Fellowship House

06/01/2026

Oldie but goodie.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a blog called Backrooms exploring liminal spaces, dissociation, trauma, technology, and the strange feeling of being psychologically “between worlds.”

Fast forward to today, and Backrooms just became a cultural phenomenon, breaking box office records and turning an internet myth into one of the biggest horror films of the year. The film opened at No. 1, setting records for A24 and becoming the biggest debut ever by a first-time filmmaker. (The Guardian)

Maybe the reason the concept resonates isn’t just horror. Maybe it’s because so many people recognize the feeling.

The endless hallways.
The fluorescent lights.
The sense of being disconnected, displaced, and searching for a way back.

Check out the blog and let me know what you think.

There’s a haunting internet myth called The Backrooms. Maybe you’ve heard of it—a liminal, uncanny dreamscape made up of endless yellow hallways, stained carpets, and flickering fluorescent lights. It’s what happens when you “noclip” out of reality, the story goes. You’re trapped in an...

05/29/2026

https://www.fellowshiphouses.com/staging/9983/psychosis-lite/

05/27/2026

https://www.fellowshiphouses.com/staging/9983/psychosis-lite/

“Psychosis Lite” isn’t a clinical term. It’s something I like to describe as the socially acceptable forms of disassociation we drift into every day. The looping self-talk. The curated identities. The constant stimulation. The subtle separation from embodied reality. Not full psychosis. Something quieter. More normalized. More culturally rewarded.

New blog in The Mandala Room.

05/27/2026

“Psychosis Lite” isn’t a clinical term. It’s something I like to describe as the socially acceptable forms of disassociation we drift into every day. The looping self-talk. The curated identities. The constant stimulation. The subtle separation from embodied reality. Not full psychosis. Something quieter. More normalized. More culturally rewarded.

New blog in The Mandala Room

https://www.fellowshiphouses.com/staging/9983/psychosis-lite/

Psychosis is typically defined as a severe disruption in perception, cognition, and reality testing. It can include hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, disorganized thought, and impaired insight. Psychosis is not one thing...

05/21/2026

Yesterday’s lecture focused on anxiety, a condition that often exists long before the first drink, pill, or needle.

More than 40 million American adults live with an anxiety disorder each year, making it one of the most common mental health conditions in the United States. 

What can confuse people outside the experience of addiction is this:

Sometimes substance use disorder is not the origin of the suffering. Sometimes it’s the attempted solution.

For many alcoholics and addicts, substances initially functioned as relief. A way to quiet panic. Slow racing thoughts. Escape dread. Regulate sleep. Feel normal. Feel safe. Feel something.

Over time, the medicine becomes the catastrophe.

Understanding this distinction matters. Because if we only treat the behavior and never explore the pain, fear, trauma, or anxiety beneath it, people often return to the very thing that once gave temporary relief.

Recovery is not simply removing substances.
It’s learning how to live inside your own nervous system again.

05/19/2026

“We taught the brain to live through glass.
Now we wonder why the body feels distant from the world.”

Screens are not just tools. They may be reshaping perception itself, compressing embodied reality into endless simulations of depth, urgency, novelty, and meaning. In recovery work, this matters. Attention is attachment. Presence is medicine. And the nervous system was not built for infinite scroll.

My latest piece in The Mandala Room explores AI, screens, embodiment, trauma, addiction, and what may quietly be happening to human consciousness beneath the surface of modern life.

Read it. Push back. Add to it. The conversation matters now more than ever.

https://www.fellowshiphouses.com/staging/9983/the-algorithm-ate-act-ii/

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Harvard physician Aditi Nerurkar have increasingly warned that we are conducting a neurological experiment on an entire generation without fully understanding the long-term consequences.

05/13/2026

Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived a thousand lives.

Over the last three years, I became almost obsessively focused on AI, its implications, its promise, and its danger. That obsession led me to complete executive leadership training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology focused on AI, machine learning, and safe deployment. What I’m beginning to understand now is the paradox inside all of this.

