I woke up thinking about my friend this morning.
We met when I was in my early twenties, back when depression wasn’t a weather pattern in my life—it was the climate. I was wrestling with suicidal thoughts, and somehow this kid a few years younger than me carried himself like he’d already learned things I hadn’t. He had that rare kind of maturity that isn’t stiff or superior—just clear. Grounded. Present. In a lot of ways, he felt like the steady one, even though I was the older friend.
Over twenty years ago, he died in a car accident.
He was driving way too fast—around 120 mph—on country roads, and he was on mushrooms. Another friend was in the car with him and survived.
And here’s the part that still catches in my throat: I helped them find the mushrooms.
Psychedelics had changed my life. I’d had a mystical experience that cracked something open in me, and like people do when they stumble into something that feels like salvation, I talked about it like it was a miracle anyone could pick up and carry. When someone asked if I knew where to get them, I passed the information along. At the time it felt casual. Helpful. Like sharing a door I’d walked through.
But doors don’t guarantee what’s on the other side.
The older I get, the more I understand how little it takes to bend a life. How one “sure” can become a forever. How consequences can arrive wearing disguises—fun, curiosity, a Friday night, a story you think you’ll laugh about later.
I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my life. But when I look back, this one sits in its own category. Not because I think I caused his death in some clean, mechanical way—he chose to drive, he chose the speed, he chose the risk—but because I can’t pretend my hands were completely off the wheel. I was part of the chain. I added a link. And I would give a lot to go back and be wiser sooner.
Twenty-five years later, I still think about him.
We weren’t friends for very long—maybe a year or two—but his absence has had an outsized gravity in my life. In my lowest moments, when I’ve been tempted to quit on myself, I’ve thought about the fact that he didn’t get the chance to keep going. And something in me tightens: then don’t waste yours. In my best moments, when I’m standing on top of some small mountain I managed to climb, I feel him there too. Like I’m planting a flag not just for me, but for someone who never got to see what he might have become.
Some losses don’t fade. They just change shape.
Today I’m thinking about the version of him that kept living: the older man he might be now, the jokes he’d tell, the scars he’d carry, the unexpected kindnesses he’d have grown into. There’s no way to know. That’s part of the ache.
But I do know this: I can let regret rot me, or I can let it refine me.
There’s a kind of regret that’s useless—pure self-punishment, a life sentence you hand yourself because pain feels like penance. And then there’s the kind that can become a compass. The kind that forces you to slow down. To be more careful with what you normalize, what you recommend, what you place into someone else’s hands like it’s nothing.
I still carry that mistake. I probably always will.
But I want it to make me better—not smaller. More awake. More deliberate. More willing to say no when the easy answer is yes. More willing to protect the future, even when it costs me a moment of social comfort.
This morning I woke up thinking of him again.
And I’ll keep honoring him in the only ways I can now: by remembering him, by living harder when I want to disappear, by being more responsible with my influence, and by trying—imperfectly, stubbornly—to turn one of my deepest regrets into a reason to choose better.