Stunned into Consciousness

When Life Forces You to Face Your Truth

Downtown Phoenix. The air was cold and damp from a late afternoon shower, the atmosphere was electric. A group of us—lifelong friends from Boston—shuffled into a soaked parking lot turned concert venue to catch The Roots play a sold-out show.

We’d been drinking and getting high all day, and everything was a bit hazy. It was Super Bowl weekend, and I was prepared to rally into an evening of parties and shenanigans with my closest buddies.

The show was underway. Not even fifty yards from the stage, I had a clear view of Black Thought gripping the mic, Questlove behind the drums, the whole band locked in. White and yellow lights cut through the cold air and fog.

Office buildings rose on all sides, trapping the bass and drums in a canyon of concrete and glass. I couldn’t make out the songs—everything was fuzzy, just vibrations I could feel through my chest, my legs, and the ground beneath me. The crowd moved as one body to the beats. Every few steps I hit a puddle, cold water seeping into my Jordans.

The Roots tonight. Patriots in the big game tomorrow. With my best friends. Life can’t get any better.

We danced. Talked shit. Laughed. Drank. Just guys being guys on Super Bowl weekend.

At some point, I grabbed another Bud Light. A stranger I’d been chatting with handed me a fat joint. I felt the crispy paper between my fingers, blew on it to make sure it was fired up, and brought it to my lips. The taste of sativa filled my mouth as I took a long, deep inhale. Warm smoke filled my lungs. My shoulders dropped, legs softened. Without hesitation, I took one more pull and passed it to my best friend Zac who’d been waiting.

Within seconds, heat flooded my body. Then tingling. Then vertigo.

The buildings began to shift. My vision tunneled. The music warped and slowed. Everything went blurry. My legs turned to putty.

I turned to Zac. “I’m going down.”

I lunged for him. He tried to catch me, reaching out, but I was dead weight. The ground rushed up in slow motion. Everything went black.

—

When my eyes fluttered open, I was on my back. Concrete beneath me, sweat-soaked through my button-down. My jeans damp with water. Voices above me, muffled like I was below the surface. Hands inspecting my chest, fingers on my neck checking for a pulse.

Flashlight beams cut through the fog in my head. I squinted against the light.

“Can you hear me?”

Where am I?

“What’s your name?”

What happened?

“Do you know where you are?”

Am I in trouble?

I forced my eyes fully open. Shock. Paramedics in navy uniforms hovered over me, looking down, furrowed brows, pressed lips. Radio chatter crackled from a nearby walkie-talkie. Just beyond them, Zac stood frozen, his face plaster white. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

The Roots still played. The music still thumped around us. The crowd still grooved as if nothing happened. But I was flat on my back on cold, damp concrete 2,400 miles from home, with strangers in uniforms checking my vitals, trying to understand what the fuck just transpired.

One minute I was dancing. The next, I was consumed by darkness and then surrounded by strangers.

—

The medical team let me go 30 minutes later, once I came to my senses. My vitals stabilized. I spoke coherently. I could walk without support. I convinced them I was okay.

I wasn’t okay.

For the rest of the weekend, I was shaken up and ashamed. I didn’t want to talk about it. When Zac asked if I was alright, I waved it off. “Yeah man, I’m good. I think I went a little too hard.” I tried to act like everything was cool and this was just a random thing that happened. I told him and my other friends it was nothing to worry about.

But I couldn’t stop seeing it. The paramedics. My damp clothes. Zac’s face. The images looped in my head, over and over. They overshadowed the Patriots’ miraculous Super Bowl victory the next day.

I flew back to New York a few days later and returned to my life. But I wasn’t the same person who boarded that flight. Something had finally broken open when I hit the cold, wet concrete.

—

Jungian analyst and author James Hollis wrote: “Awakening to the Middle Passage occurs when one is radically stunned into consciousness.” His book, The Middle Passage, presents an opportunity to reexamine our lives and ask: Who am I apart from my history and the roles I have played?

I was radically stunned into consciousness that weekend in Phoenix.

