A Man of My Word, Episode 1: My Experience Battling Drug Addiction

All right, what's up, everyone? Derrick Brose here with the Conscious Resistance Network, the Conscious Resistance Live. And this is the first episode of a brand new limited series, limited run podcast I'm doing called A Man of My Word, which is focused on my brand new memoir, my brand new book called A Man of My Word, How I overcame addiction, depression and mental and physical prisons. And I'm so stoked. First of all, this is just, like I said, a brand new kind of podcast that's going to last about six weeks. Maybe there'll be more, but for sure, the next six Fridays I'll be going live around this time and discussing different aspects of not just, you know, giving you a report of review of my book, but really getting deep into the issues that it's focused on. That would be mental health issues, that would be body weight and body image issues. I've got my notes right here. That would be discussing the prison system and the drug war itself, which I, you know, as I'm going to talk about today, I went to prison for drugs. We're going to talk about forgiveness and the power of forgiveness. We're going to talk about my waking up story and how hitting rock bottom helped me wake up and how that everything that I experienced through drug addiction, through mental health struggles, through self harm, led to what I'm doing today and then the future and how I believe that if we're going to not only just help the broader world, but also within our freedom communities, that we actually need to get to a place of being willing to be honest and address a mental health addict and addiction and these kinds of issues, which especially for me as an anarchist, somebody who doesn't want to reinforce the state narrative and to people to think, despite what I'm going to share today about how my life was changed because of all the things I went through. People who understand that the prison system and probation and parole aren't the answer. We're going to talk about a lot of things on this six weeks, like I said, limited series podcast. So I just wanted to take the time to do this because this is something that's extremely important to me. Let me just preface this before we really get into it. I've told this story over the last 13 years now that I've done public speaking. I started doing public speaking in April 2013, a little bit before that locally in Houston, Texas, where I'm originally from. And over that period, I've pretty much always shared my story of having gone through drug addiction. I got locked up and then I Turned my life around. You know, as soon as that, I realized that that's the direction I was going in. I started to use my story as a way inspire and motivate people and just show them that, you know, we can overcome adversity and things like that. But this book, A Man of My Word, which is at A Man of My Word dot com. Let me go ahead and pull that up, is the deepest I've ever gone with this whole story and with. With just talking about addiction and everything in general. I mean this is just. I've never really gone as deep as I do in this book. It's 400 pages. Um, and it's. It really is my story, guys. It's. It's my way of telling about the struggles that I went through and detailing them in a raw, gritty, ugly, honest fashion. So this is not about Derek Brose, the journalist, the activist, the public speaker, documentary filmmaker, or any of the things you may have encountered or met me for over the years. This is very specifically about my addiction and just all the nastiness that I went through and the ways that I used, which are much different than. We're going to talk about this as well. I think in the fifth episode, sixth episode, one of these episodes about why I don't think the AA n a 12 step model is always useful. That's not to say that it is not useful for anybody. Obviously it's useful for a lot of people. I have friends who are, you know, have been addicts or dealt with this who have found it to be very useful. It did not help me. It was not useful for me. It was not something I enjoyed and instead I kind of carved my own path of towards healing and recovery. And I even have issues with that word recovery. So we're going to talk about that as well. And that's part of my goal is that by communicating about all this and getting you guys in the freedom Truth, community, health space, whatever, to start thinking about addiction, to think about what we can do that doesn't have to involve government and these sort of old systems that I think many of us are trying to get away from. There's. This is the website A Man ofmyword.com. it's just a nice landing page. It'll take you to the place where you can purchase the book, including directly from Ingram Spark where I self published or Barnes and Noble Books A Million in the US and of course Amazon if you need to learn more about the book and all the chapters. I'm not going to be reading Chapters here over this podcast, we're just going to be diving deeper into the specific issues. And so as I said, every time I've shared this story, so many people have come up to me. Every talk I've given from the United States, Mexico, Canada, the UK and Costa Rica. Everywhere else that I've spoken over the years, somebody will come up to me when they hear me talk about my addiction, say, Derek, thank you for sharing. I don't have addiction issues, but I have a son who's struggling or I have a daughter who is struggling or I've never dealt with drug addiction, but I have a problem with gambling or with this other vice. And I know that it's important to share this story. And so I know it's important to, for me to have put out this book and told my story all about how I got into drug addiction, how I got into self harm and a lot of other bad thing. So I think we've given enough of an intro. I'll tell you a bit about the, the book itself really quickly and then we're going to talk specifically today all about my experiences with drug addiction. And I've got about five or six stories that I'm going to share. And just as I give you some of this background just to really illustrate some of the things that you'll find in the book, but also, you know, my true experience with this whole thing. I, I know that not everybody has had experience the drug addiction and we all experience that differently. But for me, it was a very, very strong thing and it was not very pretty. So briefly, in November 16, 2005, I was arrested for possession of controlled substance for three and a half grams of crystal meth. I had some bongs and papers and scales. I was selling crystal meth after I had been dealing it and been addicted to it for the better part of 11, 10 months, really. 10 months. And that 10 months itself was part of a bigger period of two years right after high school, into college, where I just fell into drinking and drug use and all this sort of stuff. And it wasn't until I got arrested November and then turned 21, December 1, 2005, that I really, and I realized I wasn't getting out for at least a year, that I needed to start to understand why I was trying to escape and why I was using as many drugs as I had. And so it was like a big, it was a big learning experience. And, and that's what the whole book is about. That's what the book details. My in and out of prison and then my healing and, and all that stuff. But today I want to just be authentic and real about what I've experienced with drug addiction. And since I am doing this live and I don't really do a lot of live streams anymore, I usually pre record. I would love to see your comments. We are of course going to be putting this, this audio out as a podcast. But if you're live right now on any of the platforms that I'm streaming on, I would love to hear your thoughts. Do you have, have somebody in your life who's dealt with drug addiction? Have you dealt with drug addiction? What was your drug of choice? Alco, Whatever, like whatever your addiction may have been, even outside of, you know, drugs, and just share some of that. Be okay with saying that out loud because as I'm gonna reiterate throughout this six weeks podcast, I think it is the pro, the big problem is us not talking about this. And this allows these issues to, to, to continue and to fester because they're sort of beneath the service surface. And I, I noticed this often because when I tell people, yeah, I used to be addicted to crystal meth or when I've gone on television in Houston, Texas or done big interviews