The Path to Healthy

In my 20s I did everything I could to destroy my temple – I literally tried to obfuscate myself from the world through the use of substances. I liked the way marijuana would melt away a hard day. I liked the way alcohol let me be whoever I wanted – lying didn’t seem to be a problem because I was traversing the multiverse. Meth helped me focus when my mind was bouncing around in my head. Ecstasy did what the name implied and I wanted to be in that state whenever possible – I danced until there was no sweat left and then fucked until the sun came up. Life was the use of a substance to feel, to work, to get up, to relax and to melt back into the couch at the end of the self-created chaos. I took Vicodin for hang overs, smoked cigarettes with every beer and chewed tabaco most always – I lived on tilt and I was constantly changing my chemical cocktail to feel some kind of way, but avoiding sober at all costs. I didn’t like the way I felt when facing the bright, clean world without my induced soft edges – I didn’t like the input of struggle, pain, or anxiety so I sprinted towards drunk, high and sometimes fully obliterated. As you can see, I was blowing myself up from the inside.

The only thing that could stop me was the law and they did. When they locked me up, I was forced to sober and started to look at what was important, started to reflect internally with a clear mind. I walked for miles every day with my monkey mind analyzing the first twenty eight years coming to the conclusion that I was destroying my vehicle for exploring this great planet – and slowly, I started to putt it back together.

Speed made me skinny – I was at 150 pounds when I got arrested, I am 6′ 1″ tall, so I was a rail. My general diet was honey buns and Vanilla Coke with a splash of deep fried food in-between. I washed everything down with liquor in the evenings and wasn’t against a cheese dip with some barbecue at a Super Bowl party – this is all just to say that I didn’t consider my health, just 100% self-indulgence. I didn’t exercise, I didn’t eat vegetables and I drank, snorted and swallowed large quantities of chemicals all in service of instant gratification and desire to be beyond reality in some other, untouchable realm. What it took me a long time to realize was that healthy food and exercise can bring you a true nirvana that doesn’t need to be fed with chemicals. It took me a long time to understand that feelings – all of them – are life, and you can hurt and it will make you stronger. I tell my kids to do hard things and the older I get the more I realize that the hard things are the gold.

I engaged in all sports while locked up – we had softball leagues, basketball leagues, handball leagues and flag football leagues and I was front and center for all of them. Jail is broken up into races a lot of times, but I didn’t mind playing on any team as long as I could play. My celly was black, which helped me fit in with the black men, who are overrepresented in jail, and I helped a couple key Hispanic men get their GED’s which gave me some credit with that population and I even played on an all white softball team to not alienate the race that I was associated with. The quality of athletic skill in a men’s prison is very high and I was engaged in basketball games with several high flying dunks as well as softball games where home runs happened every inning – we took out our aggression in these games, because if we stepped out of line and ended up throwing fists – the next stop was a much worse place.

I got myself up to 200 pounds, a healthy weight for me, and was able to train myself into being able to do some pull ups as well as jog a couple miles. I started to buy onions and peppers to make the food taste better and I constantly added healthy foods to my diet as I expanded my pallet – my body and my mind wanted real food and daily exercise. I would build from this foundation – it was not an overnight transformation, but many small changes that started to shape a different man going forward.