Below is my story in super extreme detail. I used it as somewhat of a transcript for my video.
My story begins as a normal drinking smoking college student. Senior year I became aware of a very bad feeling in my mind as well as my heart and body. I soon felt as if I was at Satin’s door with no way out. This is the story of why, how, and what got me to the gates of Hell, but it’s also a story of finding the light that guided me to the present.
It all began after a hard breakup with my first girlfriend that left us both in pieces at the beginning of the Spring of 2018, my sophomore year, at University of Alabama.
I became aware of feeling very “off” after this breakup. I remember thinking that I would never get over her because she was a great girl and I wanted to be with her, but I felt it was too early in life. I had the thoughts of will I ever find someone else? Will I ever be loved again? Will I regret this decision when I’m old, and wish I had never left this girl? Am I gay because I didn’t want to be with her?
6 months pass and I completely dulled all the events of our relationship from my memory so the hurt would stop and the thoughts would cease. I basically had blocked the whole relationship from my memory because I had been naive enough to think that strings wouldn’t be attached after the breakup happened. So while I was in this relationship I had lost touch with many of my friends. I felt like I had missed out on a lot of fun things that they done together, and I also felt like I didn’t fit back in with them after the breakup because I had spent so much time with her compared to time with them.
I was apart of a Fraternity where everyone was drinking or smoking, at least, every night, for years. While i was drinking and partying literally as much as I could, I was experiencing weird occurrences within myself.For instance, my past would come back to me and make me think I was a loser and worthless(Emphasis), which in those times, I would talk to my mom or my best friend from back home, both of them there for me in times of desperation.
Years pass and I was living the same lifestyle of drinking, smoking pot, doing drugs and going to bars and parties. Senior year rolls around and a normal night for me during was gambling on any game that I could(Football, Basketball, Major leagues or college. Didn’t matter), drinking scotch or whiskey in a solo cup, and smoking weed in my apartment all alone or I was going to the bar and drinking there with people that I was taught to be my friends.
I was back to what I felt as normal,haha, but another trigger feeling of being very off after breaking up with another girlfriend senior year had arisen and I felt all my problems of the past had arisen and come back to haunt me.
So with this relationship, I felt we had built a solid relationship. We would hangout and talk to each other till 4 am most nights. It was like I had found the girl of my dreams, and she made me feel so alive with everything in my body. I was starting to picture what it might be like to date this girl longterm and it looked really really bright. A couple months pass and I found that everything was crumbling under my grasp. I would be waiting on her at the bar while she was at some other bar, posting pictures of her with other guys on social media, which killed me because all my friends were texting me asking if we were ok and stuff. I couldn’t emotionally handle this so I decided that I would rather not have the relationship if this is how it was going to be. I was completely distraught and felt like no one wanted to hangout with me. I also felt as if I had grown very far away from my fraternity brothers and that I didn’t want to hangout with any of them anymore. I felt like I was super old at this point and I was not happy with living in Tuscaloosa and doing the same thing every night and everyday anymore.
Another issue was, before this relationship I had slowly began to weed myself off of the alcohol because my family has a history of being bad alcoholics on both my mom and Dad’s side. So it was already scary for me that I had began to drink a lot when I was back into this relationship, and I knew that I would lead myself down an awful road if I was to continue with this awful course of drinking consistently.
After the relationship was over, I was gambling, not exercising, drinking and smoking pot consistently, playing video games, and trying everything I could do to try to either validate myself or escape from reality. I also realized another very important fact in my life that disgusted me to the bones. (Pause)
Again, I was trying to validate myself consistently, and at this point I had found help with a counselor at UA and he mentioned this thing called meditation. I tried it out, but found that I thought it wasn’t helping, because I thought I wasn’t doing it correctly, when in reality it actually was.
So, I flew back into another relationship so I could compare this new manlihood with my past manlihood with a new very intelligent beautiful girl, but soon enough that would catch up to me as well. Time passes and I forget about the previous relationship and had grown a strong liking for my new partner. While in this relationship, I sensed that some things were just off between the both of us, but I ignored the signs. Some of the signs were things like, I would be feel weird for being myself and then I would feel bad about being myself.
About 4 months into this relationship I had become aware that I had gotten into this relationship to make myself feel like I had one upped my last relationship so I could feel better about breaking up with the past girl. After I became aware of this, it was the single hardest behavior I had to face up to and solve in my life up to this point. I knew if I didn’t tackle and conquer this inner monster, all of my future relationships would be severed because of me. We ended up breaking up because I was such a mental mess. I felt I needed some headspace, and as it turns out, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Every big decision I ever made up to that point in my life was because someone else had told me to take that path. “This major will get you a lot of money. This major oyu will for sure get a job out of school. You should go to this school for this reason.”” I was very unsatisified with that idea. I felt like I wouldn’t have any better times than the ones I had in college. I also felt that even though I had this super good job, a nice apartment and all these nice things, but the reality of it was that none of these “things” were making me happy at all. It was kind of a moment of realizing that this may be the most fun part of my life and that was a depressing thought since it was coming to an end.
I literally felt like I was dying, and that all the fun times in my life were over.
This new chapter holds realizations about the trouble of my past and the beauty of the future.
I had just moved back in with my parents because my job was in Birmingham and I needed to pay off the debt I accumulated in college so i could be financially fit as soon as possible. My job was going to be hard, but I knew I liked developing software and it would pay well so it was looking good. I knew a lot of the people already from working there the previous summer. So work began and I was enjoying spending time with the employees as well as the actual work, which was developing an application for the training process and placement process.
