Between Versions 01

Short pauses between the larger stories—personal reflections, behind-the-scenes context and a look at where No Version Left is going next. 

In the first Between Versions, I pause to reflect on what I’ve shared so far, why the hardest stories are still ahead, and where No Version Left goes next.

Transcript

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I'm John Terriel, and this is No Version Left. Before we keep going, I need to pause. This isn't another chapter of the story, it's not another episode. It's sort of a roadmap as to where we're going and why I'm taking you there. Because if you've listened this far, you may think you know where this story is headed. You don't. And honestly, neither do I. Not because I don't know what happened. I know what happened. I lived it. But I'm still trying to understand what it did to me and how much of it I'm still carrying. I didn't create no version left because I had finally made peace with my past. I created it because I was tired of allowing fear or shame or other people's version of me to keep deciding what parts of my life I was allowed to tell. So far I've tried to answer the question, who am I? I've admitted publicly that I'm an addict, and I've shared how much music gave me a voice to the parts of me that had been silent for too long. But what you've heard so far is only the doorway. Because there were entire lives before this one, lives I've built, lives I believed in, ones I fought desperately to hold together, even when I was disappearing inside them. In the episodes ahead, I'm gonna going to go back to those lives. And not to expose everyone who is part of them and not to decide who was right or wrong, and certainly not to rewrite history so I can look better in it. Frankly, I may not in some of them. I'm gonna go back because I've spent years knowing what happened without always understanding the why I let it happen. Why I stayed, why I ran, why I fought so hard to save people I couldn't save, why I could walk into chaos and become exactly what everyone needed. But I couldn't always recognize what I needed myself. And why so many times I chose abandoning myself over risking someone else abandoning me. Those are the stories I'm going to tell. But I need to be clear about why. I'm not turning around just to stare at my past, and I'm not tearing open old wounds so other people can watch me bleed. I know what it feels like to carry so much shame about the choices you've made that your own story starts to feel like evidence against you. To believe that if people knew the whole truth, they would stop seeing a person and only see the worst thing that that person had done. I know how lonely that is. So these stories have to mean more than people simply knowing more about me. Maybe someone will recognize themselves in a choice they thought nobody else could understand. Maybe they'll find language for something they've never been able to explain. And maybe someone who has never lived through addiction or grief or the slow collapse of a life will listen long enough to see the person underneath it. If understanding the why makes someone else feel less alone, or makes someone else stop before they judge, then telling these stories matter. I'm not opening these doors so everyone can look at me. I'm opening them because someone listening may still believe theirs is the only house with rooms like these. That's why I'm going back. Back to who I was before I came out. And to what happened when at 18 I finally did. 18 years isn't a long life, I recognize that. But it's long enough to learn who you're expected to be. Which parts of yourself are safe enough to show, what truths you know might cost you your place in a room. I'm gonna talk about two marriages and two divorces, but not as failures that I can summarize neatly. The love was real, the promises were real, and so were the futures I thought I was building. When those lives ended, I didn't just lose relationships. I lost homes I thought would last. I lost futures I had already pictured, and I lost versions of myself that had built their entire identity around being chosen by someone else. I'm going to ask questions I still don't have comfortable answers for. Why did I stay when something in me already knew? Why did someone leaving feel like proof that I wasn't enough? And how much of myself did I give away, trying to become someone impossible to abandon? I'm gonna take you to California, to the version of me who thought thousands of kilometers might be enough to create an entirely different life. A place where people didn't already know me, a place where I could start over, a place where I could become someone else. But California taught me that you can put an ocean, a border, or whatever it may be between yourself and your past and still find it lying beside you when you wake up. A new place can give you room to reinvent yourself. It just can't tell which version is real. I'm also gonna go back to the loss that first split my life into before and after. The death of my father. Losing him taught me how to keep functioning while part of me was falling apart, how to keep moving while grief was quietly rearranging everything inside me. It left me with promises I tried to keep, questions I never got to ask, and a voice inside me that still demands to know why. Years later, when my mother became sick, I did what I had trained myself to do. I stepped in, researched, advocated, fought. And when fighting wasn't enough, I didn't know who I was supposed to be anymore. Because somewhere along the way I had started to believe that loving someone meant making myself responsible for whether they survived. That if I fought hard enough, found the right answer, but refused to give up, I could keep loss from happening again. But that belief didn't end with my parents. It followed me into relationships where helping became caring, where love became rescue, where I became so consumed by keeping someone else from falling apart that I didn't have to admit what was happening to me. I'm also gonna go deeper into addiction, not to sensationalize it and not to make destruction sound interesting, and not to reduce it to stories about substances, because substances are only part of the story. I want to talk about the need underneath it, what I was trying to escape, what they gave me when I didn't know how to live inside my own thoughts. The moment I knew something had changed, the lies I told myself after I already knew, and the truth I didn't want to face. Stopping wasn't the same as healing. Because removing the thing you use to escape doesn't remove the reasons you needed to escape in the first place. Addiction has many faces, but so does survival. Sometimes a person falling apart is still working, still showing up, still solving everyone else's problems, still making the world believe they're fine. That was me. There are also stories about health trauma, about my body becoming something I could no longer trust. About what happens when surviving something doesn't mean it's finished with you. About careers I built because achievement felt easier than stillness. About being the person I learned to become whenever everything around me was collapsing. Capable, controlled, useful, strong. People praised that version of me. They didn't always see what it cost to maintain him. They didn't see that sometimes strength was just fear with better posture. And then there is the life I'm trying to build now. This podcast, music, business, things I've created from pieces of myself I once thought were gone. But I'm not going to pretend creativity fixed me. I'm not standing here as someone who survived everything, learned the lessons, and arrived safely on the other side. There are patterns I still repeat, truths I still resist, and days when the old version of me feels much closer than I want it to. Some of these stories aren't over. Some of the questions don't have answers yet. And some episodes may end with me admitting that I still don't know. That's where this podcast is going. Into the space between what happened and what it did to me. Into the choices that make no sense until you understand what they were protecting. Into the stories that I've told before. But never this honestly. And into the ones I've avoided because telling them may change how some people see me. I've spent most of my life being afraid of that. But I can't keep letting that fear edit my story. Because if telling the truth about my life helps someone recognize the truth in their own, then this becomes more than me broadcasting my past. It becomes proof that even the parts of ourselves we were most ashamed of, they deserve to be understood. The next chapter takes me back to who I was before I came out. And to the moment at 18 when I finally said the words out loud. Coming out is often told as a story of freedom. Mine also came with a cost. I told my parents I was gay and I was kicked out of my house. In that moment, I learned that love could have conditions. That telling the truth about who you are could cost you the place where you're supposed to belong. And somewhere between saying I'm gay and realizing I was no longer allowed to stay in my own home, a question took root. Who do I have to be to be allowed to stay? And at first that question was literal. But it didn't remain inside that house. It followed me into the relationships I fought to keep other people around and to keep other people from abandoning me. Into the parts of myself that I abandoned to keep them close. Into every version of me I created because losing myself felt safer than being left again. So the next episode isn't only the story of how I came out. It's a story of what happened when I did. And how being forced out of one home left me spending years trying to become someone no one else would leave. If any of this connects with you, if you have feedback, a question, or a story of your own to share, you can reach me through my website, socials, or email. Next time, I'm going back to 18. To the moment I told my parents I was gay, and learned that telling the truth about who I was could cost me my home. Because I didn't leave that experience behind when I left that house. I carried it with me into every relationship, every goodbye, and every version of myself I created to keep someone from leaving me again. My name is John Terriel, and this is no version left.