September 13th, 2020

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Left: You can literally see the pain in my eyes sitting in the middle of my bloated face. I weighed roughly 230 pounds (maybe more I just stopped weighing myself and I probably got fatter over the next two months) and was in the depths of both my depression and my addiction.

Right: More mirror selfies with awkward hand placement. Weighing in at 158lbs, sober and although not always happy, the constant pain is gone.

Dates are funny. They mean something different to everyone and dates circled on someone else’s calendar can appear somewhat arbitrary without any context. Outside of national and international holidays these dates rarely mean the same thing to everyone, and they can both carry a negative and positive connotations. While October 24th, 2010 may have been the happiest day of your life when your first child was born, someone somewhere on the planet found out they had miscarried or had to bury their child on that same day. Even shared holidays can have completely different meanings to people. For example you may love Christmas because you get to see the smiles on your family’s faces as you enjoy each other, but the guy down the street’s wife left him two weeks before Christmas and now all he feels is loss and pain on one of the happiest days on your calendar.

Today though, we’re going to talk about September 13th, 2020. The world was arguing about Covid, the election was right around the corner so everybody hated everybody, both the S&P and the Dow Jones were down about 2 percentage points, and I was quietly fighting the battle of my life. September 13th was the last time I had to drink a beer to get rid of the DT’s in the morning, it was the last time I passed out instead of falling asleep after throwing back 20 or so beers, it was the last time I contemplated putting a bullet in my head because of how miserable I was, but it was the first time that I surrendered myself to the fact that I was an alcoholic. This past year’s been an interesting one filled with trials and tribulations, but one thing’s remained a constant and that’s been my sobriety.

A Little Background

If you haven’t had a chance to read about my battle with addiction and you’re interested you can find it here. I’ve been told it’s a pretty good read, and if you’re someone battling with addiction go check it out as I’m sure you can relate to a lot of my story and maybe find some comfort in the fact that you’re not alone in your struggles. I’m pretty candid about my story and as a coach one of my life missions is to help people in need, so feel free to reach out if you need someone to lean on at Connor@theLDSP.com. I don’t have all the answers but I’m here and I won’t judge, and I’ll do whatever I can to help you within reason if you’re REALLY serious about it.

I spent the overwhelming majority of my adult life at the bottom end of a beer bottle as a way to cope with how miserable I was. Now there’s no real way to tell if I was miserable from the depression and anxiety caused by the alcohol, or if I was already miserable and just used it to cope but honestly at this point it doesn’t matter. All I know is that for the better part of 15 years, I didn’t go but maybe 20 total days (out of over 5,000) without booze in my life. And I’m not talking having a beer or two at the end of the day, I’m talking 12-20 beers at the end of the day and on the weekends even more. I legitimately forgot what it was like to have a good night’s sleep, or even how to fall asleep without booze. Come to think of it, I never actually really “fell asleep” because I was consistently passing out. Now passing out is very different from falling asleep as alcohol surpasses rapid eye movement sleep (REM), so you actually don’t get much restorative sleep after a night of drinking. This is why people tend to have hallucinations when going through DT’s. The brain is starving for REM sleep, and decides it’s going to get it one way or another and these hallucinations are actually REM sleep while you’re awake. It’s absolutely fascinating to learn about when you’re not going through it.

Less than 1% of the past 15 years involved me not drunk or hungover. It’s actually kind of crazy to think about because I kind of had my life together. I was a pretty good strength and conditioning coach working with all stars and world champions helping make a difference in my community, was in committed relationships, had a solid relationship with my family, had real friends that cared about me, was able to hold jobs and even get promotions from time to time. Life was good enough in the moment BUT it wasn’t going to stay that way. All it took was one event to go wrong and I went spiraling out of control. That’s the funny thing about addiction, you don’t realize how much of a problem it is until it’s entirely too late and by the time I was willing to understand that I had a problem it seemed too high a mountain to climb so I continued to stew in it.

