Parental Advisory: This post contains more curse words than any Christian blog should ever have. But it may be one of the best testimonies you ever read. Ever.
Two years ago this month I hit an all-time low. I was drunk, standing in the living room of my college apartment, staring down the barrel of a shotgun. I just did not care anymore… about anything. I didn’t care about my girlfriend of 3 years, I didn’t care about school, and I damn sure didn’t care about anything else. I’m not sure if there is a difference but in case there is, I will clarify. I was numb. I was beyond numb. I was completely emotionally shut down; and I was past the point of caring about that or trying to fix it. I had gone to the VA, I had talked to counselors, I had gone to PTSD therapy groups, and they did help; but it was like putting a band-aid on a gushing artery. I had pushed so much stuff so far down for so long that there wasn’t any room left. And I was still adding to the garbage pile in my soul at an exponential rate. I had hit a point that made it seem as though I was 2 different people.
I felt like Jekyl and Hyde. During the day, I would put my mask on, be polite with people, and go about normal life. In my heart, I was still a loving person and I was still trying to help others; but I was broken. People would tell me that I was a good person and for some reason it would make me angry. I had been trying to fix it, but I was sabotaging myself instead. I would make appointments with the VA counselor, then wake up and drink until noon so I had an excuse not to go. My drinking had taken on a whole new level of dangerous. My head felt like someone had disconnected all the wires and then placed them in the wrong places: Yellow wire in the black input, red wire in the blue input, and so on. My memory was fuzzy, my concentration sucked, and it made me so frustrated that I couldn’t figure out my own head that I just drank so I could have an excuse. I remember trying to explain it to my roommate when we first moved into college together a year earlier and I had said to him “You know how most people feel after about six beers… that’s how I feel all the time”. I would do things like drink beer while driving up the California coast into Oregon, or drink a few beers and then mountain bike as hard and as fast as I could down the roughest trails I could find, or drink a case of beer and then go surfing at night.
I’m not going to lie, it was a lot of fun… but it was also what my psychologist later termed self-destructive behavior. I was intentionally trying to wreck myself and I had been doing it for a very long time. In the couple of months leading to March, it had just gotten completely out of control. I’m not sure what the reason was behind it, but I was filled with guilt and anger for things that had happened in Iraq and afterwards. On top of that, I had developed a terrible view of women, society, and life in general. I knew that what I was doing was wrong, but I still didn’t stop or admit it. I think that’s a big part of what was driving me crazy. It was a vicious cycle. And in order to protect myself from having to deal with the fact that I was being a shitty person, I decided to completely stop caring instead. Whatever small traces were left of my moral values and inner voice, I did everything I could to destroy them. I wish I could describe what was going on in my head or how I felt at that time, but that mindest is so completely different from the one I have now that I couldn’t even start to explain it. There was a battle going on between the person I had become and the person that I knew I was meant to be and it was tearing my life apart.
Let’s rewind the clock a few days before I was standing in the apartment with a shotgun. On Friday, I was supposed to go over to my girlfriend’s house for a serious talk. She new that I was not the same man that she had started dating. Instead, I finished a paper in the campus library and then went to the bar. I didn’t call her to tell her I wasn’t coming. I just went out for drinks with some girls from my class instead. As had become common occurrence, I took one of the girls home that night and slept with her. I woke up in the morning and got dressed, realizing that I had missed yet another VA counseling appointment that I had promised I would attend. The fabric started to fray. I went home, loaded my bikes and camping gear into the bed of my truck, and drove north to the Sonoma valley. The whole way up I had crazy thoughts of suicide. This wasn’t a first, but the intrusiveness of the thoughts was on a whole new level. I reached the mountains, parked my truck, downed a couple beers to clear my head and slow my heart, and jumped on my bike. I rode harder and faster than usual. The danger felt good. I didn’t care if I wrecked at high speed. The next day, I woke up and repeated the same, biking until after dark. I had that all-too common feeling that I was running from something. I finished and drove home. The thoughts continued. My head felt crazy.
The next morning, I had to be on campus for some extra credit project. So, I drained every bottle of alcohol in the house and walked into my room. That’s when I saw the shotgun case. I had been having such intrusive thoughts for so long that I figured I may as well test whether or not I really did care. I have a voice recording on my phone still from my drive to Sonoma earlier that week, talking about how “If I could play Russian Roulette with a shotgun, I’d have to give that a go”. So, I picked it up and stared down the barrel for a moment, wondering if I had the balls to do it. Then, I cycled all the shells out. There were 00 buckshot and 3oz magnum slug. Either would do the trick, but picking which one was the difficult part. I stood there trying to decide which it would be, not realizing how fully serious I was about the whole thing. Obviously, slug won. Before placing a round into the chamber, I thought about my best friend Clay, who had killed himself almost exactly a year earlier. Our shared experiences had brought us together and he had helped me more than I could ever say by talking me into doing counseling, therapy, and veterans bike rides in the first place. My brain seemed to skip through all of the memories that we had shared together all at once and then I remembered how I felt when I learned that Clay had shot himself. I remembered crying for 2 or 3 days straight and I remembered the first time I met his family for the funeral in Texas. I threw the gun down on the bed and yelled “FUCK!!!” Then, I walked into the kitchen and grabbed a sharpie and a sticky note. I scribbled “I’m only 89.6% serious” on the note. Sometimes people say that alcohol brings out the truth in people… I can’t go back to that moment, but I’d say that it was a pretty serious estimate. I walked into my bedroom, grabbed all the guns, threw them into my roommate’s room, locked his door from the inside, and left the house.