and I've mentioned, yeah, I was addicted to crystal meth, I've seen how some people, they sort of shirk, like, oh my God, like they're, they're embarrassed for me when I feel totally fine. I'm like, I'm okay. Are you okay? Because, you know, this was my addiction, this was some crazy stuff I went through. I lived through it and it's okay, it's all good. I'm not stressed about it. So I have no stigma around it. I have no stigma to say technically, according to the, the system, the mainstream system, I'm a felon even, you know, for a 20 year old, drug possession, it doesn't bother me, it doesn't upset me in any way. So I want to open the doors of communication on this. So please, if you got a story to share, share in the comments. Maybe we'll go over some comments at the end. So let's talk about my first experiences with drugs and alcohol growing up. I first smoked weed at the age of 14. I think like a lot of young dudes, maybe I'm just going to speak from my experience who live in the city or in the suburbs. I did a little bit of both. And you find yourself just bored, let's say on one hand, bored and looking for something to do. That's kind of where I was coming from. And at the same time I was also coming from a place of, as we're going to get into in the remaining weeks of intense, intense depression and, and internal trauma that I didn't know how to deal with at a young age. And I don't think that my family, specifically my mother, had all the tools or the knowledge to know what to do with three kids who were clearly dealing with trauma from their birth father being in and out of their lives, coming in and out of prison for his own drug addiction. Right. So I was dealing with that and I was also kind of bored and I smoked weed with some friends the summer after eighth grade, going to ninth grade. It didn't become a normal habit for me, smoking every day or anything like that, but I did smoke here and there throughout high school and especially like on the that summer, I remember summer before high school, smoking a lot of weed, smoking a lot of blunts, starting to get into some trouble into high school. We're not going to get into the underlying reasons that will be in the coming episode when we talk about my mental health issues and struggles that I went through and sometimes still do fights, just getting suspended from school. I was really starting to just go down this path of identifying with being the crazy kid. But I wasn't on any drugs. So this is just occasional weed smoking, but no drugs around me and, and I didn't even get drunk for the first time till I was 18. I had few times where I drank beer around friends and it tastes like piss to me and so I never got excited about that, never wanted to go do these weekend parties. It just wasn't my life. I was, as I said, pretty depressed. So I wasn't much of a partier. And I hadn't quite realized that drugs and alcohol could be an escape mechanism. That was coming shortly after that. So I graduated in my first semester of senior year. I graduated early from all of high school and my friends were going back to second semester of senior year. After Christmas break. I was starting my first semester at Houston Community College. I graduated. I wanted to get out of the house as quick as possible, wanted to grow up. I just turned 18, graduated early, moved into an apartment with my older brother, got a job working at a warehouse, you know, full time work and was doing community college. And I was barely making it when I first started. Just like the wake up at 5am, go to the, do the warehouse for a couple, you know, the whole morning up till two in the afternoon, then walk over to the community college, take classes in the afternoon and then come back home and, you know, try to chill and have a life. And it didn't take long before that already sort of shaky situation was just completely shattered. Once drugs did get. And alcohol did get introduced into my life. That first time I got drunk, 18, living with my brother with his friends, and they were there all the time. And I remember the first time I got drunk, I took 18 shots of tequila. Why? I don't know, but I did. And that was, you know, this is in the book. I got drunk and wasted. Like, again, not just a couple of beers. 18 shots of tequila. And ended up rolling around naked on the floor. And my brother and his friends filmed it. This was 2003. 2000. Yeah, 2003 going in 2000. No, 2002 going into 2003. So cell phones, yeah, we had dumb phones, but they were definitely not like smartphones. Everybody videotaping. But definitely somebody had some kind of handheld camera, because I remember my brother being an ass. And every time people would come over, particularly my girlfriend at the time or just other friends, they would pop this tape in of me rolling around on the ground naked, all just like. Like being from tequila. Too much tequila. And so that obviously started to become kind of a regular thing. I just. I didn't. I wasn't particularly good at drinking alcohol. I remember I would just take a. Take a shot or started to do beer bongs because it felt like quick and over and just into my head. And then I could just do it really quickly. And before I knew it, I was in my, you know, my joyful, sort of joyful, dazed, inebriated state. It was also at this apartment with my brother and his friends that I first got introduced to X to ecstasy, mdma, through a. A chick that I was seeing here and there, one of their friends, and she introduced me to it. And so then eventually my brother and I get into a big fight and that apartment ends. And. And as summer of 2003 came about, that is when I really, really dove into drugs in a. In a heavy way. Again, I'm not going to give you guys the full details of everything that's in the book. I encourage you to pick up the book, but I don't want this to be just me telling the story of the book. Today's episode is focused on the drug addiction, so excuse me if I don't tell you every single detail, but I have written down here about five or six different stories that I do want to highlight from this time period going into summer 2003. Being essentially homeless for a little while, moving in with my friend, starting to party with this crew of friends I had. And we were always looking for trouble. We were just trying to start fights. We were, you know, starting to consider robbing a Taco Bell. I mean, all kinds of different things. We called ourselves Project Mayhem, and there was a lot of alcohol and drug use associated with that, particularly me and one of my buddies, we were the. Definitely the. The ones who would get into the harder drugs and eventually just from, you know, being drunk all the time to then starting to introduce Xanax to the equation, and then, of course, taking ecstasy quite a bit till I became like a freaking zombie for six months of taking so much ecstasy because it does deplete your serotonin and other neurotransmitters in your brain and can leave you feeling kind of like just depleted. So that period, 2003 till 2004, and as I said, I eventually get arrested November 2004, 5. So that whole year of me getting out of high school, going to summer, going to community College, all of 2004, I'm just bouncing around from taking a lot of Xanax and being barred out, taking a lot of MDMA and just being super hyped up all the time and. And making bad sexual decisions and cheating on friends, girlfriends and my girlfriends and things like this. Just making bad decisions all around and. And drinking, of course, and experimenting with acid, and that was sort of what we were doing and that enough on its own, but I consider most of that to be sort of playful in a way, and I know that might sound crazy to some of you, but more like playful. Just something you do after college, after high school, you know, that sort of thing. During college, after high school, some of us, not all of us, of course, but do get into drug use and. And partying for a little bit, and then it kind of fades away and you move on with your life. That's what I would consider 2003, 2004. But definitely by the end of 2004, I was getting pretty heavy into these drugs, Xanax and others, and I was just making a mess of my life already. I'd gotten a few arrests for public intoxication, stuff like that, but I did eventually start to kind of pull my life together in late summer, 2004. Met a new girlfriend, wanted to get my stuff together, got a job, somehow under the influence of bar of Xanax bars, for those