The Sunday Scaries

This may be a new term for some of you, but I can guarantee you that you’ve probably gone through having the Sunday Scaries at some point in your life. You ever have a pretty big weekend of drinking? Maybe it was a wedding weekend, or a vacation, a music festival filled with fun and drinking, tailgating at your alma mater before a big game weekend, or maybe even a two day trip to Vegas where you just blew it completely out because Saturdays are for the boys (and girls), right!? Well that feeling you get on Sunday before its back to life where you’re contemplating your entire existence, going over the poor decisions you made over the past couple days, or maybe you even look at your bank statement and want to throw up a little bit thinking of all the money you blew doing things that are out of character for yourself. It’s a feeling of anxiety and a low level of misery, it always reminded me of that “alone embarrassed” feeling. You know when you think about something you’ve done and you get embarrassed, but you’re like ALONE embarrassed. No one else is thinking about what you did, but you are and you’re embarrassed just in front of yourself. It’s a weird feeling. You might pace back and forth, or stare and look up at the ceiling or even try to distract yourself on social media but one things for sure, you’ve got the Sunday Scaries. It’s basically an overblown short lived anxiety that can be overwhelming if you don’t recognize it for what it is.

Now imagine having that feeling 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 15 straight years. Thats the life of an addict. Sure there’s events in your life that are a good distraction and you can feel genuine happiness at times, but they’re typically short lived and entirely situational. There’s no real smiling, no real joy, just dead eyes and isolation. I remember back when I first got sober my ex girlfriend told me the biggest difference was in my eyes, there wasn’t constant pain in them anymore and there was life in them. I also had the parent of a kid I had worked with who mentioned a month ago when I saw him for the first time in a while that he could tell that I was dealing with something when we first met, that there was pain I was trying to work through. That’s another funny thing about emotional pain and addiction, when people really pay attention it’s so unbelievably apparent. When someone succumbs to the horrible thoughts caused by addiction and depression and takes their own life people always say the same thing: “I had no idea they were going through anything.” That’s just the bullshit we tell ourselves to alleviate the guilt associated with not doing anything to help or even in some cases to make the situation about ourselves if we’re narcissists. People struggling with depression/addiction don’t openly talk about how they feel, but they become INCREDIBLY withdrawn. There’s signs there that people write off, but they’re still there. Maybe they show up drunk at a totally inappropriate time, maybe they text and berate you (hurt projects and causes hurt) late at night, maybe they miss something important. There’s a million ways to cry for help, but most people just see them as inconveniences and get upset with the person as opposed to recognizing it for what it is. That being said, don’t ever feel guilty when someone you know takes their own life, chances are there’s literally nothing you can do for them. It’s tough to put yourself in that mindset when you’ve never been there yourself, but just think about how bad things have to be for the only option someone feels like they have is to kill themselves. When you get there chances are there isn’t much that can be done, I know from experience.

Addiction, Depression, and the Often Not Talked About Isolation

I feel like we’re bombarded by stories about the above topics. This article is actually a prime example of just that. I think as a society we’re finally starting to do a good job of getting rid of the stigma associated with mental health in a lot of ways, and at times maybe too good of a job to be honest. It seems like it’s almost become trendy to be “depressed” and people talk all the time about how depressed they are. They’ll hop on social media and rant about how horrible everything is and that they’re depressed in an effort to garner the sympathy of their friend/follower lists. There’s actually a dopamine rush associated with notifications on your social media pages believe it or not and they’re more than likely seeking that “high”. But I’ll let you in on a little secret here: those going through depression RARELY talk about it. They don’t use it as an attention grabber, and they don’t feel comfortable talking about it. Depression’s a funny thing in the sense that it makes you feel isolated and on some levels even kind of crazy, and trust me when you’re in the depths of it you’re not sharing that information with those around you. You ever wonder why these Ted Talks about depression and addiction aren’t done in the moment and sometimes years or even decades afterwards? It’s because you don’t really understand it in the moment outside of feeling isolated and a little bit crazy, and the depression legitimately makes you feel like you’re alone. You’ll even push everyone away in the moment. I know when I’ve been in the worst parts of it I’ve pushed everyone away, I won’t answer texts or phone calls, might take me a week to return an email and all I feel comfortable doing is being alone. We withdraw from life when it happens. This is where the “suffering in silence” thought process comes from, because you’re literally suffering alone, quiet and completely isolated but it’s by your own doing.

The sad part of all of this is that as human beings we’re biologically driven to bond with things. Whether that’s a pet, a husband or wife, your children or even your friends we have a biological need to create and keep bonds. Growing up I’d hear jokes on TV shows and in movies about how Jack Daniels and Sam Adams are always there for you and won’t leave your side. I thought it was stupid and didn’t get it, but there’s legitimate merit to this. Human beings can bond with anything, all it takes is a series of chemical processes that take place in the brain and boom we can create some kind of bond. When we withdraw from shame associated with addiction and depression there’s still an innate need to bond, and that’s where the problems ultimately lie.