Living through strange seasons of life, loss, recovery, success, collapse, rebirth, and watching so many friends become memories instead of phone calls, has not made me fearful. Oddly, it has made me more courageous.

I understand substance use disorder deeply. I understand pain, disconnection, trauma, and the invisible economics that shape despair. But more and more, I find myself drawn toward advocating for meaningful regulation of AI, its deployment, its extraction economics, and the social consequences that are rapidly approaching working-class and marginalized communities.

I no longer believe it’s alarmist to say we may be creating something that behaves less like a tool and more like a rival species competing for cognition, labor, attention, meaning, and eventually autonomy itself.

Tonight, I’m deeply grateful to the Columbia University School of Social Work and the Columbia Social Work Review for publishing my piece on AI and the economic consequences emerging technologies may have on marginalized communities.

My time at Columbia has sharpened not only my academic lens, but the way we continue to evolve care at Fellowship House. Through deeper training, rigor, and frameworks like PROP, I’ve gained a stronger understanding of how to better serve Medicaid populations in Pennsylvania and advocate for people too often left without a voice in systems designed around profit instead of people.

We are entering an era where AI will reshape labor, identity, opportunity, and human connection itself. The question is whether we build systems that widen suffering or widen dignity.

Thank you to Columbia for challenging me to think harder, serve better, and remain intellectually honest in this work.

Please take a moment to read my piece in the Columbia Review.

05/13/2026

Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived a thousand lives.

Over the last three years, I became almost obsessively focused on AI, its implications, its promise, and its danger. That obsession led me to complete executive leadership training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology focused on AI, machine learning, and safe deployment. What I’m beginning to understand now is the paradox inside all of this.

Living through strange seasons of life, loss, recovery, success, collapse, rebirth, and watching so many friends become memories instead of phone calls, has not made me fearful. Oddly, it has made me more courageous.

I understand substance use disorder deeply. I understand pain, disconnection, trauma, and the invisible economics that shape despair. But more and more, I find myself drawn toward advocating for meaningful regulation of AI, its deployment, its extraction economics, and the social consequences that are rapidly approaching working-class and marginalized communities.

I no longer believe it’s alarmist to say we may be creating something that behaves less like a tool and more like a rival species competing for cognition, labor, attention, meaning, and eventually autonomy itself.

Tonight, I’m deeply grateful to the Columbia University School of Social Work and the Columbia Social Work Review for publishing my piece on AI and the economic consequences emerging technologies may have on marginalized communities.

My time at Columbia has sharpened not only my academic lens, but the way we continue to evolve care at Fellowship House. Through deeper training, rigor, and frameworks like PROP, I’ve gained a stronger understanding of how to better serve Medicaid populations in Pennsylvania and advocate for people too often left without a voice in systems designed around profit instead of people.

We are entering an era where AI will reshape labor, identity, recovery, opportunity, and human connection itself. The question is whether we build systems that widen suffering or widen dignity.

Thank you to Columbia for challenging me to think harder, serve better, and remain intellectually honest in this work.

Please take a moment to read my piece in the Columbia Review.

https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cswr/blog/view/778

04/30/2026

A fresh piece just landed in The Mandala Room. An exploration of what makes a place, a moment, a life… sacred. Not in the distant, untouchable sense, but in the lived, human sense. The kind you can feel in a room full of truth, in a conversation that costs you something, in the decision to stay.

“The sacred is not found. It’s revealed the moment we stop lying to ourselves.”

This one walks the line between psychology, recovery, and something older than both. If you’ve ever wondered why certain spaces heal, and others don’t, this is worth your time.

Read it now at FellowshipHouses.com


https://www.fellowshiphouses.com/staging/9983/sacred-ground-shared-reality/

When I was sixteen, I found myself in a reformatory boot camp, South Mountain, Pennsylvania. It was a strange place to end up for a kid who liked oil painting, pot smoke, and the music of the sixties and seventies. Overnight, I was stripped of all that. My head was shaved. I was woken at 3 a.m. to p...