of us who use that name. Got myself a job, though. Got myself an apartment, got a new Girlfriend. I was like, all right, I'm getting myself together and. And was kind of shifting away from being drunk all the time and being fucked up all the time. And then in January 2005, a couple months after I got this apartment, some old friends who I hadn't seen since high school came back around, and, you know, I welcomed them in, and they were definitely drifting further into hard drugs. I knew they were doing coke, and so coke started to get introduced to my apartment. I really, you know, I'm not the kind of person to judge or. And at that time, if you put something in front of me, I probably would have tried it no matter what it was, but I was being responsible. I was like, all right, guys, you do your party and lock up when you leave. I got to go to sleep and go to work in the morning. Eventually, of course, I start getting pulled into the coke. They also had started to experiment with crystal meth. Crystal meth gets introduced. So January, you know, I move in this apartment, I think late November, December, by February, Valentine's Day, 2005, I was evicted. So it only took about a month and a half of meth being introduced, where everything just went and fell apart to complete. And then I just got pulled into this world of again, being homeless and then getting sucked further into this drug world and. And all the things that. The trials. So that all leads to me getting arrested in November 2005. And. And so, yeah, that's basically what I want to cover today, is that there is this two to three year period of me going from smoking weed every now and then and having, you know, taking tequila shots and being the silly drunk guy at the party to then getting, like, into the darker stuff. And so one of the stories I want to tell which kind of relates to. It's. It's related to drugs, but a different type of drug. And it will be touched on next week when the second episode of this podcast, which, as I said, is a six weeks podcast. The second episode, we're going to talk about the mental health side of my journey. This one is sort of mental health and drugs, because I tried to. I attempted suicide, and I attempted suicide with a drug, but not a illicit street drug, but with Tylenol. Taking a shitload of Tylenol this summer of 2004. And I was just kind of. I just was ready to die. I was just dealing with a lot of mental health things and lack of self worth, and I was partying a lot. But I was also just starting to feel guilt from, like, the cheating on My girlfriend and just different things I was not facing. And of course, as I said, that underlying issue that was the root of all my drug use, which is my absent father and his, his prison sentences and his in and out line of my, you know, in and out of my life. And I just, I just wanted to die. So I ate several bottles of Tylenol and quickly learned, okay, you can kill yourself on Tylenol, but. But it's a slow, painful, miserable death. It just destroys your liver. And I just remember that night and I talk about it in the book, how I, my, my, my friend's sister, who I was fooling around with at the time when I was living with them, found me and I'm just like looking totally pathetic and she's like, what's going on? And I, you know, eventually told her, what's up? My friend shows up and they're both kind of sympathetic, but also kind of like, what the are you doing, you idiot? Why are you trying to do this? And I ended up having to puke up my guts the whole night. I'm sure that did not help my body and the damage that was done to it because there was quite a bit of damage done over the years from both street drugs and doing things like that just because I wasn't thinking straight. Another story that comes to mind, and I want to also make it clear, nothing that I'm trying, that I'm sharing here today is intended to be glorifying any of this stuff at all. I'm just being real and honest about some of the things I've been through. As I said earlier, there is a tendency, I notice, within drug users communities, whatever you want to say, where there's like war stories of drug use. And this is one of the things I freaking hated so much and where I knew that I needed to do something better with my life because I would spend time around these people that all they're doing is just getting up all the time. And every time it's just like talking about another time and how up they were. It's like, oh, do you remember that one time? Oh yeah. We went and we took so much coke. Oh yeah. We were doing it just like. And then, oh, this other time, it's just like once you get sucked into that whole world, pretty much that's all you're thinking about. That's all you're doing. That's all your, your whole life is oriented around that. So I'm not here to share drug war stories or to glorify them or anything. Like that I'm just sharing my personal struggles. I'm not particularly proud of many of these things. You might hear me kind of nervously laugh about it sometimes because some of it I do think is funny. It's like, okay, I went through that, I survived. But there's a lot of people I know. I can count many of them on my hands, including my own father who died of drug overdose. Throughout my life, I've been in and around drug addiction, alcohol addiction on both sides of my family, the bro side of my family, the Sanchez side of my family, and seen people go to prison. Been there myself. Like, I'm not promoting this, trying to glorify that. So if anybody who is, you know, under the influence of drugs or struggling with that, just make sure you understand that, my friend. I'm not here to glorify what I've been through. Just sharing it for educational purposes. So the second story is about another one I'm really not proud of. When I lived in that apartment, that period of time when I was living in the apartment that I tried to turn my life around that turned into a drug house, one of the things we used to do was huff Freon. Now, for anybody with a brain, you probably either don't know what Freon is, and if you do, you're probably thinking, what the hell is wrong with you? Which is exactly what you should think. Freon is this fluid that comes out of, that's put inside air conditioning units and in refrigeration and stuff like that. When you live in an apartment complex, you know, one of these giant complexes where there's a building with like 10 homes in it and then a bunch of those buildings, and in the back of those buildings they have air conditioning units that are outside. And you can go ahead and if you know what you're doing, you can get Freon out of there. That's all I'm going to say. I'm not going to give anybody any clues or anything. But we would go out there, sneak out in the middle of the night and we'd fill up like a freaking five gallon trash bag, or probably bigger than that, full of Freon. You got to have gloves on because you'll burn your hand. You're freeze your hand, then it'll burn you from the cold stuff coming out, the Freon coming out of the AC unit. As you fill up this bag. We run back over to my apartment in the middle of the night, sit around in a circle of idiots and pass around this bag of Freon. And you just sit There. Oh man. And you get like, you hear what we would call the wawas. Anybody who's ever done nitrous, similar, much less harmful, they're both pretty bad. I don't recommend them. That's the thing is all these drugs, the only thing I'd say has any redeeming value is cannabis. And even that can be abused as well as psychedelics. But we'll get into that later. So I just remember this time. I remember that we would go out there, we would get the Freon, we'd bring it back to my apartment. We also used to use it at one of my other friend's house. And just as a sort of visualization of how freaking messed up we were. I mean, we're like teenagers. 