I went to campus, but I don’t remember much of what I was doing. I do know that after the movie that we watched for extra credit, I walked into the campus bar and had a couple more beers. There was a basketball game on and some big guy cheering on his team. So, I did the most logical thing: I turned to him and said “Basketball is for pussies”, “How about watching a real sport?” As you can imagine, we had a bit of an exchange of words before kicking our bar stools to the side and really getting in each others faces. Luckily for me, a friend of mine and fellow vet walked in and started to mediate. Here I was, risking getting expelled from campus for fighting, and I didn’t care. Let me rephrase that: DID. NOT. CARE. Not at all. My friend grabbed me and offered me a ride home. I told him that I actually had to go over to my girlfriend’s house for a really serious chat, since I had missed the one on Friday. He asked me if that was really a good idea and I said “Who fucking cares? She shouldn’t be dating me anyway. May as well end it now”. I’ll have to reevaluate the logic of the friends I keep apparently, but after some discussion, he dropped me off at her door.
I rang her bell and she came down to meet me. Like some creep, I was standing in the shadows. She came out and asked if we could go for a walk and talk about things. I don’t remember much, but I know that before we hit the end of the block, she turned to me and asked “Have you been drinking?!?!” To which I just kind of stared at her and shook my head around. I don’ recall the full conversation, but it didn’t last long and I remember a few key parts. I remember her looking at me, maybe starting to cry, and saying “What is wrong with you? I don’t even know who you are anymore”. I looked at her and said “You know what, I don’t know who I am anymore either. I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff just looking down. Let’s just end this thing. I gave the guns to Joe. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing anymore” She started really crying and she was talking but all I remember is having my eyes rolled into the back of my head, laughing hysterically, and telling her that it was alright. The more she cried, the harder I laughed and I reached out and patted her shoulder like a kid and said “It’ll all be fine”. I do remember her saying she was going to punch me in the nose, which she certainly should have. I turned around and started to walk away, not knowing where I was going or how. She asked if I could come in so that we could talk, but I just kept walking. She didn’t chase me and I have no idea where I went; I just remember walking along some streets and getting phone calls from my best friend, telling me he was worried and wondering what the hell I was doing.
I woke up in the morning to a phone full of texts and voice mails. My first reaction was to laugh as I listened to people so concerned for me. After about 8 voice mails, it started to sink in. This wasn’t a game and I couldn’t keep doing this. I hated that people were concerned for me and that they had left me “stupid” messages. I just wanted to say screw everything and fly down to South America somewhere and just stay there for a year. But as I went through my phone, I realized that these people who I had tried to push away for the last few months were really concerned for me. I don’t remember much of the next few weeks but I did receive about 5 Bibles in the mail from friends and random strangers, and I probably said out loud “alright dude, I get it”.
I really started working to turn things around. I stopped drinking completely. I started going to the VA appointments and seeing personal veterans’ counselors. I agreed to take prescription medications for anxiety, severe depression, concentration, and nightmares. And my heart hurt every single day like it was literally going to explode out of my chest. The “I don’t care about anything” attitude started to disappear and with it came a whole truckload of emotional hurt. I swear to you I have never had pain in my life like what was going on in my heart at that time. All of the cheating, all of the lies, all of the asshole-ish decisions, all of the stuff that I had done, all of the ways that I had hurt people and pushed them away, it all came in like a flood. The upside is that I knew it was time to get back on my feet and face a challenge. I had the chance to kill myself and I didn’t do it. That means I didn’t have the balls or the crazy to pull the trigger. That also meant that I was at the bottom of my own hole, looking up, and I had finally thrown down the shovel. I remember thinking “If my heart wants to feel like it’s going to explode, I’ll give it some real reason to do so”. I was going to have to work my ass off to fix what needed fixed. And I was going to need all the help that God could possibly give me to accomplish that.
FAST FORWARD:
Here I am closing out month 3 of a Christan missions trip on the World Race in India. I have been praying for people, giving sermons, holding babies, and serving others in every way imaginable. I still don’t understand much about God or how he works, but I do know that this is nothing short of a miracle. I don’t know exactly what is in store for my future, but I know that God has plans for my life, I know that he will continue to call on me, and I know that I will continue to answer.
The past is exactly that and we cannot change it. However, we can learn from our behavior and fix it. The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ came and died for us so that our sins could be washed away. Sometimes knowing you are forgiven is easier than accepting it… but you have to start somewhere.
Last month, former president George W. Bush used my story as an example in a speech about how returning veterans who have struggled before are turning their lives back around for good. Watch it here, starts at 19 minutes and 16 seconds in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P7-1ndMBAw
Needless to say, this is not your average journey. I hope that you will continue to comment, support me, and keep our team in your prayers. It’s going to be a heck of a ride.
– Dave
