Originally Published in the September 2012 Issue of Just Out Magazine, on stands now. Click this month’s cover below for the original post.

In The Trenches: “The Party’s Over. Now What?”

It’s no secret that I struggled with an addiction to cocaine and alcohol for many years – Sixteen of them, to be exact. A quick Google search of my name uncovers that though, so this isn’t breaking news. I was always very openly strung out and continued to be open throughout the process of cleaning up, nearly 5 years ago at this point. By the time my active using had come to a close, I had wrecked my life many times over, hurt everyone around me, and squandered professional opportunities the likes of which I will never see again. It has been a long road to put things back to how they are today, and there are still times where that messy person appears, ready as ever to destroy all over again.

It seems you can take the drugs away from the insecure screw-up, but the feelings which led to the drugs in the first place remain. Sometimes they are small and manageable, other times they are too large to hold. Even now, all these years later, not a day goes by where I do not think about giving up. It usually happens when I get my feelings hurt or if I feel overwhelmed by the extreme realness of the universe, which tends to hit me in unexpected waves at the most inopportune times. In these moments I would love nothing more than to ease my aching shame with a drink or hide myself from you, the world, in some kind of thick, white, transformative smoke. There are times where I would literally give everything just to feel nothing.

The trouble with me feeling nothing is that it comes at great cost. I know how that story ends. I lose my work, then my friends and family, then my belongings, then my life. Boom. It’s over. Logan Lynn, dead at 32. No more love, no more music, no more words. I tell myself this story constantly so I Read the rest of this entry »

(Originally Published on The Huffington Post on 4/6/2012)

I don’t do well with death. My coping skills are still lacking around anything related to loss in general, actually — but death, I just… can’t. It’s been this way since I was a boy. The idea that everyone I have ever loved will someday be taken from me (or I from them) terrifies me and is a concept I have largely refused to look at for as long as I can remember. Death, in my personal psychology, as in life, is the final frontier.

This week when I got the call from my broken-hearted mother that her sweet sister, who had fallen ill with a mysterious condition a few months ago, was being moved from hospital to hospice, I was overcome with sorrow. My usually manageable, small, wooden feelings about death and loss were suddenly made large, alive and uncontrollable. What I am most afraid of was here, once again, greeting me head-on in the living room. I turned back into the terrified child version of myself that lives inside me while my mother and I cried on the phone together. During the really hard parts I tried not to hear what she was saying, and instead focused on the sound of my own sobbing. It didn’t work. I took in every painful word.

My brain absorbs news like this in slow motion. It hits me in tearful waves, fades to the background, then jumps out again at the strangest times. I feel a deep connection to this planet by way of my family and the love we all share for each other, and I am sad that some of that love might be moving to another part of the universe. I’m selfish in this way. I want to keep all of you close forever. Anything else just seems too cruel to imagine and, well…This has been my reality for three days now.

A few years ago I was given a book called To Bless the Space Between Us, by John O’Donohue. I have pulled it out a few times over the years when I can’t find ways of relating to the world, and it has helped me form thoughts around some of the stuff I’m just no good at thinking about. This week was one of those times. In a passage about death from the book, O’Donohue writes:

“From the moment you were born,
Your death has walked beside you.
Though it seldom shows its face,
You still feel its empty touch,
When fear invades your life,
Or what you love is lost
Or inner damage is incurred.

That you would gather yourself
And decide carefully
How you now can live
The life you would love
To look back on
From your deathbed.” Read the rest of this entry »