16, 17, 18, 19 year olds getting up, all got weird home life situations going on. But you know, for the most part we're okay. But when our parents are gone, we're sneaking in the backyard, we all got our own little bag of Freon and some gloves. And it's like one of us after the other in a line. I remember my friend goes up to the AC unit in the back of his house and he fills up the Freon. He kind of moves out of the way and does his thing. Then the other guy comes up and starts filling up his bag of Freon. But instead of getting out of the way, he just decided to hit it right there. And when he took this big hit, like breathe in, inhale this Freon, he just passed out right there. And my next friend just kind of comes and moves him out of the way while he fills up his bag. You know, I mean, this dude, we, we could have died so many times. And one of the stories I talk about is I remember clearly because it's just in my mind. Despite huffing Freon, I still have a brain. I remember sitting in a circle of people and we're huffing the Freon and I was introducing some new people to it, sorry, whoever you were. And I remember we're. We all just taking our hits and it's like you're hearing the wawas and everybody's voice sounds really deep. It's like, oh, whoa, man. And I remember we're just all laughing and being silly and somebody says, I think it was me. You know what that sound is? That's, that's the sound of your brain cells exploding. And everybody just started freaking laughing even harder because that's probably what it was. And it's sad, I think about that. I was like, wow, wow, I'm Glad I'm alive. One of the other really traumatic, traumatic events that I went through whenever I was in this addiction, which also, again, as I was pointing out, I think that psychedelics, when done right, can be teachers. And I. This is something I still believe. You know, I want to make that clear. I got. I broke free from addiction, but I am not 100% sober. I have a drink every now and then. I've recently been taking a break from cannabis, but I typically do smoke cannabis here and there's. And I do believe in the power of psychedelics when done in the right setting. I know that everybody would agree with that. And some people take a sort of 100% sober approach, and I think everybody should do what works for them. But for me, there were many times when I was in the depths of my addiction where my experiences with psychedelics, particularly acid and mushrooms, seem to be offering me a vision of a path, a way out. And in some ways, I listened. In other ways, I. You know, obviously I got arrested, so I didn't fully listen. One of those stories, the craziest one I can think of. Well, one of the craziest, craziest ones is when I took 10 hits of acid when I was going through already sort of a deep, emotional just breaking in my mind where I. The girl that I told you I moved in with the apartment to get my life back together. Well, we split up, and. And this is all detailed in the book. And so I'm having this super, like, breakdown where I've lost several girls that I believed I loved and cared about. I'm also still dealing with the trauma of my father, and I'm also on a lot of drugs. And I just couldn't quite get it at the time of, like, maybe taking all these drugs is not making it easier to think about things. Maybe I should slow the f down. But I'm going through this deep breakup, and the. And the way I would deal with almost everything at the time, if it was hard, was just like, all right, I'm gonna take a bunch of bars and black out, or I'm gonna just get wasted, or I'm gonna take 10 hits of acid. So I happen to have picked up some acid on this day because I was dealing meth, I was dealing acid. A lot of people knew me for acid from 2003 till maybe as far as 2012, because, as I said, I. Not only was it, you know, this was a job, but I believed in spreading psychedelics. And so I would always be in possession of psychedelics and at this time, I'd pick some up and I'm going through this deep emotional state. I was hanging out with my younger stepbrother who's in the book. His name's little Joey. And he, he was being introduced to my world of drugs through my friends, unfortunately, because he was only 15 at the time. And he got a very quick lesson on all the things that me and my crazy, stupid friends were doing. And so he had taken acid here and there, and me and him were hanging out together. I told him, look, I got a bunch of acid, let's try to sell some. He. I gave him a couple hits. I took like 10. And then we were going to go to the local mall to sell some to some of his friends that he thought might buy them. Well, as you can imagine taking tenants of acid, it doesn't take long for your body to start freaking out your mind to start freaking out. I'm pretty good at handling it. I was driving my Camaro at the time, and we make it to the mall and I'm just like, you know, my body's starting to overheat. I can't even see straight. It's starting to hit me pretty strong. And again, I won't tell the whole story, it's in the book. But I tried to get out of the car. I basically fell flat on my face. My. My little brother's like, dude, just stay here. I'm going to go look for some friends. And. And he puts me inside, back in the car. And I remember as soon as he left, like, it just felt like this. I don't know, like, wow. And I was unconscious. Like, I just felt like the world just like a circle, sort of like the end of a movie or something, just closing around me. And then I woke up. And he's like, yo, dude, what are you doing? And I don't know how much time had passed, but he went inside, tried to find some friends, had no luck, came back and finds me halfway out the car door, just passed out on the parking lot of this mall on like a Friday night with hundreds, if not thousands of people around. Gets me back in the car and it's like, dude, what the heck's wrong with you? I was like, I don't know. I don't know. What happened, man? What? What happened? He tells me he's fine, he had no luck, says, let's get out of here. And I couldn't find the car keys. And, and long story short, it turned into a three or four hour adventure at the mall with me Tripping balls on acid and having some heavy hallucinations to the point of I looked at him and myself and I could see my hands and I could see like skin flaking off me. I looked in the mirror, I could see myself as like a homeless, you know, vagrant bum. And I could see him too. And, and it was just like I was seeing the future if I didn't change my ways. By this point I had already been hooked on crystal for about six or seven months and been in and out of this, you know, whole drug period for almost three years. And so I was definitely like getting a message and, and I, I mean I was tripping hard. I remember at one point I was looking at the street lights of the parking lot and I was able to turn them off with my hands. I was like. And he was seeing it too. Which is whole trippy thing about being on psychedelics. Sometimes you have shared hallucinations and for a minute I convinced us like we were stuck in some time loop. Anyways, long story even shorter. We eventually get out of the situation and I get, we get back to my mom's, I'm able to drive home despite tripping on this, all this acid. We make it inside. I remember I go into my room that I was staying at the time and I'm still of course wide awake, just tripping balls. And I look into the mirror and I see this, this three way splitting of my faces where I, I could see on one side of me was this just like crazy manic version of me. Like yeah, yeah, let's go party. Come on, come on, let's go, let's go. Just like ready to just rage. And there was this other part of me that was very sad and very confused and then in the middle was, was just me and I, and I don't know how to describe this other than I had a three way psychic telepathic conversation with myself. Just sitting there in the mirror all night for several hours talking to myself and just going over everything I'd been dealing with. All the ups and the downs and the breaking of relationships and cheating and lying and getting into drug dealing and just everything. And I was at that time definitely selling a lot of crystal meth too. And so I just, I stayed up all night having that conversation. Eventually I passed out. When I woke up the next day, I decided and I went with my younger brother and we went and just basically took all the meth I had, which was about fifteen hundred dollars worth, somewhere around that, and we just went and threw it away. In a dumpster and, like, you know, buried it, got rid of it. And that was a big sign in my. Of. In my mind, which unfortunately I didn't listen to. That was. Had to be July or August 2005. And as I said, I got arrested in November 2005. So there was a brief kind of respite where I might have stopped selling drugs for a week or to. If that. I doubt it was even that long. But it was definitely a message of like, oh, my God, what the hell am I doing? I was also starting to have a lot of, like, bone pain and just physical pain from all the heavy drug use I was