Joey Came Through the Speakers and Twenty Years Came With It

Yesterday a song came through my Spotify that I was not prepared for.

Concrete Blonde.

Joey.

I have heard that song more times than I could count.

It isn't new to me.

It isn't some song I discovered yesterday and suddenly decided was profound.

It has history with me.

Too much history, probably.

It belongs to rooms I don't live in anymore.

Versions of myself I sometimes struggle to recognise.

People I loved badly.

People who loved me when I was difficult to love.

Alcohol.

Regret.

Long nights.

Messy nights.

Relationships I damaged.

Things I should have said.

Things I absolutely should not have said.

Doors closing.

Phones ringing.

Phones not ringing.

The strange loneliness that comes when you know you have contributed to your own heartbreak and there is nobody convenient to blame.

And yesterday it just appeared.

I wasn't searching for it.

I wasn't trying to have some profound moment.

Spotify simply did what Spotify does.

The song started playing.

And within minutes I was sitting there with tears streaming down my face.

Not delicate tears either.

Not the cinematic kind where one perfectly formed tear rolls down somebody's cheek while they stare thoughtfully through a window.

I was hurting.

Because suddenly I wasn't listening to a song.

I was listening to twenty years.

And twenty years is a lot of life to arrive through a pair of speakers.

I am struggling with staying sober from alcohol at the moment.

There.

I said it.

I could make that sentence prettier.

I could soften it.

The beast has been calling me back for days now.

I could bury it underneath theology and reflection and talk about seasons and growth and healing before finally admitting what is actually happening.

But sometimes writing needs to stop being beautiful long enough to be true.

I am struggling.

That does not mean I have abandoned everything I believe.

It does not mean every lesson I have learned disappeared.

It does not mean God has disappeared.

It does not mean the work I have done was fake.

It means I am a human being with a complicated relationship with alcohol, and right now that relationship is making noise again.

I know that voice.

I know how reasonable it can sound.

That's the dangerous part.

Addiction doesn't always kick down the front door screaming.

Sometimes it sits beside you.

Sometimes it reminds you of an old feeling.

Sometimes it says you have been through enough.

 Sometimes tells you that one night doesn't matter.

Sometimes it tells you that you're older now.

Wiser.

Different.

More controlled.

Sometimes it tells you that this time you will be the one holding the leash.

And if you have lived with addiction long enough, you know exactly how convincing that voice can become.

I know.

I've heard it before.

I've believed it before.

And I have paid for believing it before.

Then Joey started playing.

And something inside me cracked open.

Music is terrifying like that.

You can spend years building walls around a memory.

You can process it.

Pray about it.

Write about it.

Talk about it.

Understand it psychologically.

Forgive people.

Ask forgiveness.

Grow older.

Build another life.

Change jobs.

Write books.

Start projects.

Become someone your younger self wouldn't recognise.

And then four chords enter a room and apparently the security system means absolutely nothing.

Suddenly the door is open.

Everybody comes back.

Every version of you.

Every mistake.

Every relationship.

Every night.

Every goodbye.

Everything.

There are songs that remind us of a time.

And then there are songs that seem to contain one.

Joey has always been one of those songs for me.

There is tenderness in it.

Damage.

Love.

Exhaustion.

Addiction.

The terrible complexity of caring about somebody when love cannot repair everything that is broken.

Maybe that's why it gets me.

Because I know something about that territory.

I know what it is like when love and addiction occupy the same room.

I know what it is like when somebody cares and you are still not okay.

I know what it is like to want connection while simultaneously behaving in ways that destroy it.

I know what it is like to look backwards and realise that some people met you while you were bleeding internally and you expected them to somehow understand why there was blood all over the floor.

I know what it is like to confuse being wounded with having permission to wound.

That's difficult to write.

But it's true.

Yesterday, I wasn't simply remembering alcohol.

I was remembering relationships.

That's what surprised me.

Faces.

Conversations.

Mistakes.

Moments where I should have listened.

Moments where pride spoke first.

Times when insecurity dressed itself as anger.

Times when fear of abandonment probably helped create the very abandonment I was terrified of.

