We often live as though what’s hidden has no consequence, as though the unseen parts of our lives don’t enter the current. But the river makes this impossible to believe. Every misplaced step, every careless movement, every shadow cast across the surface—it all travels. It all registers. The trout feels it long before you see the result. And before God, it’s no different. There is no private drift. No hidden current. What we are beneath the surface moves outward, shaping what follows.

    The trout itself becomes something of a quiet rebuke. It won’t be coerced. It won’t respond to your urgency or your carefully constructed logic about how this should work. It demands something else entirely—precision, patience, and a kind of humility that acknowledges you’re entering a system you didn’t design. You can’t dominate this. You can only learn to move within it.

    Daniel stood downstream, casting into a slow run that curved beneath a fallen branch. His line traced clean arcs through the morning light, unhurried, deliberate. There’s a companionship in fly fishing that doesn’t require conversation, which is fortunate, because most of what you might say would either be unnecessary or wrong. We weren’t there to entertain each other. We were there to stand in something given, something neither of us controlled, something that—if we were honest—felt closer to prayer than most of the words we’ve spoken in quieter rooms.

    Above us, the canyon carried on without concern for our presence. Songbirds stitched quick lines of sound through the air, sharp and fleeting. A pair of crows hovered overhead, circling with that slow, deliberate confidence that suggests they’ve already assessed your situation and found it mildly amusing. Further up the ridge, red-shouldered hawk fledglings stumbled through their early attempts at flight, lifting awkwardly from branch to branch, as if learning in real time that what they were made for would take practice.

    There’s no anxiety in any of it. The birds don’t compare themselves. The river doesn’t hesitate. The trees don’t strain toward some imagined better version of themselves. They exist as they were created to exist, sustained by a God who doesn’t need their assistance to keep things running. And here we are, standing in the middle of it, trying to master what was never meant to be controlled.

    At some point, without quite realizing it, your mind begins to quiet. Not completely—this isn’t a miracle—but just enough. Enough that the usual noise fades into the background. You begin to notice things you would’ve missed. The way the current dips just before a submerged rock. The slight hesitation of your line as it drifts. The subtle difference between water that holds fish and water that doesn’t.

    And in that attention, something begins to change.

    You’re no longer trying to control the experience.
    You’re responding to it.

    There’s grace in that shift.

    You can’t force the trout to rise. You can’t command the river to cooperate. You can only present what you have—imperfect as it is—and let it move through the current. And waiting, here, doesn’t feel like wasted time. It feels like participation. Like trust practiced in small, quiet increments.

    The rocks beneath your feet shift again, just slightly, reminding you that even now, stability is provisional. But the river doesn’t stop. It doesn’t need perfect footing to continue. It moves because God sustains it, not because conditions are ideal. And maybe that’s the deeper reassurance. Your life isn’t together because you’ve managed it well. It’s held together because God hasn’t let go.

    The sun lifts higher, cutting through the trees at a sharper angle now, lighting the water in fractured patterns of gold and shadow. You adjust your stance, careful with your shadow, careful with your line, and cast again. The fly lands softly, drifting along the seam, indistinguishable from the insects that ride the surface in quiet abundance.

    And for a moment—just a moment—it all aligns.

    The cast.
    The drift.
    The stillness.
    The grace.

    Not because you’ve mastered anything, but because you’ve stopped interfering and started participating instead.

    Daniel glances up, gives a small nod, and returns to his line. No words are needed. They’d only shrink the moment.

    This is the quiet art of not being seen—not in the sense of disappearing, but in the sense of humility before the Creator. To be present without imposing. To move without announcing yourself. To realize you’re not the center of this story, and to feel, for once, that this is not a loss but a relief..

    Because the river doesn’t need your performance.
    The trout doesn’t need you to succeed.
    God, most certainly, doesn’t need you to control anything.

    You’re simply invited to stand, to cast, to wait. And whether the trout rises or not, you remain.

    Held—not by your footing, not by your casting, not by how well you’ve read the water—but by the steady, sustaining faithfulness of the One who made it all.

    And in Him, there is peace.

    Even here.
    Especially here.
    So you cast again…

  • Amnesia and the Art of Forgetting the Come Down

    It’s remarkable, really, how quickly I can forget the come down. One minute I’m swearing off everything stronger than herbal tea, and the next I’m fondly reminiscing about the “good times” like some unreliable narrator in a Netflix docuseries titled How Did We Get Here Again?

