I Survived Myself

(Which Explains a Lot)

4/15/25

I woke up today and realized I’ve been sleepwalking through my own fucking autobiography.

I found what I know as myself in a tangle of limbs and names, all of them mine, allegedly.

I can clearly see a silhouette with arms like leftover thoughts, legs like unsent voicemails, and a spinal cord knotted in on itself like a phone charger from a version of me I stopped believing in six personalities ago.

Like sure, I was technically conscious, technically breathing, technically writing 10,000-word Reddit comments about neurotransmitters like that was connection, but somewhere in the attic of my cortex, a bunch of duct-taped Izzys were huddled around a kerosene heater, shivering and muttering,

“Does anyone know who the hell we are?” And none of us did.

I mean, define “who we are” is it “functionally embodied” or “currently aligned” with the 2023 version of me eating drywall in a closet while 2021 me’s in the kitchen trying to boil shame into profit? Not 2022 me, who chewed resin and burnt themselves with a butane torch and called it a coping strategy. Not January 2024 me, who looked in the mirror and saw a stranger in recovery with my name, but no forwarding address.

Not the ten year old in the snowstorm who thought he had to become invincible just to make it out alive. And I kept becoming versions of invincible until I forgot softness was ever an option.

Anyway, I woke up today and remembered I used to exist in places my memory had written eviction slips.

I say “good morning” and seven voices respond in seven dialects of almost functioning.

I do not recognize the narrator today, but he’s got my laugh, and my fully constructed time stamped teeth, and he’s telling jokes I’ve never heard before that make me cry like I have. He’s not reading a script, he’s improvising with my trauma like it’s jazz and somehow landing every note wrong and right at the same time. If I try to focus on all of them at the same time I can only see a gait infected with glitches. Trying to make sense of it makes it make less sense because it’s an understood feeling that’s not articulated.

Realizing my situation, I return to the present moment and try to breathe through the vertigo of memory reconciling with flesh, like the house just remembered it used to be a body.

But, I’m pulled out of my maladaptive daydream, only to find my eyes forced open, staring at whole versions of myself I used to emotionally probate and pretend they weren’t me, simply because I couldn’t make the trauma and the progress coexist in the same fucking outfit.

We never did talk.

We didn’t even know we were all in the same house.

Different floors. Different wiring.

I think one of them was locked in the crawlspace trying to scratch poetry into the insulation. I think I passed another in a dream once and just thought he was a metaphor for something about LSD and some sort of community park.

I kept mistaking demolition for transformation, calling myself a phoenix while quietly pocketing all the ash. You see, I used to think healing meant kicking down doors and lighting the house on fire until only the room I liked was left standing.

But surprise!

Now the walls are shaking hands, and the floor is introducing itself to the ceiling, and the closet says “hi” like it hasn’t been locked shut since The Incident.

(you know the one, right? Insert flashback with glitchy VHS static on a CRT screen). 

Every time I made peace, I redrew the borders because surrender felt like a scam unless I was the one holding the pen. Now the map folds back into a Mobius disorder. I don’t walk in a straight line, I just orbit better now.

All my past lives are on conference call debating how to pronounce my name.

“Izzy?”

“Isaac?”

“Hey, remember when you believed in God for like two weeks because it felt like someone might be watching?”

And suddenly it’s all connected.

Today, the whole thing lit up. Like someone flicked on the fuse box and every burnt-out hallway of me hummed back to life at the same time.

The screaming ten year old dissociating to stop from crying.

The paper swallowing 2021 version with a God complex and a suicide note saved as a draft.

The one from two weeks ago who kept thinking recovery was a synonym for self-erasure as long as you did it in a calm voice.

I’m watching now. I’m watching me from every angle.

 2024 in the air purifier, 2015 from inside the amp, the versions of me that kissed bottles and cartridges significantly more passionate than people is nodding along in the rearview like, “Yeah, kid. You’re finally seeing the whole rotunda.”

They all made it.

They’re all sitting in my ribcage now, kicking their feet and comparing scars.