Serotonin and Oxytocin are neurotransmitters associated with bonding and mood (among other things), but there’s another neurotransmitter that mimics the effects of these and that’s called dopamine. Guess where we can find that dopamine rush? We find it in food, drugs, alcohol, sex/porn, video games and even social media. Hell even fitness can create a dopamine rush. Engaging in these habits can essentially change the how the reward center in your brain functions to the point of that the only reward your brain wants is whatever addiction you’re dealing with, and will do anything to achieve it. It’s a lot more complicated than that but that’s essentially how it works. You ever watch that show My 600lb Life? I have an its honestly pretty sad to watch. These people are the better part of hopeless. I’ve also often wondered what the steps were between their normal body weight and the 600 plus pounds they currently weigh. Like when you hit 300lbs was that not a wake up call? Maybe 400? 500? How often did they ignore how big of a problem this was along the way? When they became bed ridden that wasn’t enough? It’s hard to wrap your mind around it. That is until you realize you’re an addict, then it all makes complete sense. You can put yourself in their position and legitimately understand. For example, drinking every night wasn’t a red flag for me? Drinking 10 beers a night wasn’t? 15? 20 still wasn’t enough to make me take inventory of what was going on? NOPE! There are no stops when addiction is concerned, it just keeps chugging along until you’re either dead or until you hit rock bottom. Some people never even get to the point where they realize they have a problem, or are willing to admit that they do until it’s entirely too late and their lives are forever changed.

So when you’re an addict or depressed (I realize I use these relatively interchangeably, and they’re totally different but they tend to go hand in hand) you push everyone away out of shame/guilt. You completely isolate yourself. But guess what doesn’t turn off? That innate need to bond. So what do we do? We bond with unhealthy habits/substances in an effort to feel like a human being. We isolate ourselves because of how we’re feeling, and then “bond” with these substances/foods/habits. It’s a viscous cycle and the only way out is to change EVERYTHING about how you’re functioning.

Rat Park

There’s a study that was done in the 70’s up in Canada and then published in the 80’s that’s gained a lot of press lately. Joe Rogan mentioned it on his podcast during the pandemic and because everyone was dealing with isolation and there was a lot of addiction at the time it became really interesting to everyone. The goal of the original study (prior to Rat Park) was to find out if cocaine was addictive. The original study gave rats in a cage the choice of regular water, and water that had cocaine in it. These rats would essentially drink this water laced with cocaine until they OD’d. They concluded that yes, cocaine is in fact addicting. But wait, there’s more! Bruce K Alexander came along and decided this experiment did not pay attention to the environmental aspects of life, so it wasn’t fair to conclude that cocaine is addictive to the average human. So they redrew the study to not isolate the rats, and give them things to do like exercise and they’d even have friends. Thus rat park was born.

What did they find out when they replicated the conditions of the original study without the isolation? The rats didn’t particularly care for the cocaine laced water and instead enjoyed their community. They had slides, they could have sex, they could exercise and if they wanted to they could use cocaine. They opted to not indulge in the cocaine in favor of everything else. What did this tell the scientists running the study? Addiction is something compounded by isolation. Those rats in a cage by themselves would use so much cocaine that they literally died, but take away the isolation and they enjoy life. Now whether addiction causes depression, or depression leads to addiction can be up for debate and I’m sure they’re both true in some respects. But the fact of the matter is that we can’t ignore the human need to bond with something, and not having that bond can drive us to some dark places. Community is a big part of recovery for the vast majority of recovering addicts, and this study shows why.

Think about it. When you picture a drunk or heroine addict in your brain what does it look like? Is this addict shooting heroine in the middle of a party surrounded by their friends or family? Is that drunk holding his kid on the sideline of his other kid’s football game? Not typically. While this does happen, you probably have visions of an alcoholic sitting at a bar by himself or on the floor of his apartment, or a heroine addict shooting heroine in a street ally or alone in their studio apartment/slum. The stereotypical addict in your brain is someone alone, and there’s a reason for that! Isolation creates the perfect storm for addiction, anxiety and depression.

