With everything expected and asked of me, I fought. Sacrificing myself to every drug available on the streets of Baltimore since I was 12, I did what I had to…lying, stealing, and cheating my way through life, just to score my next bag of whatever substance I could grab and consume. After struggling to finish the 10th grade, I then left all academic institutions behind me forever, oh well whatever who cares not me. And so began the journey of living life any damn way I pleased for almost a decade, and to hell with it anyway because I just wanted to get high and stay high, forever. That is until my intravenous drug addiction wrestled away from me what little life I had left.

Surviving two drug overdoses, and unable to avoid months of nightly future-junkie-self death nightmares, I finally arrived, surrendering myself to the decision of getting clean. But no, not get clean for my own sake, but because my death would most certainly destroy the people in my inner circle. My mind was made up. I saw it, my own death, an absolute certainty I predicted, before my 21st birthday, I knew so for fact. I started growing up little by little, trying to put myself second, putting others first, and doing the very thing that BigBird would preach about every Sunday morning behind his Protestant church pulpit. Thus began my life-long-career of caring and helping, a dynamic that would soon become one of my six great addictions, and counting...

Even once I ‘decided’ to get clean, breaking free of the absolute stranglehold that drugs had on me for almost a decade, the ‘doing’ was the hard part. It would be another five torturous years before shaking that naughty little monkey off my back completely, but I recognized, how long could I maintain my clean time? I hand not successfully completed anything in my life up to that point, except for my resolute resentment and defiance I held for the world. So how in the hell would this be any different? Was such ruse even reasonable, the possibility I could really get clean and stay clean after a tumultuous 13 year addiction, because quite frankly it all felt false.

Upon a deep, dark, and painful exploration into my heart of hearts, I thought I had figured out an escape from this certain death sentence. I fell soundly on the realization and the commitment that more than I WANTED TO get high, I must be steadfast with my resolve to first and foremost NOT want to get high, at least for the next five minutes which was all I could hope to possibly manage anyway. “Just for Today” is a phrase that I assume is meant to be used to help us try to manage pain, trauma, and addiction while building strength and momentum. But it was always a foreign concept to me. I could never do it. Hells bells, a whole entire “today” felt so incredibly long, as if it were a decade away. An entire day at a time? Wishing and hoping to make it through a whole day just by trying to be tough and not think about drugs? Are you kidding me? Hah! I'll be dead by lunch. I had to live minute by minute, then in fifteen minute blocks, then hour by hour, and finally with a slight breeze at my back, I would try to make it out alive and survive just a few hours at a time. Maybe I could make it til breakfast if I was eating that day, maybe til lunch, maybe til dinner, maybe til midnight, or maybe til bedtime if I was sleeping that day.

The Devil himself was lurking in my conscious and in my subconscious, just waiting for me to slip an inch and take this somewhat shitty life of mine away from me forever. I was intimately aware and mindful of this and during more than twenty years of resulting “clean time”, I always felt the master of death scratching at my heels every time I would slow with my forward momentum. I had to keep pushing, keep going, and not stop no matter what, because if I paused for just a second, I could and most likely would find myself back in the darkest of places, at the bottom of the pit inside my own nothingness. This cavity, the last holding cell, a gap between the world that once gave oxygen freely but now, you struggle, your breath under arrest, and then slightly distracted, you barely begin to adjust your grip and then, without a hint of notice, he strikes. With lightning speed and unbearable nuclear force, you're gone, done. Fatally consumed. End of story. It is a very thin line for some of us.

At first, I was trying to just avoid dying. My strength, optimism, and resolve improved as I continued experimenting with how much brutal shit I thought I could endure. Besides needing to stay in the lead of the race against the prince of darkness, I discovered that through total unwavering commitment I could actually find success with linked minor victories, giving my heart of hearts a small taste of hope to try and just keep facing forward. But even when I thought I had survived the toughest thing ever, tougher things just kept coming for me. Major changes in life direction aren't easy and for me and it has become my process of digging deep to find self-truth and then assuming the rather painful position of the willingness to accept any and all physical and mental blows of trauma and heartache to get to the better life waiting for me.

My new addictions, otherwise void of drug substances, would then continue full-bore throughout a professional athletic career, a global corporate business executive career, and a fierce and relentless journey of self-discovery. Then realizing I had become powerless over an otherwise desirable but bizarre effort of caring for and helping others, I realized that I never really got clean at all.

Trying to live fully and out in the open, I threw myself into situations that might hurt me both physically and neurologically. Being taken down by a blow to the body doing something I loved would taste like the most amazing and scrumptious birthday cake compared to my previously-vicious self-inflicted poisonous death pill that I consumed every day, all day. It’s hard for most people to comprehend but I had just skirted death, certain death, and there was no way I was going to sit around and just coast, you know, taking it easy and resting there in mediocrity. I wasn't afraid to jump, even when I couldn't see a safe place to land. I cultivated skills and developed talents I never knew I possessed to celebrate life openly, wildly, and joyfully. It wasn’t recklessness but a pursuit of living boldly out in the light, as far away from that dark death pit as I could be. Pursuing life with 101% effort and void of concern for a slip, a fall, or a break, my injuries would sideline me for a while but wouldn't stop me. My own safety came last because I felt I had nothing to fear as long as I kept going. And the faster I went, the bigger lead I would have on those things chasing, and trying to devour me.

