Author: Derek Castleman

Derek Castleman is an educational data analyst living in Delano, California, with his wife, two dogs, and sometimes his fifteen-year-old daughter (when she is not too busy). He advocates using philosophy to strengthen the journey of recovery and enjoys bringing this insight to the world through his writings and podcast appearances.

Life is short. It is a saying that we so often hear and for many of us we can so easily agree with. It can make sense. The way that days can pass us by…the months…the years. It seems as if everything can just become a blur. Moment after moment rushing by as if they were a speeding train. And for those of us in recovery, we have to struggle with the harsh reality of possible years wasted and gone down the drain to the time in which we were actively involved in our addiction. …the life we receive is…

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My daughter has Stargardt’s Disease. Now, there might be a chance that you are exactly like me and have no clue what the hell that could mean. Until she had been diagnosed with it, I had never even heard of it before. And it might make sense if you, like me, have not. It is something that is thought to affect possibly 1 in every 10,000 people, while something like being bipolar, which I suffer from, is much more common, affecting 1 in 100 people. As my daughter has learned through her trials of dealing with this disease, it is…

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Most people (nearly 80%) quit their New Year’s resolutions by February. Just one month to abandon the goal they laid out for themselves to improve their lives positively. More interestingly, one in seven people never thought they would see it through. Some quit because of societal pressure (40%), and the average American would spend $15,748.19 to have someone keep them accountable (Gervis 2020). Therefore, people are setting goals they never expect to achieve, cave into peer pressure, and would pay someone to make them accountable for keeping their goals instead of finding accountability inside themselves. It is sad when you…

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What is your pleasure, Sir? Now, if you are a horror movie addict like me, you might remember this line. It is the first and last line to the horror movie Hellraiser (I love this movie so much I even have a tattoo of it). If you have not seen this movie, one of the common misconceptions is that the bad guy is Pinhead, a demon sent from Hell to punish. But in reality, the antagonist is a man named Frank, a person who pursued pleasure all over the world trying to find it in its ultimate form, only to…

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