One of them brought a pop tart.

One of them is just fidgeting in place and has been looping the same sentence for three years and still won’t tell me what it means.

One of them is writing this poem.

They all showed up for the seance for every forgotten flavor of me and are pulling up chairs made of apologies and asking who gets to sit in the pilot seat.

I say, no one.

I say, yes, all.

I say, we’re gonna co-drive this breakdown until it learns to sing.

And my god, I can hear it now

It’s not harmony, no not yet

It’s just the clatter of instruments realizing they’re in the same room, tuning themselves to a frequency I used to call “disorder.”

I can hear it in the sound of my nervous system humming a C Phrygian dominant scale for its sexual tension, my timeline rewriting itself in mixed meter, my heartbeat doing avant-garde slam poetry about reintegration saying something like:

“I am the me who left the voicemail. I am the me who deleted it.

I am the me who pressed play on it six months later

and wept like a choir of malfunctioning clocks.”

Or some sort of writing that says so much to say so little.

Memory used to be a prison with a disco ball, now I see the glitter was just glass. I was dancing barefoot for applause.

But now?

Now it’s all fluorescent lighting and folding chairs. Now it’s group therapy with all the Me’s I’ve been trying to sedate with praise, pills, punchlines, or perfectly constructed personas. And you could imagine the shock when I raise my hand to tell them that I’m now in the house sympathizing with the half-remembered phone call where I told myself I’d be okay and believed it for the first time without crossing my fingers behind my back.

Seeing their reactions I then proceed to explain to them that it is more like that I was always at the crime scene with every ghost I made of myself and none of them screamed at the same time. Still stuck in figurative language I suppose I tell them now I’m sitting in a broken down version of my own operating system, reading error logs written in handwriting I almost forgot was mine and they all say some variation of:

“I’m still here. You just weren’t listening.”

And I scream into the circle of myself,

“WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME I WAS STILL ALIVE IN THERE?”

and one of me shrugs, and another rolls their eyes, and another one probably 2021 me, they were always a little dramatic just starts sobbing and says,

“We tried. You kept updating the firewall.”

They said nothing before.

Now they won’t shut up. Now they’re harmonizing. Badly, but it’s something. It wasn’t transcendental. It wasn’t cinematic. There was no sitar, no soft focus enlightenment. It was more like:

“Oh. Shit. That’s me. All of that. That’s all still me.”

Not “me” like the brand. Not the curated little collage of traits I pin to the wall so people know which Izzy they’re talking to.

No, like me.

It all snapped into place like a dislocated shoulder finally sliding back into the socket.

Painful. Loud. Relieving in a way that makes you cry without realizing you started. I remember now. I remember the entire damn thing and I realize it’s all me.

The Izzy who survived but called it surrender.

The Izzy who almost died because he mistook numbness for strength.

The Izzy who created a new version of himself every six months

The Izzy who called 988 but hung up when they didn’t know the drug I was talking about.

just to avoid dealing with the one who needed to be seen.

So here I am.

A Russian nesting doll cracked open, each layer screaming “I’m the real one!” and instead of deciding, I let them all sit at the control panel. We are all driving. We argue but eventually agree over the music choice. We write poems that loop back on themselves and end exactly where they begin:

“I found myself in a tangle of limbs and names…”

And maybe

maybe that’s what healing actually is:

A broken transmission that finally starts making sense when you realize the signal was always coming from inside the house.

So I lace up all my timelines like a boot and I walk like I’ve got nowhere to be

but here. They’re all here now.

Not ghosts.

Not symptoms.

Not metaphors.

People.

Versions.

Selves.

Me.

-Izzy Izix

New Pathway

Same Storm

Different Shelter

March 23, 2025

I’ve decided to sell off the rest of my personal crypto. Not for survival, not out of fear, but to buy things that symbolize creation, not destruction.

Something profound has replaced my craving for drugs.

(My own destruction.)

It’s been overtaken by a craving for expression.

(My own creation.)

