A friend from my past made this impossible to deny.

He was sharp. Exceptionally intelligent. He could explain people to themselves with uncomfortable accuracy. In a room full of noise he'd find the one thing nobody wanted to say and say it like it was obvious.

But when it came to his own scars, that clarity vanished. He drank heavily. Used cocaine often. Turned conflict into posture. He could read everyone except himself.

I don't think he chose any of it consciously. Nobody does. The pattern usually starts much earlier, in places where something hurt before there were words for it. Fear, shame, grief that never finished. All of it gets sealed behind repetition. The seal becomes the habit. The habit becomes invisible.

When we were close I tried to help him. Later, after I became a father, the distance between us grew without argument. We didn't fall out. We just stopped reaching.

The last few times I saw him, the exchange was always the same. A brief greeting, a practiced smile, and the sentence he used when he didn't want to be seen.

"I'm good."

He said it the way people say it to strangers. Smooth, final, polished by repetition. It kept him protected. It also kept him unreachable.

Here's the mechanism I see now that I couldn't while I was standing in front of him. Addiction isn't self-destruction. Not at first. It's self-preservation. Something hurt, and the substance or the behaviour made the hurt quiet enough to function. That worked. So it repeated. And because it worked, it never got questioned.

The problem is that a strategy built to manage pain at fifteen doesn't know how to stop at thirty-five. It keeps running because nothing replaced it. The original wound sealed over, and the seal became the structure of the person's life. Drinking isn't about the drink. The habit isn't about pleasure. It's about not arriving at the feeling that's waiting underneath. Every repetition is a small agreement to keep the seal in place.

From the outside it looks stable. From close up it looks paused. The person behind the habit stopped moving a long time ago, but the habit keeps them busy enough that nobody notices. Including them.

That's what "I'm good" was. Not a lie exactly. More like a locked door disguised as an answer. He wasn't telling me he was fine. He was telling me not to look closer. And after enough repetitions, I stopped looking. That's the other cost nobody talks about. The people around you don't leave because they're angry. They leave because the answer never changes and asking starts to feel pointless.

I don't judge him. I don't blame him. But I think about that phrase. How much it costs to keep saying it. How it protects and isolates in the same breath.

The move I've taken from watching this isn't about addiction. It's about the phrase. I started paying attention to my own "I'm good." The moments where someone asks how I'm doing and I give the polished version, the one designed to end the conversation rather than open it. When I catch myself doing that, I try to say one true thing instead. Not a confession. Not a breakdown. Just one sentence that's actually honest. "I'm tired and I don't know why." "This week was harder than I expected." "I'm not sure what I'm doing with this."

It's uncomfortable every time. But it keeps the door open. And keeping the door open is the difference between someone who can still be reached and someone who can't.