doing. And. Yeah, and so things like that. I felt like the spirit, if you will, of that medicine was trying to tell me, dude, like, you are headed down a bad place. Like, you need to wake the up. And I got the message. I mean, I didn't fully listen, but I understood the message. Another story, this one is about my sort of machine gun heart beating after doing lines of what we called 50 50, we would do at my apartment. A lot of cocaine and a lot of crystal meth. And we did them together often. You know, everybody had their favorite pet drug in my apartment that I was living in. So it was me. It was my original apartment. Once I got evicted from my job. Excuse me, When I got fired from my job that I used to be, I was working at a barbecue restaurant, cooking and all these giant pits and just busy all day. And I was. I was loving it. And then eventually, because of Crystal Matthews, I got so weak that I couldn't even carry these giant boxes and do the job. And I lost the job. And so some of these old friends who had came around, one of them in the book, his name is Brian, he basically said, hey, man, well, I can help you pay the rent, Let me move in, and we'll sell drugs together. And that's what happened. Then another one of my friends, older friend, sort of mentor, inspiration, some ways for my younger, confused self. He was hooked on opiates. Laura sets, heroin, things like that. The buddy who moved in with me, he was hooked on cocaine, and I got hooked on crystal. We were one heck of a bunch, you know. So every night we're either doing coke. Crystal, he's popping some. Some opiates of different kinds, or we're combining all these things together. This was just like a night, a daily, nightly thing, because we would sleep all day. And then my house ended up becoming, like, known as the spot for all the different local high school and College kids, whoever else who wanted to party, they could come show up and we'd stay up all night doing whatever. There was pretty much always going to be drugs around and we had things for sale. So in that environment, I mean, I was doing a lot of drugs. But on the final night of my apartment, whenever I got an eviction notice, after crazy night of other things happening with me throwing a chair through a window when I got the eviction notice, I mean, I just, I realized I was screwed. I was like, I have no place to go. I burned bridges with my family. I'm hooked on these drugs now. I've been selling drugs and I got to be out of here in 48 hours. And they, you know, I just basically started throwing away all my furniture. I basically had this huge parties hold all my friends. This is like a. And I say friends loosely. These are people who came around because they knew they could party. I thought some of them were friends. And I was looking for real friends and community, but I didn't find much. But people were like, hey, coming out. This is the going away party. Everything must go. I got to get the hell out of here. So if you want a couch, take it. If you want something, take it. If you want drugs, come buy it, because we're all moving out. And on that night, we were doing these giant plates of what we would call 50 50, which was just coke and crystal just, you know, mixed together. And we didn't do little small lines. I mean, we. You pull out your, your dinner plate and imagine a line going from one side to the other. That's the kind of thing we were doing. You fill a plate like that with four or five or six lines and pass it around the table. And I remember that night, there's just so many people there partying, getting down, and I'm just like, oh my God, what the hell am I going to do next? I've already like taken all my furnit and dumped it at the dumpster. Basically, the house is pretty much empty and we're all just partying in it. And I will have to figure something to do out, you know, the next morning. And I do. I had like the last bit of coke that I had on this particular night because I bought a bunch of cocaine to make some money before we moved out. And I basically set out some lines of coke and some crystal. I think I was trying to do all of it. It's like it. I sold as much as I could. I'm going to do the rest of it. And I Had this giant plate with, with four big lines on it. And I remember just grabbing a straw or rolled up paper or something and just 1, 2, 3, tried to make it to 4, got to 3. I was like, oh, I can't make this. And I just kind of passed it off to whoever was standing next to me. Went and fell into my room, fell onto the bed. And I'm just laying there just in like deep reflection, like, oh, what the hell am I gonna do? And my heart's like beating, beating out of my chest. Like I thought I. I did think at that moment, like I might die. Like, holy am I. Did I just kill myself on my last night here? Because, Yeah, I was 20 years old and I guess a 20 year old heart can hear, he can handle it, but anything, you know, can go if you push it too far. And yeah, I just remember that night just being in this deep reflection, having no idea what's really coming next for me, where I'm headed next, but just realizing, like, all right, this is, this is life right now. I might as well try enjoy it. Yeah. Now another story that I want to share. As things started to kind of progress and, well, both in good and bad ways, in many ways. That lesson I got from acid of like, hey, you need to wake up. You're heading a bad direction. I continue to reflect on that. I mean, there was, as I talk about in the book, there's a chapter called, are you even enjoying yourself? Because I tell this story of how on one of those many nights at my apartment with everybody doing drugs, I tried to talk to a friend and just try to be real with him about like, hey, this is what I'm dealing with, man. I think I'm. I'm depressed. I think I'm going through this. And I remember him saying that, he's like, are you even enjoying yourself? And I remember clearly saying, no, I. I don't think I am. I just don't know how to stop. I just feel like everything's just going so fast and just keep screwing things up everywhere. And as I say several times in the book, I was the architect of my own pain in all these different ways. And, yeah, and so I was realizing I was headed in a bad direction and I needed to find something better, but I just, like, couldn't help, couldn't get myself out of that. So after getting evicted, I'm homeless again for a while. I end up getting pulled further and further into the drug world. End up becoming like one of the many drug runners for this dude who would later get arrested and go back to prison. And there was actually an FBI bust in. In West Houston in 2005, where several people who I was working for indirectly, I was nowhere near any sort of top of the totem pole, which is one of many people in a dude's notebook who owed him money and who were selling drugs for him, but the higher ups would later be arrested. And so I'm going further into this world and just realizing, like, I need to stop. I want to get away from it. I start hanging out with this dude who was a little bit older than me. He'd been to prison before and claimed that he was also trying to change his life. And he always just got me into some scheming things. We're always scheming. Breaking into storage units to sleep or just all. I mean, all kinds of stuff. This dude knew how to rob people's houses. I was never involved in those robberies, but he kind of took me under his wing, you could say. And he said he wanted to get himself together and that we should get an apartment to get our lives together. I was like, great, let's do it. Let's figure it out. So we get this apartment in West Houston, and right away he tells me that he was able to get the apartment by giving the apartment managers some amount of crack. I don't remember what, you know, crack cocaine. I don't remember what amount it was, but he was just like, yeah, yeah, they happen to be, you know, enjoy crack every now and then. So I was able to give them some. And they gave us six months free rent and free move in. So, you know, we're good for a while. And I just like, okay, that's not exactly the start I was hoping for, but I guess, you know, what a deal is a deal. We get to move in, no rent for a little while. Like, I can get on my feet, get off the streets, etc. And. And he was you know, also saying, like, yeah, we're not going to be. This isn't going to be a drug house. I repeatedly told him, like, please do. Like, I already. I just lived in that. I'm