Anxiety

Anyone here also deal with anxiety? If you’re an addict you know all about anxiety because it’s all you feel when you’re not drunk/high. And chances are if you’ve dealt with depression there was a nice bout of anxiety that led you there. When I got sober, I spent A TON of time trying to figure out what I was going through. I read studies and books, watched videos about people’s struggles with it, listened to podcasts about the subject, and I’m pretty sure I went through every single TedTalk video about addiction and depression. I was obsessed with trying to figure this out and learn about it. You might even say I was……. addicted! It’s a corny joke but it’s kind of true, I have one speed and that’s a sprint just like every other addict. Anyways one thing I learned was that my struggles with anxiety were incredibly compounded by my substance abuse. It never occurred to me that living in the Sunday Scaries 24/7 was a product of alcohol abuse. I mean I knew it wasn’t healthy but I didn’t realize that my anxiety was what caused my brain to crave the reward from the booze. You know when my anxiety went away? When I’d crack open that first beer of the night. It seems like I should have been able to put two and two together but in the moment I wasn’t really looking at it that way, I just wanted the anxiety to go away and booze did it.

Now imagine this Sunday Scaries mindset, ALL DAY LONG. Not just in the evening on a Sunday or a morning after you’ve acted a fool, but all day every day. The things you tell yourself in the moment are rough, and you get pretty hard on yourself and say things to yourself that you wouldn’t say to your worst enemy. This self talk is HORRIBLE. The only thing you can’t do is the thing you tell yourself you can’t do. It sounds stupid but its true. You’re designed to win, and in telling yourself what a failure you are your mind really takes that to heart. Imagine if someone constantly tells you that you’re not good enough. Maybe it’s a boss, a coach, a partner or a even a parent. Think about how that would make you feel. Now, take those same words about you not being good enough and put them in your own voice, in your own head 24/7. At least when it’s another human being you can get some relief from it and brush it off because you don’t spend every waking second around them. But when this verbiage is coming from yourself, there’s NO RELIEF. EVER. It’s always there and it’s debilitating.

Now for me, my continued substance abuse caused this anxiety, which created this negative self talk, which put me into depression, which caused me to escape and numb with alcohol, which caused the anxiety which caused the negative self talk and you get the point. It was a vicious cycle, and you can start at any point in the ride but it’s tough to get off once you get on it and the longer you stay on this ride, the faster it goes. I finally got to the point of wanting to get the hell off this ride.

Early Sobriety is Messy

When I first got sober I was miserable. It’s almost like you’re mourning something even though you know you’re better off without it. It’s like walking out of a long term toxic relationship that has zero chance of redemption. At times you find yourself almost longing to be back with that person because it’s familiar, even though it causes you untold amounts of pain and misery when you’re with them. I felt this way about booze. I thought if I could just change, me and booze could rekindle our relationship and everything would be ok. I also kind of felt like a child, like I had rules that I had to obey. Like I wasn’t in control which was odd because for the first time in a LONG time I was finally in control. I had visions in my head that I was just going to get this under control and then I’d be able to drink again. I was hell bent on fixing myself so I could drink again. When I say this I’m absolutely not kidding, part of my early sobriety was driven by my wanting to be able to drink again. Sounds weird but for a lot of addicts early on that’s part of the motivation as sad as it sounds.

Some people even get weird about it, if you haven’t been through it yourself you don’t really know how to handle it. Hell, I was going through it and I didn’t know how to handle it so it’s the better part of impossible to expect anyone else to understand. I had friends that wouldn’t drink in front of me, and here’s a hint: if someone close to you is REALLY serious about sobriety do whatever you’d normally do in front of them. Otherwise it legit makes them feel bad that you’re abstaining from doing something just because of them, it’s a really quick way to make them feel like more of an outcast than they already do. I had friends who laughed, I had friends that weren’t supportive, I had friends who said “how long are you gonna do this for?” but I also had a ton of people in my life who were super supportive. You want to really know who your friends are? Stop doing something that you always do together and opt to just spend time together, you’ll see in real time that friendship was based on getting hammered together and not mutual interests outside of your need for self destruction. Your sobriety is going to do a good job of clearing out the toxic people pulling you down in your life.

Sometimes the act of abstaining from certain substances can feel weird in public. I know my first month of sobriety I didn’t even want to go out to dinner because I felt weird not ordering a beer, or being in an environment where I’d typically get hammered. I would actually get anxious out in public because I thought it was weird to be out and having fun without booze. I didn’t want to go to the usual restaurants I would go to because at every single one when I would pull up a spot at the bar the bartender would just bring me a Miller Lite. I knew pretty much every bar tender between New Tampa and Wesley Chapel and they knew me, or at least that I was gonna order the better part of 15-20 Miller Lites and tip pretty well. I didn’t want to go to these places because I didn’t want to have that awkward conversation about being sober. It was almost like I had to admit that I wasn’t ok, and that’s a huge struggle for addicts. It’s weird but early on in recovery, the shame isn’t gone yet and you’ve just lost your only coping mechanism (booze/drugs) you had to deal with it. For me, it was just better to leave it alone in the moment.

