There is nowhere to go from here but up.

Today is the day.

A new beginning.

Sometimes I wonder where the past fifteen years went. I look around at my life now and, from the outside, everything seems almost perfect.

I don’t say that lightly.

Nothing is perfect, and nothing stays the same forever. Believe me, I know that better than most.

If you knew where I came from—if you knew what I’ve been through—you might wonder how I’m still here to tell the story.

The story of my life.

The story of rock bottom.

Oh yes. Rock bottom.

I was thirty-three years old when I wrote those words in my journal. And as the saying goes, when you’ve reached the bottom, there’s nowhere left to go but up.

The problem is that rock bottom doesn’t always look the way people imagine it.

Sometimes it looks like a person who is still getting dressed, still answering the phone, still scrolling through social media. Someone who can laugh at a joke while privately wondering how the hell she is still alive.

There were days when I asked myself exactly that:

What am I still doing here?

Between the drinking and the drugs, I had somehow escaped the fate that had already taken some very good friends of mine.

They hadn’t been so lucky.

People would ask how I felt when someone close to me died. I always wanted to scream the truth back at them:

How the fuck do you think I feel?

Seriously.

Sometimes being alive felt like running an American obstacle course where nobody had bothered to tell me where the finish line was.

And then there was social media.

Technology has given us incredible ways to stay connected, but it has also created a strange new way of learning that someone you once loved—or laughed with, drank with, grew up with, or simply knew—is suddenly gone.

You open your phone.

You scroll.

And there it is.

A photograph. A tribute. A sentence you have to read twice because your brain refuses to understand it the first time.

Someone is dead.

I learned about the deaths of friends that way more than once.

Sometimes I had taken a break from social media, only to return and discover that while I had been gone, someone else had disappeared permanently.

And every time, the same thought found me:

That could have been me.

I would read the posts beneath their photographs.

I can’t believe you’re gone.

I wish I could talk to you one more time.

You were so loved.

And I would think about the people I hadn’t spoken to in years. People whose lives had continued somewhere beyond mine. People who might someday see my photograph appear on their screen and suddenly remember that I had once existed in their world.

Maybe they would write that they missed me.

Maybe they would say they wished I were still around.

And I wondered:

Why do we wait?

Why does death make us say the things we were too distracted, stubborn, angry, embarrassed, or busy to say while someone was alive?

Maybe I could have become another photograph.

Another post.

Another collection of comments beneath a picture:

I can’t believe she’s gone.

And whether anyone would have seen that post would have depended on something as ridiculous as whether they happened to log in that day.

There’s something profoundly disturbing about that.

I survived years when survival was never guaranteed.

At thirty-three, I didn’t have some beautifully mapped-out future. I didn’t suddenly understand why I had survived when other people hadn’t. I couldn’t tie everything that happened to me into a neat little bow and call it a lesson.

I only knew one thing:

I was still here.

Maybe, for that moment, that was enough.

Because when you’ve spent enough time at rock bottom, getting up doesn’t always begin with some enormous transformation.

Sometimes it begins with opening your eyes.

Putting your feet on the floor.

And deciding that today, you’re going to try again.

There was nowhere left to go but up.