Hiding in Plain Sight

Writing H2H was easy. Living it changed me.

Aug 19, 2025

For years, I was the guy with the wide grin and a drink in hand, the one who kept the table alive with stories and jokes. I was the spark, the host, the connector. People leaned on me to pull them in, to make them feel included, to stitch the awkward silences into something bright and meaningful. And I did it well. I loved it. It gave me energy, and, if I’m honest, it also gave me a sense of cover.

Then I quit drinking.

I thought sobriety would be a doorway into a fuller life, and in many ways it has been. I also shut the door on a part of myself. Without alcohol as my social fuel, I pulled back. I cocooned. As the person who wrote Human-to-Human, who preached connection like oxygen, began living in a kind of self-imposed isolation.

It didn’t happen all at once. At first, it looked like boundaries. Healthier choices. A needed reset. But slowly, almost without noticing, I stopped reaching out. I told myself I was protecting my energy. I convinced myself I was just turning inward, focusing on what mattered. And maybe I was. But really, I was hiding.

The Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh once said, “Without understanding, there can be no love.” Maybe I needed to understand myself sober before I could love myself sober. And in that learning, I built some walls to protect myself.

For several years, the cocoon was my shield. It allowed me to process grief, disorientation, and the unnerving quiet of no longer being the fun guy, the one with the easy laugh and bottomless energy for others. What was left felt raw, unpracticed, and vulnerable.

Connection isn’t neat. It’s messy, demanding, unpredictable. It requires showing up without a script, without the liquid courage that once smoothed the edges. So I stopped showing up.

The irony is thick. The guy who built a movement on Human to Human went dark on his own humanity. I wrapped myself in silence, in careful routine, in protection. I told myself it was introversion, a new version of me. But that wasn’t the full truth. It was survival.

And survival, while necessary, isn’t living.

What I remembered recently in one of those moments where a coconut hits you in the head is that connection gives back tenfold. Energy, ideas, creativity, belonging—it all flows from being with others, not from hiding from them. When I isolate, I shrink. When I connect, I expand.

Maybe you know this too. Maybe you’ve pulled back after a loss, or a change, or a decision that altered how the world sees you. At first, the cocoon feels safe. But after a while, it stops being protection and starts being a prison.

The lesson is not that I betrayed my own philosophy. The lesson is that I’m still living it. Connection is not a trophy you win and display forever. It’s a daily practice. Some days you nail it. Some days you don’t.

I’m not the fun guy anymore, not in the way I once was. And that’s fine. I don’t need to be the loudest laugh in the room or the one who carries the whole table on my back. I don’t need to give without boundaries or mask my own exhaustion with jokes. That part of me is gone, dissolved, and I’m grateful.

But the part that remains—the part that loves to connect, to share, to invite others into something bigger than themselves, that’s still here. It was just waiting for me to remember.

The cocoon wasn’t a mistake. It was a passage. And it became time to peel back the layers.

Because connection, for me, isn’t optional. It’s how I come alive.

And I’d rather be alive than safe.

Stay human,
- Bryan

Drop your version of going H2H with yourself in the comments—I’m listening.

BEing Human

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