Falling asleep is an absolute chore. Sure there’s things that you can take to help but as a recovering addict I didn’t wanna run the chance of slipping back out of recovery so I just dealt with the sleepless nights while my body relearned how to fall asleep again. If you’re anything like me the night time is when your head is racing the most. Now I’ve essentially isolated myself from most of the people and things I used to do to try to keep my sobriety, and I’m struggling to fall asleep which caused my mind to race. You know how hard it is to tack on an extra 5 hours of your mind racing to the end of your day? Its BRUUUUUUTAL in the moment, but right now I can look back and have a chuckle about it. It forced me to learn the value of positive self talk, and taught me how to down regulate at the end of the day without booze. But like I said early on sobriety is just messy.

But don’t let this deter you from taking back your own life! The early goings on with sobriety are messy, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the messiness of addiction.

The Last Day of My Life

Now I’m pretty candid with my life story. I feel like it’s important both for me as a way to work through it and get rid of the shame and guilt associated with it, and other people who are going through the same struggles so they can understand that they’re not alone. This section gets heavy, there’s things in this section that I haven’t told anyone outside of a select few people in my life, not even my parents. But it’s been a year and I’ve been able to take a step back, take inventory of it, work through it and it’s something that I’m 100% comfortable talking about. This kind of stuff, I believe, is incredibly important.

In 2018 alone there were 48,344 suicides here in the US and I shudder to think what the number was in 2020. That’s not including overdoses that were basically an attempt at suicide that worked. That’s over 132 suicides a day. That’s 132 people who thought they had no other choice and they had nothing left to offer the world. It’s heartbreaking because these are fathers, sons, mothers, daughters and they all mattered to the people around them, they just couldn’t see it in the moment when life got overwhelming. Imagine being in so much pain that the better option is death. I know this pain, in 2020 I was almost part of this statistic. It was the catalyst for my sobriety and I wouldn’t be here today if something beyond extraordinary didn’t happen in the process.

If you’ve read my original blog on my sobriety you know the headspace I was in at the moment. I couldn’t open my gym, a two year relationship had just ended, I was drinking more every day than any human should drink in a month, I was broke, I felt like shit, I was WAY overweight and I hated myself. I cried myself to sleep on the 12th (which had become a fairly regular occurrence over the course of the previous couple of months) and woke up needing my fix around 9am, but hey it’s the weekend and people are already tailgating for the Bucs game so I figured it’s ok. Oh the mental gymnastics we do in an effort to make this kind of thing ok. I opened my first beer around 9:20 in the morning, and got all in my feels thinking about all of the places I went wrong in life and how I would have done things differently. It’s super easy to Monday morning quarterback your life, but I don’t recommend doing it while drunk. Well I was out of booze around noon and decided to go get more so I ran out to the gas station, drunk at noon on a Sunday. I bought a 12 pack of Miller Lites intending on drinking enough to just pass out and get through the day. That’s all I was doing at this point, trying to get through every day. Got home and continued to get in my feelings, had poor self talk, and just all around making myself feel worse. Then I had an idea that I didn’t really want to live anymore. For a long time I had mostly just been indifferent to life, I was never suicidal but if I got hit by a car or had a heart attack I figured I just really wouldn’t care. I was ok dying, I just didn’t want to go out of my way to make it happen. But this was different, after taking inventory of my life I actively wanted to die.

I started making plans for the rest of my day knowing it was going to be my last. Thought about the foods I wanted one more time, people I wanted to reach out to and let them know that I loved them, local things I wanted to see one more time, and how I would do it. Around 6pm I needed to make another beer run and I was kind of hungry so I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone. For some reason I wanted Hungry Howies Pizza, and it was right next to a spot that I had originally looked at for my gym and I thought I’d stop by one more time and take a look at it. Maybe it would trigger something in my head that would make me want to stay. Maybe seeing it would allow me to envision what my life COULD be like when everything falls into place. So I placed the order for the pizza, and headed over but stopped and grabbed another 12 pack along with a road beer because the pizza spot was a solid 3 minutes away and I’m not gonna not drink on the way right? Well I got there, and I was so drunk that all I could think about was how bad things were, seeing the space for my potential gym didn’t make me feel anything outside of horrible that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. It seemed hopeless.

