By
Updated 4 months ago,January 6, 2025
Growing up in East Anchorage, Alaska.
In high school, I was THAT kid.
The popular kid, the jock, the best player on the team kid.
Coming into East High School I had a 4.0 GPA.
Coming in my senior year.
Guess how my senior year ended?
I got kicked off the basketball team for getting in a fight during a game.
So no more sports.
A month later I was charged with a felony; a crime in the amount of 6 dollars.
My face was all over the news.
East Anchorage basketball star $6 bandit.
All in 365 days.
That was my 18th year.
From college-bound athlete to an inmate, and an alcoholic just like that.
Now here are 2 stats that define my life:
I mentioned what happened at 18 right?
Lost my scholarships, kicked out of school, but really what happened was I lost my future.
I leaned into the streets and the criminal lifestyle.
I used substances to convince myself I didnt care because I didnt want to.
And if theres one thing that narcotics are very good at, they are very effective emotional suppressants.
While I was high, I did not feel, I did not care.
Around age 23, my life was altered indefinitely.
I was sitting in a hotel with a good friend of mine getting high and drunk.
I became so desensitized morally and had no acknowledgement of the line between right and wrong.
Careful and careless was always blurred.
That was the worst day of my life.
First: Get high.
Second: Ignore it.
And at that moment, right after that tragedy I didnt know what to do.
So I decided to do what I always did when a problem presented itself and that was get high.
The problem was, I could only get my hands on one drug.
And that drug was heroin.
And with that drug, it just does not work like that.
I used heroin every day for the next 2 1/2 years.
I quit for one year.
While I sat in prison.
It wasnt until I went back to prison that I finally found a way to change my ways.
But it didnt start like that.
Would you believe it?
Yes, I was in prison addicted to drugs as well.
You are the freaking problem.
You have no one to blame.
You have no excuses.
You got nowhere to run.
it’s crucial that you CHANGE.
I dont think I ever held myself accountable for the way my life had gone all those years.
And when I looked up off that jail cell floor.
I did some soul-searching.
Then I started trying things.
And I started to feel different.
Working on myself from the INSIDE/ OUT was my way out of addiction.
Changing how I thought, which changed how I acted.
Thats how I recreated myself from a criminal and an addict.
To an author, philanthropist, speaker, and a changed man.
And to rewrite my story from a tragedy to a comeback story.
I can still remember thinking that was how I was going to die.
What I live in now is a newfound fondness for the entire human experience.
But I held on and God intervened and my luck finally changed.
Not to give up.
To try one more time.
I dont know what it is about us, but I do know that we all have it.
We all can rewrite our stories.
We all have comeback stories.
Thanks for listening to mine.