    Recovery amnesia is sneaky. It doesn’t just erase the carnage—it crops it. It edits out the shakes, the shame, the hospital visits, the texts I shouldn’t have sent (all 42 of them), and replaces it with a gauzy montage of euphoric nonsense. Wasn’t I fun? Didn’t that run end with a sunrise and poetry? No. It ended in the ER with my pants inside out and a half-eaten granola bar stuck to my forehead.

    But still, the forgetting happens. Like emotional dry rot. You remember the glitter but not the cleanup. The rush but not the crash. You forget the way the silence felt afterward—how cold it was, how alone you were, how your soul felt like it had been evicted from your own body.

    That’s why recovery needs anchors: meetings, journals, awkward honesty, and people who will lovingly remind you how incredibly horrible you treated yourself.

    So today, when the highlight reel plays, I’ll hit pause. I’ll remember the full story. Not to punish myself, but to stay free.

    Because the come down wasn’t just a bad night. It was the thing that nearly ended me. And I didn’t crawl out of that pit just to jump back in because nostalgia suddenly showed up in a leather jacket.

    No thanks. I’ll keep the herbal tea—and my dignity.

  • People Who Are Suffering Are Relatable

    There’s something oddly comforting about talking to someone whose life is also a hot mess. Not the curated kind of mess, either—the kind people post about with a sepia filter and a caption something like “healing era.” I mean the real thing. The kind where you forgot to pay a bill, cried in your car for reasons that were both specific and deeply confusing, and then ate something questionable out of the fridge because it felt like a decision.

    It’s like being at the DMV—fluorescent lights buzzing, numbers being called in no particular order, and a room full of people who all seem to have made the exact same mistake you did. You brought the wrong form. Or no form at all. Or you brought a form, but apparently it was printed pre-Covid and is now considered an artifact. You sit there, quietly panicking, until you lock eyes with someone else clutching the same useless document. And in that moment, something shifts. You don’t want them to be in the same predicament—but since they are, you start feeling less alone. There’s an unspoken agreement: We both suck in the same oddly specific way.

    That’s what suffering does. It levels the room and provides opportunity for connection.

    We don’t connect through perfection or filters. No one has ever said, “I really bonded with her because she had everything together and spoke in bullet points.” No. We connect through the cracks, through the moments when someone pauses mid-sentence and says, “I really don’t actually know what I’m doing.” Through the late-night overthinking that turns a simple conversation into a full-blown psychological autopsy.

    We connect through stories that don’t land cleanly. Stories that end with, “…and then… I just sat in the grocery store parking lot and cried. Which was awkward because I had just made eye contact with a man in a wheelchair missing a leg, and a dude loading a rotisserie chicken into his Honda Civic.”

    There is something deeply human about that.

    People who are suffering don’t offer polished advice. They don’t lean back and say things like, “Well, have you tried optimizing your mindset?” They don’t have a morning routine that involves cold plunges and journaling about abundance. What they have is presence. They sit next to you and nod in a way that says, I know that feeling, and I survived it, barely.

    They hand you a tissue that may or may not have been in their pocket for several days. They offer you a mint or a Werther’s Original that has fused with the wrapper and possibly lint. They don’t fix you. They don’t try to elevate themselves above you. They simply sit and listen.

    And listening, as it turns out, is the rarest form of kindness.

    Suffering people, for the most part, have lost interest in pretending. Not because they’re enlightened, but because they’re tired. There’s only so long you can keep up the illusion that everything is fine before your nervous system files a formal complaint. At some point, the mask slips—not dramatically, not with a grand reveal—but quietly. You forget to laugh at the right moment. You say “I’m tired” and actually mean it.

    They’re not talking to you from a mountaintop while sipping green juice and recommending podcasts. They’re sitting next to you, trying not to fall apart in public themselves. Which, if we’re being honest, is a full-time job with no benefits and a surprising amount of overtime.

    There’s a certain skill involved in holding it together just enough to get through the day. Smiling when appropriate. Nodding at the right intervals. Pretending you didn’t just forget what someone said because your brain took a brief vacation. It’s like emotional tap dancing—light on your feet, don’t make a sound, and for the love of God, what ever you do, don’t trip in front of witnesses.

    But when you find someone else doing the same dance, something softens. You don’t have to perform as much. You can let your shoulders drop. You can say, “Yeah, it’s been a weird week,” and they won’t ask you to elaborate unless you want to. They’ll just say, “ditto” in a tone that carries an entire backstory.

    And that’s where the connection happens—not in the explanation, but in the recognition. It feels like sand paper for the soul.

