August is Overdose Awareness Month.

And I wish I did not have to write this post.

I have overdosed.

Not in a movie-scene kind of way. Not with a dramatic rescue or swelling music or a neat little ending. Just a raw, breathless moment suspended between life and death—where time blurred and silence pressed in so thick, I thought it might swallow me whole.

But I came back.

Somehow, I came back.

Not everyone gets to say that.

This month, I carry the weight of two names especially close: friends I lost to overdose. One was the kind of person who could make you laugh even when everything hurt. The other had a heart too big for the world and never stopped trying to heal others, even while fighting his own demons. They were not statistics. They were not failures. They were human beings—complex, brilliant, wounded, beautiful.

And they are gone.

We lose too many. Every day. Over 100,000 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses last year alone. Many of them were trying to numb pain no one ever stopped long enough to see. Others were caught in the brutal cycle of addiction with nowhere safe to turn. And far too many were simply failed—by a system that criminalizes illness, shames vulnerability, and treats people like problems instead of souls worth saving.

Overdose Awareness Month is not just about remembering the lives lost. It is also about ending the silence that helps no one and educating others about the realities of substance use, recovery, harm reduction, and hope.

So I am saying this now—not for sympathy, but for solidarity:

I have lived through it.

I carry grief that still wakes me at night.

And I am not ashamed.

If you are still here, still fighting, still breathing—you are not alone.

Let us talk about overdose. Let us talk about Narcan, and trauma, and healing that does not always look pretty. Let us tell the truth: that recovery is not linear, that stigma kills, and that compassion saves lives.

To my friends who did not make it—I miss you more than words can carry.

To those still walking this path—your life matters.

To everyone reading—please, do not wait until it is your friend, your sibling, your child, or yourself.

💜 I am here. I see you. You are not alone.

#OverdoseAwarenessMonth #EndTheStigma #HarmReductionSavesLives #NarcanNow #NeverForgotten