Shifting gears a bit, I had begun a consistent meditation practice that completely shifted my mindset of my life is over, to having a hopeful outlook on the future. I practiced mantras, which are repeating a set of words to myself, “Love”, “One”, and “God”. Meaning, Love always, Everyone is One, and God is above all. I used these words, because they are the most prominent words in my life. Where I learned this from was from 2 books. One was a book called “Think and Grow Rich” by Napolean Hill, which was recommended to me from a friend of mine that travelled the country and asked many high level executives what books he should read. This book taught me that you can train your mind into thinking the way you want it to. The other book was called, “Change your thoughts, Change your life” by Dr. Wayne Dyer. This book was a Christian translation of the “Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tzu. This book taught me that there is so much to be grateful for in life and that life can be so simple if we want it to be. These books taught me the power of consciously adding ideas to the subconscious that would quite literally tell me these ideas throughout the day, and since I knew exactly what Love, One, and God meant to me, that just amplified their power in my mind and I allowed those thoughts to flow consistently and lighten my day over and over again.
There was another realization from the practice of meditation. I learned this very early, maybe like a week after I was meditating on flow of presentness. I became aware of all my mental processes were all out of whack. I was thinking in ways that would not allow me to move forward in life. I used to think that everyone was against me, and that all my thoughts were my own. Basically that I was consciously creating these thoughts. It just simply isn’t true. I didnt realize this for a long time, and still practicing at taking a step back and observing my thoughts other than being carried away by them. I would be stuck doing whatever it is that I would have been doing, and been unhappy doing it without any direction.
I also realized that in college, I was angry at people all the time because of my own issues.. I was unhappy with the relationships I had built. I was unhappy with the place I was going to in life. I was unhappy with my living conditions I was having all of these negative thoughts when I was in my own head all of time. Looking back, I had this girlfriend that was telling me, I like you so much more when you aren’t in your head, so don’t think so much. I agreed like always because it was true, that When I was out of my head I was much more clear, but also seemingly capable of anything. One problem was that I am super sensitive and pretty much I blocked off all of my
About 5 months pass, and I had been assigned to a project that initially I was ok with. I brought everything I had to the table for the team. I was doing my best to help everyone out. In the meantime at home, I was continuing self-education on the power of the mind. I was juicing my brain with what entertained me most, consciousness and how to harness the power of thought to think the way you want.
So another month goes by and now I’m not happy with the project that I’m on. I have a 6 month review coming up about my job. At this point I decide to put the “Think and Grow Rich” model of training your mind,(giving myself a set of words that will feed into my subconscious that will feed my conscious day after day) multiple days before an event that would execute the intention I want to display. So I sat down and meditated on saying these words, “I am motivated, determined, willing, and confident” and trained my mind to believe these things. 3 days for 10 minutes a day before the review. Review day came, and like clockwork I went into her office and told her exactly how I felt, with all of these ideas, “motivated, dedicated, determined, confident, willing” coursing through my mind. By the end of the review she gave me the same old response, like it might be 6 months to a year before we can get you on a new project, so I was disappointed that the tactic hadn’t worked.
2 days later she came over to my desk and asked me to come in here office, and I felt like she was just going to follow up with how I’m feeling with the job and if anything had changed, but it nothing had. She said, I’ve got some good new for you, you’re getting a 10% increase in pay and you will be put on a new project by the end of January. I was flabbergasted. I had no clue what just happened. This tactic had worked. It gave me even more than what I was expecting because I just wanted to be on a new project.
This was the turning point in my existence, I was completely engulfed into this idea of feeding my conscious thoughts about intention and exactly what I want. So I’ve been exploring consciousness ever since. This consciousness exploration has put me on a path of exploration in my past, which has lead to short-term pain, but long-term self-awareness about what has happened to me in my past that has shaped who I thought I was. In reality, consciousness is who we are now and what we allow to come into consciousness is what shapes our thoughts. So if you do not allow your past to come into your thoughts, unless its about how you learned from your past, then you are not shaped by your past, in theory. Seeing into my past, about what has shaped my life up to this point is interesting. I have found that my father has molded my life quite a bit as well as my mom. There are tools for this introspection work as well.
I began exploring new ways to train my brain, and I began experimenting with a new way of meditation because it was recommended to me from a mentor. This was was called Vipassana, which is the art of focusing on the breath in silence. This practice taught me thatI had a bunch of underlying past experiences that I needed to address. This is the beauty of Vipassana. Sitting in complete silence, I was able to be introspective and realize that my past had shaped a lot of what I had become, but I had learned that each day is a new day and that all we have is the present so I wanted to live there more often, so I wanted to release these past experiences.
I went and found a teacher that could help with these ideas, and a man named Jordan Peterson came up on a Joe Rogan Podcast and he mentioned a way to get over some of the things in our past. If you want to see the video, it’s on my youtube page, “How to Release and Learn from your past.”
This helped very very much. I can't stress how much this helped, but it was one of the first days I woke up with immediately good thoughts entering into my head.
This began a chain of events where new things in my past would spawn up a lot, and I learned through journaling everyday about these events on that same prompt of 1. What happened 2. What were the effects of what happened 3. What did I learn 4. What would I do if the happenstance came up in the future. So now I journal everyday on anything that’s on my mind that takes up concentration.
3 months after that, I have now found tools that have worked wonders for me. Eating right, getting enough sleep, Exercising and Breathing have changed my life. Introspection has been beneficial as well.
-I can honestly say this journey has been the most liberating experience because I can picture what the world would be capable of if people took advantage of the ideas I’ve learned.
- Why do you exist?
- If you were to dying tomorrow, would you be ok with what you’ve done with your life?
- Ask these questions an immerse yourself in your honest response and see how it makes you feel.
- This could be your chance to break through and find out what you were meant for.
- Thank you all for reading and I love you all.