As of late, I’ve finally been able to articulate the mindset I had lived in for years into human language instead of letting it bounce around abstractly in my head.

“You pray for what you want, until you have it. Then you pray for it to be taken away.” It’s some sort of NA quote.

For the past couple years, all I’ve really wanted was to feel connected: to my life, to myself, to my emotions. To other people. To nature. To weird, abstract synchronicities that don’t make sense but somehow feel real. Yeah yeah yeah some hippie shit, four tabs this forks park that, but it was my truth.

When I was dissociated, I tried everything to get my feelings back. Then, when I got emotions I wasn’t connected to, when they felt foreign, I tried everything to get rid of them.

Now, I’m in a place where I’ve actually caught what I’ve been chasing. And I didn’t get here by chasing it, I got here by doing the opposite of everything I thought would work.

So I’d be a fucking idiot to just sit here and do nothing now that I finally have everything I ever asked for.

In the last six months, I’ve had a lot of people gassing me up, telling me what I’ve done is impressive, that pulling it off is some unbelievably difficult Herculean task.

And the only thing I want people to know is: I mirror that sentiment back at them. You might not see yourself as resilient. I didn’t either. I saw myself as a frightened, shallow, weak willed, insecure excuse for a person. But weirdly, nobody around me ever shared that view. Even when I was in the thick of it, they told me the opposite.

The point is: we are our own worst enemy. If I was supposedly completely meaningless and still find a way to do the work it took to get here, then I have complete faith in you, because I don’t see you that way.

Izzy Izix

Frozen Valor

The Klein’s Battle to Save Their Family in the Grand Canyon

A True Story

6/1/24

In September 2016, My parents, Karen and Eric Klein, and I, Isaac, 10, planned a week-long vacation to Las Vegas from December 19th to the 26th. We didn’t have friends or family there, but it was meant to be a fun getaway to celebrate my 10th birthday, Christmas, Hanukkah, and my mom’s 47th birthday. We had a loose itinerary, with the only concrete plan being to see the Beatles Cirque-du Soleil show on December 24th, thanks to tickets from my Grandparents.

We decided to take a few days away from Las Vegas to visit Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon since none of us had ever been there. We thought about taking a paid tour bus, but since we were renting a car anyway, we figured we’d drive ourselves. After checking Google Maps in September, we planned to drive to Bryce Canyon, spend the night, then head to the Grand Canyon the next morning. We’d stay there for an hour or so, then drive back to Las Vegas that night.

One morning, we left Las Vegas and drove for four hours to Bryce Canyon. We drove through the canyon, took pictures and videos, and then checked into a hotel called Best Western Ruby’s Inn for the night. The next day, we left the Inn and, with our GPS leading the way, headed to the Grand Canyon via Route 89, through Kanab, Utah, and then to Route 89A. Shortly after that, our GPS said Route 67 was closed, so we needed to head onto Forest Road 22 South to reach our destination.

These back roads are used by the U.S. Forest Service. This road was paved, then turned to gravel. We noticed that we lost cell phone service at that point and that the GPS began to go a bit “wonky” randomly changing arrival times and routes. It was about this time that it started to drizzle. As the road became more narrow and rutted, our GPS began to “freeze”, lose contact with the satellites, and we lost cell phone reception. Realizing this couldn’t possibly be right, we were attempting to find a place to turn around and go back from where we came from. Before we could find a place to turn around, our car slid into a rut off to the side of the road, and our car got stuck in the mud.

As our Kia got stuck in a ditch, we reached Forest Service Road 226. A road only equipped for heavy-duty off-roader or ranger trucks. We had gone 25 miles off Highway 89 in Fredonia. We were completely immersed with miles upon miles off the north rim. sunset approaching and snow starting to fall, my mom, a biology professor, naturalist, and former founder of a wildlife hospital, With no cell service and Mom being a runner with wilderness survival knowledge, we decided she would hike to find help, leaving on the 22nd as the sunset, and there was no snow on the ground.