I’d been on autopilot for years. Wake up. Check Twitter. Shower. Make coffee. Get stoned. Walk to the office. Take pitch meetings. Go to meetups and dinners. Have a beer or three. Get stoned again. Work until midnight. Repeat.

I thought I could keep it all together—my career, my marriage, my health, my performance—while hiding what was really happening underneath.

I’d wake up at 3 AM in a silent panic, my heart pounding, knowing I was addicted and in over my head. A voice kept whispering that I had a problem, that I was using substances to numb the anxiety of pretending I had it all under control. And I was keeping it from my best friend—the very woman sleeping next to me. The foundation was cracking, but I couldn’t let anyone see it. If I admitted who I really was and stopped performing, the whole thing would collapse.

That night in Phoenix, the illusion shattered. A portal opened to the middle passage.

—

A portal opens when the constructed self—who we think we are or hope others see—meets something it can’t manage, can’t control, or can’t explain away.

In the first half of life, we build an identity to get our core needs met—love, belonging, respect, safety, security. We spend decades reinforcing it. But when it meets forces larger than the ego can manage, we become helpless. These moments force us to face what we’ve been avoiding—sometimes gently, sometimes violently.

When we’re stunned into consciousness, a threshold appears. An invitation. The opportunity to abandon the identity we constructed in the first half of life and step toward something more true, an authentic way of being.

Portals don’t open randomly. They emerge when something underneath the surface, something we’ve been ignoring or running from, finally breaks through and demands our full attention.

Sometimes life opens the door for us. You walk into the office and they’re waiting for you—a box on your desk, security escort to the parking lot. The doctor doesn’t meet your eyes when she delivers the news. Your partner says the words you’ve been dreading: “I can’t do this anymore.” The bank account hits zero and there’s no safety net left. Someone you love dies, and suddenly the world you knew doesn’t exist anymore. The external world shatters the illusion of control, and the portal opens whether we’re ready or not.

Other times, the door opens from within. Depression that won’t lift, no matter how much you exercise, meditate, or pretend everything’s fine. Anxiety that wakes you at 3 AM with your heart pounding and won’t let you fall back asleep. Your body turning against itself: bald spots appearing, autoimmune flares, mysterious symptoms the doctors can’t explain. The addiction you can no longer hide from yourself nor the people who love you. The voice that’s been whispering this isn’t working for months, maybe years, until one day it’s not whispering anymore. It’s screaming. The inner world erupts, and the portal opens from the inside out.

I was stunned into consciousness from the outside. Collapsing in public. Paramedics. Zac’s face. The external event I couldn’t rationalize away. But what it revealed was the internal pressure that I had been running from for years. A soft voice that had been whispering I had a substance use problem. I’d been managing it, rationalizing it, and pushing it down. Everything was going well on the outside…until it wasn’t.

Phoenix made it impossible to ignore.

—

This is why portals are so threatening.

The ego’s job is to manage our existential anxiety—to keep us feeling safe, stable, and in command. In the first half of life, it constructs an identity built on external achievements and social expectations, then fiercely defends that construction. It tells us stories about who we are, what we’ve accomplished, and what makes us valuable and special. And it works hard to convince us that this provisional self—this socially acceptable performance—is who we actually are.

Mine had been working overtime. I was a venture capitalist on the rise. Decent husband. Benevolent resource in the tech community. Influential voice on Twitter. I thought I was untouchable and in control.

But I knew for years I had an addiction. The voice was clear: Steve, you have to stop. You’re killing yourself. Every time I heard it, I’d reach for another hit. I’ll quit next week, I’d tell myself. Next month. After this deal closes. I was living a double life—the public persona and the anxious addict. And as the addiction grew stronger, the gap between them widened.

Walking through the portal means letting that constructed self fall away. It means admitting the ego was never in control. And the ego will fight like hell to prevent that because it’s a matter of life and death.

—

When a portal opens, you’re forced to face what you’ve been hiding from. You see the truth. But seeing it isn’t the same as walking through.

In the gap between awareness and action, you’re caught between two versions of yourself—the one you’ve been performing as and the one you sense you need to become. The old situation and identity no longer fits, but the new one hasn’t taken shape yet. You’re suspended. Unmoored. Neither here nor there. The gap is uncomfortable and, for some, unbearable. Most of us try to deny it, then escape it, but it’s where transformation happens.

