The Death of a Thousand Faces (Or, Waking Up with a Gun to My Own Head)

There’s a moment—sometimes gradual, sometimes like a Louisville Slugger to the skull—when you wake up and realize you’ve been living a lie. Not just one lie, but a full-on catalog of them, a goddamn department store of identities, each one designed for a specific occasion, custom-tailored to keep the machinery running smoothly. And the worst part? You played every role with conviction. A true professional.

Irish Catholic childhood. Worcester, Massachusetts. Survival was the name of the game. You were expected to wake up every morning and get in line. Academics. Sports. Church. Rinse, repeat. Anything else was useless and disposable, some petty distraction invented by lesser minds. You didn’t find yourself—you performed. And if you did it well enough, you were rewarded with another day of relative peace.

And I did. Oh, how I did.

I was the sports guy. The honor student. The trustworthy neighborhood kid. The baseball player. Later, the rugby player. The Classics major who never quite knew what a Classics degree was supposed to do. The party animal. The warehouse worker with a liberal arts degree. A man of many faces, each one worn long enough to pass inspection before being swapped for the next.

But there’s a price to pay when you keep rolling out new models of yourself without ever checking what’s under the hood. Sooner or later, the whole thing collapses under its own weight, like a drunken scaffolding job in a hurricane. You wake up one day and realize you have no idea who you actually are. You’ve been sprinting from one identity to the next for so long that the original blueprint is just a smudge of ink on a forgotten page. And in the absence of identity, you start looking for something—anything—to make the walls stop closing in.

Enter booze. Enter drugs.

At first, they were the Great Liberators. The fire escape from a life of obligations and roles and carefully curated versions of myself. The first few years were glorious. My own personal revolution, a celebration of reckless abandon. Somewhere, my mother was shaking her head, and that alone made it worth it.

But revolutions have a way of devouring themselves, and freedom turned into dependency faster than I could clock it. What had started as an escape hatch became a cage, just with better lighting. The first real wake-up call—the one that came bitter and mean, the one that slammed me into the pavement like a dirty cop on a power trip—was realizing that these weren’t symbols of rebellion. They were rusty, jagged shackles, and I had locked them on my own wrists.

But it wasn’t just about the booze. The real problem, the venom running through my veins, was the fact that I still had no idea who the hell I was. I was running blind through a house of mirrors, slamming into one false version of myself after another, trying to outrun something I couldn’t even name.

And then came the second wake-up call.

The kind that doesn’t just shake you up—it burns the whole goddamn house down.

The realization that if I wanted to survive, if I wanted to make anything out of the second half of my life, I had to kill every last one of those old identities. Wipe the slate clean. No more borrowed faces, no more desperate shape-shifting. The only way out was through, and the only way through was to stop bullshitting myself.

So I started digging. Pulling apart the wreckage. Sifting through the ashes of all the people I had tried to be, looking for something real underneath. And what I found, buried under years of performances and Catholic guilt and bad decisions, was the same thing that had been there all along:

The kid who felt something shift inside him the first time he heard a great rock song. The kid who wrote because he had to, because something in his gut wouldn’t let him stop. The kid who wasn’t built for quiet conformity, who was never meant to be a well-behaved cog in someone else’s machine.

It took years to stop running from him.

But once I did—once I let him take the wheel instead of locking him in the trunk—everything changed.

Because when you wake up to who you really are, there’s no going back. And for the first time, you don’t want to.