Times when I wanted somebody to understand me while making myself almost impossible to reach.

That's a brutal thing about getting older.

Sometimes maturity means finally understanding what happened twenty years after you desperately needed the understanding.

You look backwards with tools you didn't possess at the time.

And suddenly you can see it.

Oh.

That's what I was doing.

That's why I reacted like that.

That's why I kept pushing.

That's why I couldn't sit with silence.

That's why rejection felt like death.

That's why alcohol felt like relief.

That's why I kept trying to numb things I didn't yet have language for.

And understanding it now doesn't allow you to travel backwards and repair it.

That's the tragedy of hindsight.

It gives you sight without transportation.

You can see the room.

You just can't walk back into it.

There are people I would love differently now.

I know that.

There are conversations I would handle differently.

There are moments when I would shut my mouth.

Moments when I would speak.

Moments when I would say:

I'm scared.

Instead of becoming angry.

Moments when I would say:

That hurt me.

Instead of pretending I didn't care.

Moments when I would say:

Please don't leave.

Instead of behaving as though I was the one who wanted distance.

There are apologies I would make with greater understanding now.

But life doesn't hand us edited editions.

We live the first draft in permanent ink.

Maybe grace is partly learning how to live knowing that.

Alcohol was woven through so much of it.

Not everything.

I refuse to give alcohol authorship over my entire past.

There was joy.

There was real love.

There were extraordinary moments.

There were friendships.

There was laughter.

There were people who mattered deeply.

There was music.

There were ridiculous nights.

There were beautiful mornings.

There was a young man trying to figure out what the hell being alive meant after already learning far too early how close death could come.

There was faith.

There was rebellion.

There was searching.

There was surviving.

There was me.

Alcohol doesn't get to own all of that.

But it was there.

Sometimes in the foreground.

Sometimes quietly waiting backstage.

And addiction has this awful ability to become attached to memory.

You don't simply remember drinking.

You remember who you were with.

What music was playing.

What the room looked like.

Who you loved.

What you hoped would happen.

What actually happened.

The person you were trying to become.

The person you were trying to forget.

Alcohol becomes threaded through nostalgia until pulling one memory can tighten ten others.

That is dangerous.

Because nostalgia is a liar when it wants to be.

It remembers the first drink better than the aftermath.

It remembers warmth.

Not consequences.

It remembers laughter.

Not the mornings when you hated yourself.

It remembers connection.

Not what addiction eventually isolates.

It remembers the promise.

Not the invoice.

And eventually the invoice always arrives.

Yesterday, Joey brought the invoice with it.

That might be why I cried.

I wasn't romanticising those years.

I was grieving them.

There's a difference.

I was grieving what happened.

What didn't happen.

What could have happened.

Who I was.

Who other people were.

The relationships that could not survive what we were carrying.

The years I spent trying to make peace with myself through things incapable of giving peace.

And maybe most painfully, I was grieving the fact that I survived long enough to understand some of it.

That sounds strange.

But there is a peculiar grief in becoming the person your younger self needed after the younger version of you is already gone.

I wish I could sit beside him.

Not lecture him.

God knows he heard enough lectures.

I wouldn't tell him to get his life together.

I wouldn't give him ten steps toward becoming a better man.

I'd probably just sit there.

Let him talk.

And when he inevitably started making jokes because the conversation was getting too close to something real, I would let him.

Then maybe I would tell him:

You don't have to destroy yourself because you're hurting.

You don't have to make somebody else responsible for saving you.

You don't have to drink every feeling into silence.

And when somebody loves you, don't punish them for the people who didn’t.

That one hurts.

Maybe that's what the tears were about.

Not one woman.

Not one relationship.

Not one bottle.

Not one mistake.

It was the accumulated weight of all of it.

Twenty years collapsing into several minutes.

There are times when memory doesn't arrive chronologically.

It arrives emotionally.

Everything that felt similar gets stored in the same room.

Loss beside loss.

Love beside love.

Addiction beside shame.

Shame beside loneliness.

Loneliness beside another bottle.

Another song.

Another goodbye.

Another morning promising yourself that things would change.

And yesterday somebody opened the door.