I returned to New York in February 2015 knowing something had shifted. The question was there: Who am I, now, and what is life asking of me? But I wasn’t ready to face it, to answer it.

For five months, I lived in the gap. I continued to go through the motions—Twitter, weed, pitch meetings, dinners, more weed—but everything felt hollow. I’d wake up in the middle of the night knowing that my addiction and anxiety were growing and I needed to change, then would try to convince myself by morning that I could manage it. Rinse and repeat.

The ego didn’t give up easily. It tried to regain control. Maybe I can just cut back. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I don’t need to quit entirely…I just need better boundaries. The rationalizations were endless. The bargaining was relentless.

This is what happens in the gap. The ego fights to close the portal, to convince you that you can go back to the old life and pretend this never happened. But you can’t unsee what you’ve seen. The old life doesn’t fit anymore. The cracks are too wide now. You have to choose—walk through, or keep pretending and perpetuating the old way of being.

The gap stretched on for months—February, March, April, May. I kept working and performing. My ego was pretending I was fine while the foundation continued to crack.

The portal was still open. The real question was whether I was ready to face my fear and do what I knew was required.

—

In June 2015, I finally stopped fighting.

Walking through a portal begins with acceptance. The raw, uncomfortable acceptance of reality exactly as it is. You stop fighting. You stop rationalizing. You stop numbing what you know to be true.

This runs counter to how we think change works. We assume we have to force ourselves to become better, to fix what’s broken, to will ourselves into a new version. But the psychologist Arnold Beisser described what he called the paradoxical theory of change: “Change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not.”

I couldn’t change by pretending to be the guy who had it together. I could only change by accepting what I actually was: an addict that was in over his head. Most importantly, someone who couldn’t do it alone. I was done trying to hold it all together myself. I’d seen enough. My ego could no longer take care of me. I was suffering too much.

Then came the harder part: turning toward what I’d been running from. Facing it instead of numbing it. Speaking it out loud instead of keeping it hidden.

Late May 2015. I was sitting in my office with an intern who’d been working for me that spring. He was in his mid-twenties, sharp, earnest. I knew he was in recovery—he’d mentioned it casually a few weeks earlier because we were evaluating a company in the addiction tech space.

I don’t remember what we were supposed to be talking about, but I remember the moment I stopped pretending.

“I have a problem,” I said. “I can’t do this by myself anymore.”

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t look surprised. He just nodded with compassion and acceptance, like he’d been waiting for me to say it.

“There’s a meeting tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’ll take you.”

—

The next morning, I walked into my first AA meeting in a church basement in Midtown Manhattan.

I didn’t know who I would become. I didn’t know what my life would look like on the other side. But I walked through anyway.

That was June 6, 2015. I’ve been sober from alcohol and cannabis ever since. My first adulthood had finally come to an end. The second was beginning.

The man who walked into that Roots concert five months earlier no longer exists. He is in many ways a figment of my memory. That version of me died that year. Over many AA meetings. In dozens of therapy sessions. Daily walks in Washington Square Park. Countless moments of surrender.

And inside that portal, something unimaginable emerged. I left venture capital. Became a coach. Became a father. Moved out of New York City and into the woods. Built a life I didn’t know I wanted, one I couldn’t have even imagined when I was performing the old one.

The portal opened up something my ego, at the time, could never have planned or predicted. That’s what portals do. They don’t lead to the life you think you want or the life someone had planned for you. They lead to the life that’s actually yours.

—

Your portal may be lurking in an addiction, too. It could be the relationship that’s slowly suffocating you. The job that’s draining your soul. The grief you’ve been running from. The pain you keep ignoring. The voice inside that keeps saying this isn’t working.

When the moment arrives that stuns you into consciousness will you let the truth reshape you, or will you spend your life force fighting reality?

You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to stop fighting, accept what’s true, and take one courageous step forward.

If you’re reading this and there’s a voice you’ve been ignoring or a truth you’ve been avoiding, the portal is already open. You’re standing at it right now.

The only question is whether you’ll walk through.