really trying to get my life together. Let's not do the, you know, the. The heavy drug thing. And that was fine, and we both agreed on that. But it only took a few days for me to realize that this entire complex was filled with crackheads, which is why the apartment managers were on crack, because literally, there was crackheads everywhere. I'm sure there were some regular families living their lives in this unfortunate situation. But there was definitely crackheads all up in that apartment complex. And at first, you know, this dude who I was living with, you know, his name's Jason. In the book, you know, we. I said, like, okay, fine, people are going to be doing their own thing, but we're not going to let this turn into a crack house, right? Because I was already starting to see partying was starting to happen. Certain people we knew from my previous apartment that I knew smoked meth were starting to show up. And. And again, it. Eventually it all happened. It became a crack house, it became a math house. I stayed away from the crack, the crack, but I was still using meth. And it was just. I could just see how crazier and crazy. I'm like, oh my God. Here I'm again, I'm living in an apartment and it's freaking turning into drug central. Like, no, I need to get out of this. And so I kind of did my Harry Potter thing and I ended up living in this little room under the stairs. I mean, I. I say room very loosely because it was more like a storage closet or something like that. You know, one of these sort of triangle rooms. Literally like a Harry Potter type situation. I put the few possessions that I had in there, which was like a backpack and some clothes, a little. I had like a stereo. And I was obsessed with Pink Floyd at the time. I was still taking a lot of acid again, like I was looking for answers and knowing that I had that, it was something else better for me. And so I literally locked myself under those stairs and that. That closet, in that room for. For days at a time, just tripping balls on. On acid, listening to Pink Floyd with the freaking stereo blaring all the way up and just trying to like. It just felt like like many people who unders, who've experienced psychedelics, you might know, like, it feels often like there's a message that's supposed to be imparted to you and you're kind of just. It's on the tip, your tongue, it's right there that, you know, you could tell there's something important being communicated. You're just not quite sure how to get it. And I was in that situation just going deeper into my introspection. I know that might sound crazy and just like more drug use to some of you who have no experience with these things, but for me, this was a big step because it was in that space that I realized, like, I gotta stop. Like, I'm going to quit. I'm going to quit. Crystal meth. And it was through that that I was able to actually do that. I, you know, started with just this deep introspection from acid. I eventually told Jason, my. My roommate, dude, you know, you do what you want, but I'm not using crystal anymore. I definitely don't want any crack. Please don't offer it to me because I will say yes. And thankfully, in this situation, he and whoever else was around, nobody was like, come on, Derek, come join us. You know, there were, you know, it wasn't any sort of silly stuff like that. People just left me alone. And I also was smoking a lot of weed. I will credit cannabis for helping me quit crystal meth, because I remember when I made that final decision, I was under the influence of acid or maybe MDMA again. I know I was still taking drugs, but I knew, like, that meth had a particular heart like, like, hold over me that I didn't like and I needed to get, you know, out, out of. And it felt like that would be the step towards better things if I can just stop taking meth, stop using meth, and I can get past this. And I made that decision. And then the day after, I remember sitting in this freaking crack meth house in the corner of the room and this, like, purple plush couch looked all beat up and stained and just sitting in the corner of the room and I have my bong and I'm just smoking weed. And I'm just like, okay, day one, smoke weed all day. Don't fucking smoke meth. Try to eat some food. Stay away from these crazy people. Because I had burned so many bridges, I couldn't just go back. You know, I had my car right outside, but I just didn't have the strength to leave. And I'd burned a lot of bridges. I didn't know where to go. So it was like that for day one, day two, day three, four, five, six, seven, of just sitting in the corner of the room smoking cannabis as a way to kind of calm my nerves, which were shot from all the freaking meth and coke and other things I was doing. And. And just patiently, like, wait till this feeling and this desire for using meth, which is not a physical addiction, like some other addictions, like say, heroin or something. It is. It is very much like a mental thing. There's definitely some physical components of, like, you know, you're like, for example, I'm six foot. I weigh 165 pounds. If you guys have ever seen me standing up in a video, you see my mostly slim figure. Well, I was 105. I think 105 or 110 pounds when I got arrested. So towards this period, I was definitely, like, not looking good. And, yeah, by day eight, I just literally got up. I don't even remember I said bye to Jason or anything. I just, like, got up, got in my. Grabbed my. Got in the car and drove back to my mother's house and walked up the door, knocked on it, said, mom, stepdad, I know I've been up. Please just let me come home, because I'm tired of going to bed hearing crackheads smoke all night, you know, and that was the beginning of me coming home and. And continuing to be sober from meth and all this. Unfortunately, I did go back to selling drugs because I needed to make some money, and that's when I eventually got arrested. So those are some of my stories which you can find in my book, my memoir, A Man of My Word, How I Overcame Addiction, Depression, and Mental and Physical Prisons. You can find the [email protected] those are just some of the stories and experiences that I detail on there. As I said, you. I probably laughed a couple times in there not to say that those things are funny. They're real life experiences I lived. And it's. There's even more in the book, of course, there's crazier things and just more details about these stories. You know, for example, like, two weeks after I moved out of that. After I left that apartment, some guy was shot and killed at that apartment complex right outside of our apartment, in fact. And so I just continued to distance myself further and further away from that world. And even though I did get arrested, I did a year, 2005, got out September 2006, only lasted for about five months. Went back. I did that game back and forth, back and forth until October 2008, when I was released after serving 18 and a half months and becoming a felon in the state of Texas and then getting released on parole in June 2009. And that was shortly before I started waking up in all these other ways, which we'll talk about in an upcoming episode. And there was a few points in there where I did. I did use meth once or twice after that over the years, and I very quickly regretted it and eventually, you know, just did abandon it completely. But that's a bit about my story. And as I said, when I went to prison, when I got locked up, I started to work on some of the underlying issues, you know, because drugs were just the escape mechanism. Drug and Alcohol abuse are, I would say, rarely ever the actual, you know, route. They're just the surface level, like, okay, you're using drugs, you're using alcohol, or you're gambling or doing other things, and there's a root cause to that, there's a reason underlying that that is causing you to go pursue these habits. This is just my belief, my experience. I think it's pretty obvious. And so for me, again, I had to start as I got locked up and I realized I wasn't going anywhere. I started journaling a lot. I did get into meditation. I did started opening up spiritually to praying and just like healing and looking at, like, how did I get from this point of being just this sad, confused little boy because his dad wasn't around to then being angry, violent young man, and then eventually a criminal addicted to drugs and going to prison. Like, how did that progression happen? And starting to look at those root causes. And