If I thought something was possible, I was quick to throw caution to the wind and just go for it. Suffering 40 broken bones, 13 surgeries, and more than 30 concussions, I'm thankful to be vertical and operating under my own power today. Given the chance to go back and do things over, I would have not slowed down to otherwise avoid the blows but rather, methodically and wisely tried to find ways to go faster, thus able to make it cleanly up and over the obstacles that had previously stopped me in my tracks.

The insatiable responsibility and true love I felt for my wife and two small children found me welcoming more and more responsibilities at work with commensurate pay. With continued diligence, my children could possibly come out of college debt-free, my wife could reside peacefully at home with the kids and hopefully live out a dream or three, and the family unit as a whole could enjoy bites of those things foreign to me, nice things, things I could previously never even dream of tasting.

The big boy career took a toll on my marriage. Without a moment’s notice, I lost everything I had ever wanted in my entire life and my absolute worst nightmare had suddenly come true. Totally obliterated was the complete family unit with both parents operating in synergistic harmony, laughing, loving, and fearing not for the gap and the lull between paychecks. Sitting in my own pool of tears facing the brutal reality of having to reinvent myself once more, I struggled through the devastating divorce. Wrestling with the precariousness of possibly erasing my entire 16 years of clean-from-drugs time, I dodged that hollow point death bullet and instead picked up a resulting five-year alcoholic binge.

As my shattered heart collected and absorbed the small broken pieces of itself year by year, I started to feel whole again. The relatively insignificant physical battery from sport slowed and the surface neurological toll from the brain injuries seemed to lessen. But silently, without barely a sign, tragically and deep within, this catalog of damaging blows to the head continues to grow on its own and could become a monster I might not ever be able to tame.

Still, standing squarely in my own open field of sunshine with bunnies at my feet and rainbows on the horizon, I learned to reflect, to think, and to question everything. Trying to understand what just happened and releasing once held-tight disastrous beliefs that I will try to not repeat again, I sat down to chart a course for my new journey forward. Accepting what I learned to be a constant barrage of challenge and pain, I stood soundly, braced for the ever-present storm of fear, worries, and chaos. I learned to identify and verbally name them when I met them, judgement, blaming, assuming, and of course, the tsunami of lies both from within and incoming. My eyes yearned to see more, my ears strained to hear more, my brain looked to learn more, and I began to build the tools to better handle those things that would surely keep coming for me. I began to become the one I was probably always meant to be, a thinker, a helper, a doer, a teacher, even as the hard rain of emotional viciousness would continue to soak me, seemingly with a relentless pursuit to drown me in my own shoes.

Identifying and accepting what I thought were all my faults and mistakes, I would try yet again, hoping to love with my eyes wide open this time, staying short of letting a yet undiscovered true love number two walk away from me prematurely. Deciding to possibly put the bitterness of true love lost behind me one day, I would eventually find honest forgiveness for her, my true love number one, completely releasing four years of my own ugly and hateful resentment that I harbored and carried around on my person like a five hundred pound suit of armor. In the most unlikely of places, I found new love like no other. Marrying my new true love, the second in my lifetime, my soulmate defined, we loved wildly, travel extensively, and then got sober, together, always together with where we were and where we were going.

But I had even more faults hidden below the surface of my seemingly put-together self and a few more mistakes in love would then put us on separate paths. After holding hands with my soulmate for just short of a decade, we would go off in different directions and the blanket of gloom and despair would come for me once more. I was better prepared and although I still struggled, I decided to be stronger than myself once more and remain in the sunshine.

I dug deeper into the rabbit hole of self to understand what really mattered, what I truly needed, and started throwing away many of the things I thought I always wanted. Walking away from the corporate executive business career and the fortune that just sat there at my feet, literally a seven-figure pile of money waiting for me to pick up, I chose to start living life more on my own terms yet again, just as I had almost 40 years earlier. This time, considering everything I have learned thus far, I tried to put the most critical things before all else. The care of my kids and for others would come first before my own self, before my desire for a blissful love life, and before a positive-balance bank account.

Picking myself back up again and again, each time collecting new tools and the additional strength to face the next big life challenge that was sure to come, I learned to focus on being my best self despite my weaknesses, my fears, and like all of us, my inability to speak pure truth. I had to live my life with purpose and on purpose, surrendering myself to the reality that not by luck, hope, or prayer would I make it. I had to dig in and maintain a position of inner-strength and hyper-responsibility, comparing myself only to the best version of me, comparing myself only to my own maximum potential, and no one else.

It wasn't about the ability to ignore, endure, or otherwise work harder than everyone else in order to survive but rather, I pushed everything else aside and arrived at the one thing, the pure truth of my life. I also learned that I had to make my life mean something, like REALLY mean something, it wasn't an option for me, and making a meaningful life became one of my non-negotiables. I didn't have a choice in the matter of acquiring self-life-meaning because it was a force stronger than me. I thought I mostly had things figured out and then the key to my pure truth and creating meaning in my life turned out to be something entirely different altogether....