Moreover, my dad had a broken back last summer, so he wasn’t going out. After hugging us goodbye, Mom set out with a bottle of water and a snack-sized box of Cheerios, hoping to reach a well-traveled road in a few hours.

According to our GPS there was help under 5 miles away. 

We were 30 miles away from said help. 

We were also 25 miles in the forest, and 3 feet of snow started to fall.

It was pitch black. It has been hours. There is no help.

Karen Klein walked or ran to the main road to flag down someone for help or find cell phone reception. She grabbed a water bottle and snacks and headed south on Forest Rd 22. About three hours into her walk, it began to snow lightly.

From 3:00 PM to 3:00 AM the next day, Karen couldn't recall exactly when she reached the main road, but when she did, she saw it was snow-covered yet plowed, with tire tracks indicating recent travel. She turned left (south) and continued walking, hoping to get cell phone service or encounter a passing car. As night fell, the snow got heavier, and she used her cell phone to light the road and see road signs. She left snack wrappers in the middle of the road to indicate her presence in case someone was tracking her.

Karen began to experience what she believed were hallucinations. She saw twinkling blue lights in the trees, similar to those in the movie "Avatar," and wondered if it was the Aurora Borealis. At intersections, when unsure of which way to go, she saw a weasel appear in a swirl of snow. The weasel would chortle, point in a certain direction, and drive off on a little motorcycle. This happened three times, always when she was uncertain about the direction, or at a divergence in the trail. As a scientist, she couldn't explain these visions and thought she might be dying, as such hallucinations were unusual.

My Father and I decided to trek out of the car in the blizzard to find my mother. Within 1.5 miles of walking my shoes dissolve into the snow. We are too far to turn back now, I don’t care. We keep yelling for help, anybody, I now truly know what it is like to scream violently for help into the abyss of what could’ve been a remote island for all I know. Because that’s how alone I truly was. Stuck in the middle of a blizzard, in lands that were closed for winter, on the 22nd of December. But, all I knew was there was no one, no help, no cell service, and no mom. We weren’t going to run into anyone. But, we follow her footsteps. Until mile 7, we gave up. My father had a broken back. I'd been walking for at least 6 miles without shoes in almost a foot of snow. And we hated turning around. Me and my dad knew half of the time she was way too far ahead of us and we were just walking for the security to see she was safe. Turning around felt like I was letting my mother die. I had no way of knowing she was alive. I let her go in the snow, to save myself. 

Or at least that’s what I felt at the time. We turn around, and I eventually begin recognizing my location, I see my shoes in the snow. Completely useless. They’re covered under a foot of snow. It has been almost 8 hours with no sign of my mother. I fell asleep in the car around 3 o'clock

Karen Klein's cell phone battery died, leaving her without light to ensure she stayed on the road. After walking for 12 hours and 20 miles, she decided to stop. She reached the edge of the forest with a clearing ahead and noticed the road was no longer plowed. It had stopped snowing by this time.

Taking shelter under a stand of spruce trees with boughs reaching the ground, Karen broke branches to sit on and leaned against the trunk. She had no more food or water. Afraid to fall asleep and freeze, she pulled her knees to her chest, wrapped her coat around herself, and rocked back and forth to stay warm. To stay awake, she recounted episodes of Star Trek: TNG to keep her awake, so she did not freeze to death and planned her morning strategies.

By Friday, the morning of the 23rd, when she hadn’t returned, Eric, my father, a mental-health counselor, and incredibly talented vocalist and musician, made the difficult choice to leave me alone in the car and hike to higher ground to get cell phone service and call emergency services.

My dad who broke his back 5 months prior, who just got out of his brace, said “I need to get this car out of the ditch, get you out of the forest, and find mommy, and without help, that isn’t going to happen.” 

Oh my god. My father cannot trace back those steps, his back. It is futile because there is no way my mother has survived this long in the snow.  We had driven for almost 45 minutes since our last true reception. 

At around 8 AM we had a pep talk.

“to run the car to keep the heat on, drink the juice and water that we had left, and not to open the doors for anyone unless they had a police or ranger badge.”