again, it largely came from my lack of relationship with my father. And I did eventually get to come to terms with him before he unfortunately died of his own drug overdose in June 2018. Now, when I got locked up and when I was released, I was forced to go to. And I say forced because I definitely didn't want to be there. It was a stipulation of my probation to go to Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous or any of those sort of AA N A 12 step programs. Now, I want to offer some of my thoughts on this. I do want to preface this by saying, I think I said it earlier, that if AA or NA works for you, 12 step model works for you, great. I. I'm so grateful that it does that something works for you. And I have a good friend, in fact, who I know is going through his own recovery journey and who may see this. And, you know, I'm speaking to you, I'm speaking to everybody else I know who has had success in. In whatever form for however long with AA and N A, if that works for you, great, wonderful. It did not give me what I was looking for. It did not work for me largely, I think, was because I was being forced to be there. As I said, I had to go there. A stipulation of my felony probation was that I had to go to these meetings two times a week and get, you know, signed for it. I had to go to two aftercare meetings a week. I just, you know, they were stacking all kinds of stuff on top of me. And we'll talk about that in a couple of weeks when we discuss the prison Systems and the parole and the probation systems and what those are really about. So I didn't want to be there. And I'm sure there are different types of A N A meetings all around the world because they are all around the world, depending on where you live in the neighborhood and stuff like that. But the ones that I went to, which was not one or two, I went to many over the years and several different locations in different parts of Houston. And it was always just some room with a bunch of guys, mainly women, sometimes two. Most of them were a bit older than me. I was like, I said 20 to 25 of this. So these are men in their 50s, 60s and up, smoking cigarettes, drinking a shitload of coffee, you know. And again, freedom of choice, do what you want. But it's also important to recognize that some people just trade one addiction for another. But just sitting there and again, sharing sort of war stories of like, well, you know, I did this horrible thing at this time and you know what? Just, I don't know, it just never was the right vibe for me. Maybe, I'm willing to admit maybe I just wasn't in the right mindset because I was definitely still resistant at that time. When I first got locked up and I got out, I was just like, oh God, you know, this is. I'm just here because I'm. I have to be. And so I wasn't trying to get anything out of it, I'll give you that. But I just don't think that these programs are really helpful for everybody. I do talk about in the book the origin of the AAA program and how the original guy, he actually, he had his own beliefs on acid as well and how he thought psychedelics like acid could be useful for people in their recovery. That was a controversy within the AA community. And it's also not to say that there's no good things in the 12 steps. I think there's actually quite some good things in there. I might. Might change some things if I was trying to create my own 12 step type program. But I do think generally making amends with people, things that you've done wrong, you know, you've done wrong with people, like when possible to make amends with them to, you know, just say your piece, ask for forgiveness if possible and move on if it's not there. I think there's some good things in there. What I. The main thing I have with, and I'm speaking more broadly here, aa na fit into this 12 step, the. What's sometimes loosely referred to as the recovery Community and even that. I kind of have struggle with that term of recovery because it just. In my mind. And maybe I'm just being too nitpicky here, but I do believe in conscious language and I think that the words we use do matter. That like, recovery is a state after an injury. Right? You're in recovery from this injury, from this ailment, from this thing. And that typically lasts a short period, a couple of days, a couple of weeks, couple months, depending on a couple of years, depending on how bad the injury may be. Right. But I don't like this idea, which I think is implied when people say, like, oh, he's in recovery, she's in recovery, that you're just in recovery for the rest of your life. Like that doesn't. Or. And that. And of course that ties into the other idea, the core idea of AA and these programs, which is addiction is a disease. I don't believe that. I don't buy into that. Again, I'm willing to say there might be exceptions. All of our brains work differently. My own father, he was in and out of prison his entire life. My entire life, I think he was more institutionalized. But this dude loved drugs and he did do a lot of drugs, and he died of drugs. And he lost his children because of drugs and lost his freedom because of drugs. Like, no matter what the consequences, he couldn't stop. But again, there were also underlying things going on in my father's life. Trauma from his upbringing, his relationship with my grandfather, stuff like that. I don't think that there's this idea that you're an addict, you have a disease, it's never going to go away, so therefore you're always in recovery. I completely and wholeheartedly reject that. And some people a problem with that. So my book, my memoir, it is about addiction, but is not an AA book. It is not, you know, that I eventually found an AA meeting and found a sponsor and my life turned around. No, mine's a little bit different. I up a bunch back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And in that process, I did start to incorporate meditation. I did start to journal every day to journal out my thoughts. I did start to incorporate spiritual practices both inside, prison and outside. Because what that ultimately did was to give me the. The space and the. The freedom, the time of. Of day to sit down. Like the journaling. Let's start with. And write out my thoughts and. And just sit down. Like when I accepted, like, I'm not going anywhere, I'm going to be in this prison. This jail and in another place, they're sending me a couple places till at least next year. I might as well use this time. I just literally sat with myself and I just started writing. And my handwriting was sloppy and crazy as it ever was. But over time, it's pretty crazy how my handwriting got more slow, more precise, as my thought processes got more precise and more. More defined, I think. And part of that was, of course, I was still getting sober. The crystal meth was still leaving my body. I'd only been sober off it for a couple of weeks when I got arrested. And I'd been using a lot of drugs before that. So my body did need time to detox and release from all kinds of stuff and then to kind of get back to some state of equilibrium in addition to the mental, emotional stuff I was dealing with as well. And so my thoughts, my writing, everything became more precise. And I was able to kind of take all this chaos that was up here in my mind all the time that the drugs only made more difficult and put it down on paper and. And really, like, see it and look at it, you know, it was. It was useful for me because my mind these days, I've learned how to navigate my mind. My mind is racing. It's busy. And that I can channel that into getting a lot of work done and doing documentaries and journalism and books and all this stuff. I love it. I love keeping my brain excited, you know, focused and. And directed, but without that direction and without that discipline. When I was younger, it was just like a mess up here. And I think that overwhelming, like, oh, my God, like, there's just too much going on. I'm feeling this. I very much feel my feelings. I. You know, I'm an empath, as some people say. Whatever. I just, I. I definitely feel things deeply. And that meant the good and the bad. And as we'll talk about in coming and next week's episode, I was also, at different times, told I was bipolar. And so we'll get into those. So those claims. But the point is, my head was just a jumble. And being able to stop and journal and write my thoughts down really allowed me. Really just allowed me that space to get my head on straight, to start looking at my life and to