Apparently his name was Joey.

The strangest part is that I have a life now that I did not plan for back then.

That thought has been sitting heavily with me.

I survived into years I hadn't imagined.

There was a season when my thinking was incredibly short-term.

Get through tonight.

Get through this feeling.

Get through this relationship.

Get through this loss.

Get through this craving.

Get through this unhinged head of mine.

The future was theoretical.

Now I'm standing inside that future.

I write books.

I have Refined by Fire Press.

I care about preserving old Christian works.

I care about manuscripts.

I care about sentences.

I care about building something that might remain after me.

I work.

I write.

I think deply about my life.

I make coffee.

I pat my cats.

I think about theology.

I obsess over books.

I dream about what the press could become.

I am recovering from surgery and learning how to live with a finger that has been permanently changed.

There are ordinary things in my life that the younger me never planned for because he wasn't necessarily planning that far ahead.

And that tortures me sometimes.

Because I am living in the bonus chapters.

The life beyond the season I thought would define everything.

What do you do with that?

What do you do when you survive your own worst years?

Nobody tells you that survival creates responsibilities.

Eventually you have to decide what to do with the life that survived.

Maybe that's why sobriety feels particularly important to me now.

Not because I want some perfect badge.

Not because I want to become morally superior to anybody who drinks.

Not because I am trying to rewrite history and pretend alcohol never gave me anything.

That's another lie.

Of course it gave me something.

If addiction gave us absolutely nothing, nobody would struggle to leave it.

It gave relief.

Until relief became expensive.

It gave numbness.

Until numbness began taking everything else with it.

It gave confidence.

Until confidence became chaos.

It gave escape.

It gives cheap grace.

Until I realised escape doesn't have a destination.

That's the bargain.

Addiction offers something real enough to get your attention and then charges far more than you agreed to pay.

I know this.

And still I struggle.

That is the humiliating part.

Knowledge isn't immunity.

Experience isn't immunity.

Faith isn't immunity.

Writing books about pain isn't immunity.

Understanding addiction doesn't magically silence addiction.

Sometimes you can know exactly where a road leads and still find yourself staring down it.

That is where I am being honest about standing right now.

And I need honesty more than performance.

I don't want to write a blog where I am always the man standing on the other side.

Recovered.

Healed.

Victorious.

Wise.

Looking backwards at everything from some beautiful mountaintop.

Sometimes I am halfway up the hill and tired.

Sometimes I'm sitting down.

Sometimes I'm wondering why I started climbing.

Sometimes an old song comes through Spotify and I cry because twenty years suddenly feels like yesterday.

Sometimes I miss people.

Sometimes I miss versions of myself even though those versions were hurting me.

Sometimes I miss things I absolutely should not return to.

That's the human experience.

And admitting that matters.

Missing something doesn't mean it was good for me.

Wanting something doesn't mean I should have it.

Remembering something fondly doesn't erase what it cost.

A craving isn't a command.

A memory isn't an instruction.

A song isn't a prophecy.

And pain doesn't get to make every decision simply because it speaks loudly.

I need to remember that.

Especially now.

My Christian faith doesn't make this less complicated.

It makes me unwilling to lie about it.

I believe in grace.

Not decorative grace.

Not Instagram grace.

Not the kind of grace Christians sometimes talk about when they really mean respectable people making minor mistakes.

I mean grace for the moments we don't put on church slides.

Grace for relapse.

Grace for addiction.

Grace for shame.

Grace for damaged relationships.

Grace for the person who knows better and still struggles.

Grace for the person sitting alone arguing with himself.

Grace for the things we would change if God gave us a time machine.

Grace for yesterday.

Grace for today.

Grace for the person who hasn't figured tomorrow out yet.

Jesus has never required me to pretend darkness isn't dark before I bring it to Him.

That's one of the reasons I still believe.

The Gospel doesn't tell me I was secretly fine all along.

It tells me I was loved while I wasn't.

There is a difference.

And tonight that matters.

I don't know what sobriety will look like over the coming months.

I'm not going to make some enormous declaration from a blog page.

I've made enough dramatic promises in my life.

I am interested in something smaller.

Today.