I drove back home and on my way stopped at the hockey rink where I had poured almost 5 years of my life into building a sports performance department before leaving earlier in the year under circumstances that I’m not legally allowed to talk about. And although I hated that place more than anything in the moment, I still had some amazing times there and was proud of the work that I tried to do there. I made life long friendships there and met some of the best people on the planet working there. I sat in the parking lot eating the pizza and drinking my beers trying like hell to find something to make me want to live. Some connection with an athlete that I made there. Some memory that would bring a smile to my face. Anything. I spent an hour in that parking lot just trying to find ONE reason to live. And I couldn’t. So I drove home and decided that was it.

I still had some of the pizza left and about 4 beers left from that 12 pack I bought 3 hours earlier and I didn’t want all of that to go to waste so I decided to finish them. It was now knocking on midnight, and I was still wanting to die but looking for ANY reason to live. I was so drunk that I couldn’t find any happiness in anything. My life felt as if though it was crumbling around me and everyone would be better off without me so I decided it was probably time. I pulled out a pen and paper to write a note to leave behind. I made sure to tell everyone that there’s nothing anyone could have done, that I was sorry I couldn’t have been better, and not to worry about me because I wasn’t in pain anymore. I was content. It’s funny but most people who deal with depression will allow themselves to burn in an effort to help others, and in writing my note all I could think about was how much I was letting everyone else down.

Now I hadn’t mentioned how I decided to go, but I figured a gunshot to the head would be the easiest and quickest way. I was going to do it in my bed so it wouldn’t make a mess that anyone had to clean up outside of tossing my mattress/sheets and maybe replacing the carpet. I decided to take a shower before so I could feel the happiness of cleaning up after the end of a long day, maybe that would help. Like washing the dirt from the day away and starting fresh, clean, and new. But it didn’t. When I got out of the shower I took some time to cry, and just tried to find one reason to live, and I just couldn’t. The gun was loaded and on my nightstand, ready for me. I walked into my bedroom and tripped and fell.

I woke up the next afternoon on the floor at the foot of my bed with a giant headache which was weird because I essentially didn’t get hungover anymore outside of being anxious. What the hell happened?? Why was I still here? Part of me was pissed off that I woke up, part of me a little bit relieved that I was still alive and all of me was dumbfounded at the situation. I made my way to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror for about 20 minutes trying to piece the previous night together. Did I dream being ready to kill myself? I walked out to the living room and saw the note I wrote so that was a no. I went back to looking at myself in the mirror and noticed I had a small bump on the side of my head and I looked like I had just been hit by a truck. The best I can figure at this point is that I tripped on my way to bed fell and hit my head on the bedpost at the foot of my bed and knocked myself out cold and woke up the next afternoon. I laughed at myself and smiled a real smile for the first time in a very very long time because holy hell, I’m such a failure that I couldn’t even properly kill myself. At least that’s how it felt in the moment but looking back at it I’m pretty sure it was God injecting some humor into my life to remind me what being happy felt like. It worked.

Now you can tell me until you’re blue in the face that God doesn't exist, but this had divine intervention written all over it. I know my home like the back of my hand, I could walk into bed blindfolded from the parking lot. I can, and have crawled into bed while being in a drunken stupor and have also walked to bed when I was seeing double or triple after a long night of drinking without hurting myself. Hell, there wasn’t even anything on the floor to trip over. I can’t rationalize that, and for me faith fills in that gap. He’s got a plan for all of us, and apparently I was pretty far off from fulfilling my part in his plans. All I know is that it gave me a new lease on life, and I wasn’t going to waste it.

Don’t be me, don’t waste 15 years of your life slave to addiction and pain. There’s times where I wish like hell I could go back and change everything that’s happened. Like if I could go back and do it over again maybe I wouldn’t have treated people the way I had at times, wouldn’t have done the stupid things I had done (thank GOD I never hit and killed anyone when I was driving and shouldn’t have), wouldn’t have plowed through as much cash as I had, or maybe I would have, honestly who knows. But I’m grateful for this experience, and the chance to tell the story in hopes of helping someone else fighting the same battles.

I’m 100% serious, if you’re struggling and need help go get it! My email address, phone number and business address are all on this site. I will do literally anything I can within reason to help if you REALLY want it.