I Hugged a Serial Killer
The Day Evil Looked Ordinary
I hugged a monster and felt a chill in his eyes.
Not the kind of chill that screams danger, but the kind that slides under your skin quietly—like a cold draft in a room where every window looks shut. It was subtle. Too subtle. A stillness that wasn’t peace.
The room itself was nothing special. Anonymous meetings rarely are. The coffee was burnt. The folding chairs wobbled. The air carried the faint ache of honesty—people trying to piece themselves back together, one admission at a time. We were all there to face our demons, or at least pretend to.
He sat across from me—quiet, polite, the kind of presence you’d call “respectful” if you didn’t know better. When the meeting ended, people got up, hugged, and said the usual things: keep coming back, one day at a time. He opened his arms, and I hugged him.
And for a second, I felt something cold and hollow. Not fear. Not menace. Just absence.
I didn’t know his name. Not yet. He never introduced himself.
A few weeks later, I found out.
The Face on the Screen
I was sitting in Cuyahoga County Jail, half-watching a TV bolted high on the wall. The news flickered between weather, sports, and static. Then a mugshot came on.
Anthony Sowell.
The words underneath said it all: The Cleveland Strangler.
My stomach turned to stone. I knew that face. The dead eyes. The same quiet man from that meeting.
The noise of the jail faded. The jokes, the arguments, the chaos—all of it dissolved. The room shrank until there was only that image on the screen and the memory of that hug.
The horror wasn’t just that he had murdered people. It was that I hadn’t seen it. That he sat ten feet away from me, shared a circle, spoke the language of recovery, and I never once thought monster.
That’s when I learned the first lesson: evil doesn’t always look like evil.
The Shadow Within
For years after, that meeting haunted me. Not because I thought I could’ve stopped him, but because I couldn’t explain how he fooled everyone.
Later, I came across Carl Jung’s idea of the shadow — the dark, unconscious part of ourselves that holds the pieces we repress: anger, greed, shame, rage, and fear. Jung said that when a person refuses to face those parts, they don’t disappear. They grow in the dark.
And if left unchecked, the shadow doesn’t just whisper—it takes over.
That’s what I saw in Sowell’s eyes that day. Not power. Not confidence. But vacancy. The total absence of self-awareness. His shadow wasn’t something he wrestled with. It was who he had become.
The thought hit hard: what separates a man trying to get clean from one consumed by his darkness isn’t moral superiority—it’s honesty. It’s the willingness to keep looking inward.
The Mirror in the Meeting
When I replayed that day, I thought about the others in the room. How many were fighting their own wars quietly. How many were smiling through their pain. How many were lying, not to others, but to themselves.
I thought about my own story—addiction, destruction, chaos. The lies I told to survive. The masks I wore to blend in.
The truth is, I wasn’t any less broken than the next guy in that room. But I was trying. I was willing to face my reflection, no matter how ugly it looked.
And that, I think, is the real difference. Not goodness. Not purity. Just awareness.
Getting clean wasn’t the end of my darkness. It was the start of knowing it.
Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
That’s what meetings taught me—sit with your pain, name it, and don’t let it fester in the dark.
Lessons Learned
Lesson 1: Evil hides best in the ordinary.
The most terrifying thing about Anthony Sowell wasn’t the evil he did—it was how normal he seemed. Evil doesn’t always show up with fangs. Sometimes it smiles. Sometimes it opens its arms and says, “Keep coming back.”
Lesson 2: “I would never” is a dangerous sentence.
That phrase is ego in disguise. Everyone wants to believe they’re different, that the line between them and the abyss is miles wide. But it’s not. It’s inches. And you cross it one compromise at a time.
Lesson 3: The shadow doesn’t disappear because you get clean.
Everyone carries a demon.
He destroyed others.
Mine tried to destroy me.
Clean time, success, love, stability—none of that kills the darkness. You can be years clean and still be ruled by your shadow if you stop doing the work. The moment you think you’ve “arrived,” it’s already creeping back into the driver’s seat.
Lesson 4: Proximity to darkness doesn’t make you dirty. Denial does.
For a long time, I hated that I had shared air with him. That I’d hugged him. I felt contaminated. But that’s not how it works. The danger isn’t contact—it’s blindness. What would have truly tainted me was pretending I had nothing to learn from the encounter.
Lesson 5: Integration beats exile.
You can’t kill your shadow. You can only name it, face it, and keep it close enough that it never surprises you again. Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Recovery is the daily practice of proving him right.
The Human Condition
When I think back to that day, I don’t see monsters anymore. I see people—some aware of their darkness, some not. Some fighting to stay clean, some lost in their own reflection.
That meeting, that hug, that chill—they remind me that getting clean isn’t about removing evil from the world. It’s about refusing to lie to yourself about the one that lives inside you.
I don’t believe in pure monsters anymore. Just people who stopped facing their shadow long enough for it to eat them alive.
So I keep doing the work. I stay clean. I keep showing up. I keep taking my inventory—of resentments, fears, ego, pain. Because I know what waits if I stop.
I hugged a man who lost the battle with himself. And every day since, I’ve made it my job not to lose mine.
When I felt that chill in his eyes, I thought it was something foreign, something alien. But now I know—it was a warning. A mirror. A reminder of what happens when you stop doing the work.
Because in the end, the real monster isn’t hiding in the shadows.
It is the shadow—waiting for the day you stop looking.
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Jason I've been meaning to write to you for a while to tell you how much I appreciate your content.
I went through a lot myself (drugs and a few other things). Everywhere you look, you see smiling faces and the facades of successful lives, but behind them there is often an abyss: life crises, depression, drugs, opiates, alcohol, failed relationships and divorce... It's everywhere. That makes it all the more important for people to finally acknowledge this dark side of themselves and talk openly about it. That's the only way to get it under control.
I don't trust myself. I don't trust my assessments. I know there's a part inside my soul I better not listen to. I've been wrong too many times both in real life and in financial decisions. It helped me become a better person and a better trader as well. The worst version of myself was high on conviction and without doubt or self-awareness. I never wanna go back there.
You remember these Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry cartoons where there's a tiny angel on one shoulder and a tiny devil on the other, both whispering to the character? Yeah I know its meant as a gag but to me that's not a joke at all, that's the reality. Maybe there's ppl out there that can just follow whatever tought crosses their mind because they don't have that dark side. Good for them. I'm not one of them tough. I have to carefully choose which toughts I follow and which ones I better not.
Amazing read 👏🏽