Journals from the Journey: Mark’s Story

Mark walked through the doors of Journey House on February 26, 2024. He had been drinking and using all night because he did not want to come. When his intake counselor asked him when he had last used, he told her it had probably been about 30 days.

She did not let it slide.

“Hey man, I’m just gonna shoot straight with you,” she told him. “The only person you are fooling is yourself.”

“And when she said that to me, it just hit me like a rock,” Mark says. “That was the turning point of my life right there. It really was the turning point of my life.”

Before Journey House, Mark had eighteen years without a drink. He built it on his own, through church and willpower, without a recovery community around him.

“I had 18 years clean,” he says. “But it wasn’t true sobriety. It was through just learning a few things.”

He relapsed in 2022. Looking back, he says the relapse taught him something he wishes he had understood decades sooner.

“God is there,” Mark says, “but he put people here on Earth to surround you, and these people are in AA and NA recovery programs. They’re very important to your sobriety. There’s no one person that can do it by itself.”

For eighteen years, Mark hid his struggle, even from the people closest to him. “For the first 18 years, nobody never even knew that I wasn’t drinking,” he says. “I was an undercover alcoholic. A functional alcoholic.”

At Journey House, Mark met a team that would not let him hide. Lane confronted his lie at intake. Jess and Kyle followed with what he calls tough love. Jake, who would later become his sponsor, was firm but never harsh.

“Jake was a gentle giant,” Mark says. “He was firm. But he knew how to talk to people. He was respectful with what he said.” He had never let anyone hold him accountable like that before.

“I’m being honest with myself,” Mark says. “I’m being real with the addiction that I have. It’s no come-up story.”

Before Mark found Journey House, he nearly did not make it here at all. At a barbershop with a friend of thirty years, exhausted from a night of drinking, Mark agreed to take what he believed was a small amount of cocaine to perk himself up. It was laced with fentanyl.

“I took a little teeny little toot,” Mark says. “It was fentanyl. I taste the drain in the back of my throat on that thing, and that was the last thing I remember.”

He collapsed in the chair. His friend started CPR while someone called an ambulance. Mark woke up seven hours later on a slab in the hospital’s intensive care unit, where a nurse who had worked on him told him how close he had come to not waking up at all.

“The fentanyl was pure,” Mark says. “It was just a speck. It was really just a little speck that I took.” He does not talk about that day with fear. He talks about it with purpose. “It wasn’t my time,” he says. “God had more for me to do.”

That conviction, that he was given a second chance for a reason, is what carried him through the hardest parts of early recovery, and it is what he wants every newcomer at Journey House to understand about how thin the line really is.

“You are one hit away from death,” Mark says. “Or just your whole life changing.”

Mark did not return to use during his time at Journey House. Instead, he became a resource for the people walking the same road behind him. “They put me in a position to be a peer leader, a house manager, and I had so many people that was depending on me,” he says. “I couldn’t let them down.”

One night on a porch, Mark recognized the signs of a relapse in a younger participant before the man said a word. “I literally saw myself in him,” Mark says. “I said to myself, this is what my wife sees. I don’t want to look like that again, ever.”

Today, Mark does not hide who he is. “I’m in recovery,” he says. 

When Mark imagines speaking to someone sitting in the lobby on their first day, he does not soften the message.

“Look at me, and let me be your example,” he says. “Be true to yourself, aware of yourself and the people around you. Take this opportunity very seriously, because it changed me.”

His warning for anyone tempted to return to use comes from a place he never wants to revisit. “If you have to relapse, if you feel like you have to call somebody and talk to them, reach out,” he says. “Don’t take that drink, that smoke, that sniff, that hit, or whatever you do, because you are one hit away from death.”

Mark’s story is proof that the work does not end when the years add up. It begins the moment someone stops hiding and lets people in.