A better life is possible, but it won’t knock on your door; you must chase it, own your mess, and keep going even when it hurts. He grew up in a storm. His mother battled alcoholism, his parents split and reunited, and he bounced between homes and schools so often that he never stayed anywhere long.
He saw the kind of chaos substance abuse brings into a house, yet he loved both parents deeply and still does. His dad put him to work on the farm when he was eight, teaching him discipline he didn’t appreciate then but leans on now. He also remembers waking in strange houses to his mother sobbing and being told to leave because things had spun out of control. In rural Oklahoma with a stepfather, things got worse: meth, paranoia, danger, and the family fled. Anxiety became his normal, even if he envied kids whose families stayed together and whose dads had time to teach them simple things like how to kick a ball.
He once swore he’d never touch drugs or alcohol, until he did. The first drink made him sick, but he chased the feeling anyway. Alcohol turned into weed, new friends, and cough syrup binges. When his parents moved back in together, the house looked like a second chance on the outside, but upstairs, it was parties and pills. After a bad acid trip left him unsure what was real, he left school in eighth grade. A doctor handed him Xanax, and the panic calmed. That became his shelter. He couldn’t smoke weed without spiraling, so he carried benzos like a life jacket for everything cocaine nights, woods hangouts, even sleepovers. A decade disappeared into that routine.
During the pill boom of the late 2000s, pharmacies and bottles were everywhere. His parents quit, but he stepped in, moving pills, making money, feeding his own supply. The upstairs of his place turned into a wrecked playground: holes in walls, spray paint, no sleep, endless laughter, and occasional fights. There’s a memory of someone parking on the lawn to challenge his dad, who shoved the car into the street with a plow truck. It all felt wild but survivable until the bank took the house.
He shifted to a trailer, poured himself into death-metal drumming and writing rap, and then pills tightened up. Heroin and meth filled the gap, and fentanyl brought funerals. Friends gone. Suboxone kept sickness away sometimes. He started selling “clean” drugs at festivals, dressed like a free spirit, quoting Hunter S. Thompson, while stacking acid, Molly, ketamine, and Xanax, waited in his pocket. A Michigan run ended in a SWAT team, a setup, and a charge carrying two to twenty years. He refused to cooperate. Jail didn’t honor Xanax scripts, so he shook through benzo withdrawal behind bars, processed through Jackson, then moved to a tough facility, then boot camp, then home. He’d learned what consequences feel like.
In those same years, his mother went to prison for manufacturing meth. He had a daughter he hadn’t really shown up for. Sober, he realized how much she needed him. He set up child support, took weekends, learned to keep a job and a phone on, and found a recovery group through an old friend who’d turned his life around. But he still knew how to work the system: doctors prescribed stimulants and painkillers, and he added heavy kratom doses. He got engaged, then lost himself cheating, breaking trust, and breaking a heart he valued. He begged for rehab and landed in Florida, where he shook off methadone and kratom and didn’t sleep for a week. He worked a 12-step program, re-found a higher power, and wrote songs that traveled online. He auditioned for America’s Got Talent and performed sober at his mother’s prison.
Then COVID hit. He left Florida for his grandmother’s place, drifted from his recovery circle, crept back to kratom, and found a pill-mill doctor who handed out Xanax for cash. Another crash, another rehab. This time, a sponsor challenged him hard and would not let him hide. He wrote more music; videos reached hundreds of thousands.
His daughter’s mother died from an overdose, and grief reshaped him. He kept showing up for his girl. A filmmaker moved by his song offered to shoot a music video; they pulled it off, and a viral post about his day job as a server pushed his story into the wider light. He started helping others find treatment, mentoring people who ask, and spending a summer actually present with his daughter, watching her grow into herself.
He remembers lying dope-sick on a stained mattress, praying for different days. Those days came, but not as a gift; he had to fight for them, fail, and fight again. He learned that love can survive chaos, work habits taught in a field can save you later, and honesty with the right people can be a lifeline.
