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 in Just Out Magazine, August 2012 Issue)

My beloved Pomeranian companion of the past ten years died suddenly a little over two months ago and I have yet to make heads or tails of the whole thing. Truthfully, I’ve been carrying his cremated body around in a tiny tin box ever since, sleeping with him next to me at night, and am so far having a really hard time letting him go.

During the first few weeks after his death I was in a state of sheer panic around his absence. For over a decade, silence in the house meant little dude was up to some sort of mischief or that he was in trouble, so to be suddenly surrounded by this new, impenetrable quiet has been unsettling. I found myself calling for him in the night, looking for him all over the house in the morning, and waiting to hear the pitter-patter of his paws on the hardwood floor as I opened the front door or walked to the kitchen, but he is gone.

As it turns out, I had a great deal of purpose wrapped up in taking care of this tiny creature, and I’m finding that in many ways I was dependent on the love I received from him in return. He was the only consistent thing in my life for the past decade, and without him around everything just feels harder. I have yet to make it through a full day without some sort of tearful breakdown and was unable to control said emotional outbursts at all until very recently. It sounds crazy that an animal could make me lose my mind like this, but he was so much more than a dog to me. For many years he was my child, my family, the only reason I got out of bed in the morning, and the only reason I came home at night…so to call him my “pet” minimizes the depth of our relationship.
A few weeks back while I was talking to a close friend about my inability to let Dutch go, he challenged me that maybe it was feeling too hard to do because I wasn’t actually supposed to be doing it. He suggested that, instead of working so hard to let him go, I should learn to hold onto Dutch in new ways. His body is gone, that much is certain. All that’s left is this box of ashes…which isn’t all that comforting when I stop and think about it.

So, I took his advice. I began to look for Dutch again, minus the feeling of panic those initial searches held after he passed. I started to focus on all the ways he is still here with me instead of mourning all the ways he is not, and suddenly he was Read the rest of this entry »