    There’s a strange, almost holy twist to all of this: suffering makes us kinder. Not immediately, of course. At first, it makes us irritable, hungry, and deeply suspicious of anyone who uses the phrase “everything happens for a reason.” But over time—quietly, almost imperceptibly—it reshapes us.

    It sands down our arrogance.

    It takes those sharp edges—the ones that judged, dismissed, or rushed past other people’s pain—and softens them. It reminds us, sometimes brutally, that we are not in control of nearly as much as we thought we were. That life can shift under our feet without warning. That the person we silently judged last year might be the person we understand this year.

    You start to notice things. The hesitation in someone’s voice. The way someone lingers a little longer than necessary after a conversation, like they’re not ready to go back to whatever they came from. You become gentler, not because you’ve mastered anything, but because you’ve been undone in enough places to recognize the same in others.

    Suffering teaches you to pause.

    To not honk immediately 13ms after the light turns green. To not snap at the barista who got your order wrong, because maybe they’re just trying to make it through their own version of a hard day. To not text that person you shouldn’t text—not because you’ve suddenly become disciplined, but because you understand what comes after.

    There’s a humility that comes from being a mess. A quiet acknowledgment that you are not the exception to human struggle—you are part of it. Fully, awkwardly, undeniably.

    That humility is where real connection lives.

    Because once you’ve been there—once you’ve sat in your car, staring at nothing, wondering how you got here—you stop expecting other people to be flawless. You stop needing them to be composed, impressive, or inspiring. You just need them to be them.

    And in return, you start allowing yourself to be real, as well.

    Not all at once. Not dramatically. But in small, brave steps.

    You say, “life is in full session,” instead of “I’m fine.”
    You admit you feel overwhelmed instead of pretending you’re busy in a productive way.
    You let someone see the version of you that isn’t performing, not some vein pseudo, that if we really think about it, they probably can see through it.

    In those moments something remarkable happens.

    They don’t leave. They sit. They lean in slightly with more intent on listening.

    Or if they do leave, someone else stays. Someone who recognizes the language of struggle, who hears what you’re actually saying beneath the words. Someone who doesn’t need you to be anything other than what you are in that moment.

    Which is often… just trying.

    Trying not to fall apart.
    Trying to show up.
    Trying to make one decent decision in a day full of questionable ones.

    And that, it turns out, is enough.

    So if you’re suffering today—if things feel off, heavy, or quietly unmanageable—don’t hide it. Not all of it, not in a way that exposes you to the wrong people, but in a way that allows you to be human in the presence of others.

    You are not broken. You are not uniquely disqualified from life.

    You are, in the most honest sense of the word, relatable.

    And there is someone, somewhere—maybe sitting right next to you, maybe standing in line behind you, maybe scrolling through their phone pretending to be fine—who is quietly hoping they are not the only one.

    The only one who feels this way.
    The only one who doesn’t have it together.
    The only one who is one small inconvenience away from crying in a parking lot.

    The reality is.. You are not alone.

    And maybe, just maybe, your willingness to be a little less hidden is the exact thing that lets someone else breathe a little easier.

    Not because you fixed anything.

    But because you showed them they are not alone.

    And sometimes, that’s the most powerful thing a person can offer.

    A nod.
    A pause.
    A quiet, unspoken agreement:

    Yeah. Me too.

  • The Coyote Mindset

    Mark Twain’s description of the coyote in his book Roughing It is possibly the best metaphor for the feelings of isolation that often accompany personal growth. He calls the coyote a “long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it.” Which, coincidentally, is exactly how I feel when in this season of growth. Like some awkward, half-starved creature stumbling through recovery, unsure whether I’m progressing or just making a fool of myself.

    When you start to grow, you leave behind your old ways, but you haven’t quite found solid footing in the new. Often you can feel stuck in this uncomfortable in-between, much like Twain’s coyote. Alienated, twitchy, and deeply uncool. The coyote doesn’t command the respect of the noble wolf, nor does it have the carefree charm of a house dog. It just slinks around, judged by everyone often family, including (and especially) itself. And if you think about it, that’s what happens when we abandon our old identities and try to become something more. There’s a deep loneliness in realizing that personal growth often means standing apart, and insecurity loves to feast on the fear of not belonging.

    Jordan Peterson writes that we need to push forward anyway, and consciously carry the “burden of transformation” even when I feel ridiculous or out of place. Today, I will embrace my awkward growth phase, knowing that discomfort is not a sign of failure but of progress. i will guard against the mental isolation that I use to operate in, I will embrace and employ what I am learning in this phase of my growth, despite the expectations and judgements of others. I may not be a wolf at this point, but I sure as hell don’t have to stay a starving coyote.