Tonight.

The next decision.

The next hour if necessary.

Calling somebody before isolation starts sounding intelligent.

Getting honest before secrecy gets comfortable.

Remembering that the version of alcohol my mind occasionally advertises is not the complete product.

Remembering the invoice.

Remembering the mornings.

Remembering the relationships.

Remembering myself.

Not to shame myself.

To tell the truth.

Because shame makes me want to disappear.

Truth gives me somewhere to stand.

And maybe yesterday's tears were not weakness.

Maybe my body knew before my mind did that there was something I needed to grieve.

So I sat there.

And I listened.

And I cried.

I let the song be what it was.

I didn't need to turn it off because it hurt.

I didn't need to build an entire theology around it either.

For a few minutes I let twenty years sit beside me.

The mistakes.

The heartbreak.

The addiction.

The people.

The nights.

The apologies.

The things that cannot be repaired.

The things that somehow were.

The life that came afterwards.

All of it.

And somewhere inside those tears was something I did not expect.

Gratitude.

Not gratitude for everything that happened.

I will never pretend every wound was necessary.

I don't need to call destruction beautiful to prove God can redeem something.

I was grateful that I was there to hear the song.

Still here.

Older.

Scarred.

A little wiser.

Still capable of being moved.

Still capable of crying.

Still capable of loving.

Still capable of regretting.

Still capable of writing.

Still capable of choosing what happens next.

That is no small thing.

Maybe I spent too many years thinking redemption would mean forgetting.

It doesn't.

Some songs will always hurt.

Some names will always carry weight.

Some seasons will always have weather attached to them.

Some mistakes will always make me wish I could reach through time and grab myself by the shoulders.

Some love doesn't disappear simply because the relationship did.

Some grief becomes quieter without becoming nonexistent.

And some addictions don't vanish simply because we finally understand them.

Maybe maturity isn't becoming untouched.

Maybe it's becoming honest enough to know what touches you without automatically surrendering to it.

Yesterday Joey touched something.

Deeply.

It opened a room.

I went inside.

I cried.

But I came back out.

That matters.

There is a line between remembering a life and returning to it.

I am trying to learn where that line is.

Because I don't want to hate the man I used to be.

He was trying.

Sometimes terribly.

Sometimes destructively.

Sometimes selfishly.

Some of the time Bravely.

Sometimes drunk.

Other times frightened.

Sometimes faithful.

Sometimes completely lost.

But he kept moving.

And somehow his footsteps became mine.

I don't owe him a return to everything that nearly destroyed him.

I owe him something better.

I owe him the chance to see what all that survival eventually became.

Books.

Faith.

Work.

Refined by Fire Press.

People I love.

Ordinary mornings.

A future.

Maybe sobriety isn't about rejecting him.

Maybe it is one way of finally protecting him.

Maybe it is saying:

You suffered enough.

We don't have to keep recreating the wound just because the wound is familiar.

I don't know whether Joey will always make me cry.

Probably.

I'm okay with that.

Some songs earn permanent access to places inside us.

But I don't want those places controlling the whole house.

Yesterday the song came through the speakers.

Twenty years came with it.

For a few minutes I was young again.

Heartbroken again.

Lost again.

Remembering people I haven't held in years.

Remembering mistakes I cannot undo.

Remembering alcohol.

Remembering why I wanted it.

Remembering what it took.

Then the song ended.

That's the part I keep thinking about.

The song ended.

I was still sitting there.

Tears on my face.

My life around me.

Not the life I planned twenty years ago.

Not the life I expected.

Not a perfect life.

But a life.

Mine.

And I realised something.

There was a time when I could not imagine the man who would be sitting here writing these words.

I hadn't planned this far.

Yet here I am.

Maybe that's enough reason not to hand tomorrow back to something that has already taken enough yesterdays.

So tonight I am not promising forever.

Forever is too large for me right now.

I am telling the truth about today.

I am struggling.

I am remembering.

I am grieving.

I am tempted.

I am grateful.

I am still here.

And tonight, that has to be enough.

Tomorrow can ask me again when it gets here.

---

About the Author

Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 6.1 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.

• Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
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