He always said it was very upsetting to leave me, but I had no shoes. So, there goes my father. In the opposite direction of my mother, and we went the prior night. 

I don’t know if I ever told anyone, but I got out of the car a couple of times, to follow him, without shoes. In what is now 3 feet of snow.  I didn’t make it more than a couple yards every time. This is my first panic attack I remember, the first of many. I screamed wordlessly at the sky, I was screaming for my grandfather who had passed, for god, asking why he would do such a thing to me. I was always dramatic. I asked God why he had to take my mother from me. I was very religious at this time, I had gone through private Jewish Institutions from Pre-school until I was 11. 

I had taken a napkin, covered my head with it, to make a Kippah, and resited every prayer I had remembered from my 1st grade Siddur. I said I needed someone, anyone, to come back by 3 pm or I would join god. Fall in the snow and cease to exist the way my mother must have gone, hours ago. 

It was only 10 AM. 

I pulled my hair out, I punched myself and slammed myself against every surface in the rental car. I got out of the car, multiple times to try and remove it from the ditch, physically. I screamed gibberish words to the songs I heard on the radio. I cried, I shook, I had no reason to live. I begged for each one of my family members to appear before me. And to me, I had no parents anymore. 

I had given up hope. Karen and Eric had not given up hope.

Meanwhile, Karen was on her second day. Traversing a small road, that was now covered in 3 feet of snow, hoping that somebody would come by. Karen pulled a muscle in her left leg and couldn’t lift her foot properly. Her shoe soon became frozen with ice and wouldn’t stay on, so she decided to walk without it. 

When she finally saw a sign indicating that a Grand Canyon visitor’s center was four miles away, she knew that she could do it, that she simply had to do it. She began walking south on Rt 67 towards the Visitors Center. She pulled a muscle, and her shoes were filled with snow. She had to physically lift her left leg each time to move forward. She did that last four miles 10 steps at a time, in 3 feet of snow. It took her nine and a half hours.

At 2:56 PM on December 23rd, 2016 I saw my father and Kane County Sheriff Tracy Glover in a lifted ranger truck. I have been saved, it is the Sheriff. My dad is alive. I bet my dad would say this is the only time we would show any affection towards the police institution. 

Karen didn’t know it, but rescuers were on their way. After walking 20 miles uphill, Eric was finally able to dial emergency services and explain our family’s desperate situation.

According to People Magazine, my dad said “Such a great kid he is. He said he shut the car on and off so he wouldn’t waste gas. Then he passed the time listening to music and sending positive energy out to the universe.”

In retrospect, I think this is a hilarious way to describe my experience. 

We were both treated for potential frostbite, which I had stage 1.

We were put in a hotel, and we got driven around by the sheriffs to the grocery store, to buy a fan, so I could rest. I think my mother is more than dead by now since it’s been over a day in 3 feet of snow. I fell asleep at around 9 PM. 

But after walking 26 miles, dragging a bad left leg with no shoe through the snow, Klein had found another shelter instead — a cabin nestled in the trees about 100 yards away with no power and just a few blankets, unlike the visitors center. She had to break a window to gain entry.

“There was no heat, no electricity, and no food, but it was shelter,” she says. She wouldn’t have survived through another night without it. She felt around in the dark until she found a bed and curled up, exhausted. 

It might’ve been colder there than outside.

The snow was at least 3 feet deep and still falling when Tracy Glover and two other men came upon the fee booth at the North Rim entrance of the Grand Canyon.

About 5 hours after entering the park, Glover reached the cabin. Karen heard voices outside and saw lights through the windows. Shouts about a broken window and footsteps reached her ears, followed by a pounding at the door. She confirmed her presence and the first thing she said to the officer was not to arrest her, explaining her delirium. Search and Rescue staff arrived, providing warmth, hydration, and reassurance about our safety. Within 30 minutes, both teams arrived, and Karen was transported to an ambulance at Jacob’s Lake, then to a hospital in Kanab, and eventually to one in St. George due to severe frostbite and concerns about organ failure. Physicians and rescuers emphasized that had they not found her when they did, her injuries could have been fatal within 12 hours. Her muscle creatine kinase levels(method of measuring muscle breakdown) were 18,000% higher than someone who ran a marathon. Kidney Failure was a large concern. (Normal CK levels are between 60-174 IU/L, post-marathon runners around 300 IU/L, and hers was 55,000 IU/L.)