just, you know, say, what. What have I been doing these last couple years? And why have I been hurting people? Why have I been hurting myself? And so that was a big part of it. And then also I had a grandmother, my granny, who since passed, my father's mom, who has always been A big spiritual influence to me. And she started to send me books when I got locked up first. She was sending me Christian books. She is, she was a Christian. She would probably consider herself to be like a Christian mystic, honestly, something of that sort, because she was into all kinds of things, things that some of you would probably term New Age. You know, she read and, and watched and listened to all kinds of things. She went to a church that was Christian, but called itself the Church of Conscious Harmony. Very open minded, I'll say maybe more than some of you would agree with, but that's just how she was. And so she opened me up to all kinds of ideas when I was younger. And when I got locked up, she sent me a book by Father Thomas Keating, who is since deceased. And he had something that he called Centering Prayer, which is essentially like a type of Christian meditation or contemplation, which is. And so she sent me that book. And I was also kind of, I was actually kind of resistant to this because I had been so closed off to anything religious or spiritual because I, I made the two. One thing like I figured anything spiritual, anything to do with God is religion and religion's dogma. I still have very firm, clear memories of being kicked out of Sunday School as young as seventh grade for asking too many questions. So I was not very open to anything about religion or, or Christian or God at the time. In fact, that for many of those angry years in my teenage years, I was very much anti God and I wasn't satanic. But I love drawing upside down crosses to trigger and piss people off. So when my grandma, when my granny started sending me books about Christianity and even though it was kind of a little different than the Christianity I was familiar, familiar with, I was kind of like, ah, I don't know. But I read it because what else are you gonna do? You got nothing but time. And I opened up to it and then my granny sent me books on Zen Buddhism and Zazen, which is sitting meditation. And I started to meditate on a nightly basis in addition to opening up to praying. And I remember going to sleep some nights at these different facilities and hearing people like, what the is that dude doing over there? Because I'm just sitting here, you know, cross leg position, hands on my knees, fingers touching and just like, okay, I don't know what I'm doing here, but I'm gonna try to do it. You know, it was totally. I'd kind of been aware, I think, of things like meditation and stuff over the years, especially as I got Interested into psychedelics, but it wasn't something I was, you know, deeply aware of, but it was these practices that would form the foundation for my healing for the years to come. As I said, I didn't, you know, do a year and never go back. I did a full year doing the prayer, doing the meditation, doing the journaling, really trying to commit to get the most out of this, this experience. And I was only. I only lasted for five months before I got sent back. And eventually, you know, I. I started to do some other practices which we'll be talking about in the coming weeks when we talk about forgiveness, where I was really able to get even deeper using both meditation, using both prayer and journaling to get to the root of my. My trauma and my pain. And. And that does go back to my father. So, yeah, that is some of how I have dealt with drug addiction. Guys, as I said earlier, I'm not 100 sober. I have a drink from time to time, mainly socially. We don't really drink big in this house, but once in a while we might get a bottle of wine. I usually, if I'm out with friends or we go out for dinner, I might have a drink. I know my limits these days, and I can tell that there's a part of me that does like to drink a whole lot and does like to do things to the extreme. And so I've just learned how to navigate that, how to be the one in control. I also, as I said, like to smoke cannabis from time to time, but I do take breaks because I want to still be in control. And even cannabis can be addictive. And a lot of people, including myself in the past, have had trouble acknowledging admitting that. And then from time to time, not very much, Very, very rare, actually, I. I would maybe take a mushroom or something like that. I'm open to it. At least I haven't closed the door on my psychedelic days. But it's not something I do too often, mainly because I'm too busy. And I eventually got to the point where those medicines said, you don't need me anymore. You've got this. You can go take care of things without using external substances to, you know, stimulate your brain or stimulate your thinking. You don't need something outside of yourself. You have everything you need inside yourself. That goes for me, that goes for you. That's the message that I got eventually. So, yeah. This has been the first episode of this brand new limited series podcast that I'm going to do over the next six weeks called A Man of My Word. I hope you guys have enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it. This has been episode one talking about my experience battling drug addiction. As I mentioned earlier, I am reading the comments. So before we wrap up today, if anybody has any comments, any thoughts, I would love to see what you have to say because this is a big issue. This is something that is important to me. And this podcast, it's not only an effort to say, hey guys, go buy my book. Check it out. I think you'd enjoy it at A Man of My word dot com, but it's also part of my effort to shift more and more of my activism in this direction. I'm still always going to write journalism and I've got a new article coming out tomorrow. I'm always going to be doing independent media because that's what excites me. That's what I love to do. But at the same time, I also am going to create more content that's focused around addiction and mental health because it has become, it has been such a big part of my life. Even though most of you don't know these things about me, I was a wreck for most of my young life. And this book is a way of me putting my story out there in the hopes, in the prayer that it will help somebody. And also it's about sort of turning, you know, turning the page and closing the door on that chapter of my life and now stepping into more fully who I am as a man at 41 years old. And part of that means helping other people. So I am going to continue to share these stories. I'm going to continue to offer what I can. And I do think eventually I will be starting some type of foundation called the Troy Bros. Foundation in honor of my father in order to create programs and ways to help people who are struggling with addiction. I don't know what it's going to look like exactly. That's just a plan that I have for the future. If you ever want to talk to me about this, if you have ideas on how to tackle these topics, if you want to collaborate together, you can reach me at into the light protonmail.com that's all one word. Into the [email protected] let's talk about it. I really want to work with other people who care about these issues. Thank you guys for being here today. Thank you for listening to me. And next week we'll be back. We'll be talking all about mental health, self worth, my struggles with depression, with bipolar diagnoses, my questions about whether or not I was a sociopath and self, you know, self harm, cutting all these kinds of things. We'll be talking all about that, my experiences with that. Until next time, guys, thank you so much for listening. This is Derek Brose with the Conscious Resistance Network and the A Man of My Word podcast. Remember, you are powerful, you are beautiful, and you are free. Peace. Since 2012, the conscious resistance Network has been an independent media organization focused on empowering individuals through education, philosophy, health, and community organizing. We work to create a world where corporate and state power do not rule over the lives of free human beings. Our motto is leading by example and helping others in their pursuit of freedom. Visit theconsciousresistance.com to find our articles, documentaries, interviews, podcasts, books, and more. Remember, you are powerful, you are beautiful, and you are free.