Between 2:30 am-3:00 am I was awoken by the news. 

My mother was found alive.

In the last month, three people have died due to exposure to the cold in Coconino County.

But now

In the last month, three people have been saved from exposure to the cold in Coconino County.

She was then taken to a regional hospital in Kanab, Utah, where she was reunited with Eric and me, before being transported to Dixie Regional Medical Center. To be treated for stage 3 and 4 frostbite, and kidney failure. 

She said “If I lose a few toes, in the grand scheme of things, they’re just toes. We made it. We’re a miracle. We’re still here for each other and that’s all that matters.”

The doctors performed modern life-changing surgery to completely save all her toes, so she, a runner, can continue to run.

We are alive. 

Karen Klein, alive, survived Kidney Failure and stage 4 frostbite. Eric survived over 35 miles with a broken back. Isaac survived. Because of everyone. 

And though we survived, we are all certainly still surviving. But, we do it in the warmth, comfort, and security; of our own home, that comes with our family. 

Thank you: Karen Klein, Eric Klein, Kane County Sheriff; Tracy Glover, Coconino County Sheriff Jim Driscoll, their respective teams and investigators, the doctors we all were treated by, and the many different therapists we all went to after. Thank you all for collectively saving my life. I could’ve never done it without you.

Izzy Izix

Chiaroscuro

7/8/24

I found it tucked away in a dusty corner of my closet, a photo I never knew existed. It hit me like a punch to the gut, seeing us there, frozen in a moment I'd buried deep. Your smile, the way your hand rested on mine, it all flooded back in a rush of bittersweet nostalgia.

I hadn't thought about you in years, not really. Life moved on, or so I told myself. But seeing that picture, it was like reopening a wound I thought had scarred over. Memories rushed in, uninvited yet undeniable.

We were young and reckless, full of dreams that shimmered like mirages in the desert. I remembered the nights we stayed up talking, laughing until our sides hurt. The plans we made, the promises whispered in the dark.

But the photo didn't just bring back the good times. It dredged up the fights too, the shouting matches that echoed through empty streets, the tears that stained our cheeks, the broken pieces of trust we tried to glue back together.

I saw the moments I wanted to forget the doubts that gnawed at my insides, the insecurities that poisoned our love. How could something so beautiful turn so ugly?

In that moment, staring at our younger selves captured in glossy paper, I felt a wave of conflicting emotions crash over me. Regret for things left unsaid, anger at how things fell apart, and a strange longing for a time when life seemed simpler, even if it was just an illusion.

I hadn't eaten yet today. My stomach churned with a mix of nerves and memories, each bite feeling like a betrayal of the emotions that surged within me. Calories saved for liquor, to numb the ache of remembering and to drown out the questions that clawed at my mind.

I didn't know what to do with the picture. Part of me wanted to tear it to shreds, to erase the past and move on once and for all. Another part wanted to hold onto it, a tangible reminder of a love that once burned bright.

But mostly, I just stood there, staring at that damn photo, feeling everything and nothing all at once. Wondering if you ever stumbled upon it too, if you ever felt the weight of our history crashing down on you like it did on me in that quiet, dusty room.

That photo changed everything. It unearthed truths I'd buried beneath layers of time and distance. It forced me to confront the scars we left on each other's hearts, and to acknowledge that some wounds never truly heal, they just fade into the background until something, like an old photograph, brings them roaring back to life.

In the end, I put the picture back where I found it, tucked away in the darkness of my closet. A relic of a past I couldn't forget, no matter how hard I tried.

Izzy Izix