166: What if you didn't have any fear?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. And it was just a nightmare compounded by nightmare. Overwhelming is not the term. It is beyond devastating, confusing. The mind almost has to find a way to prove that it's not real. This cannot be happening. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 166, What If You Didn't Feel Any Fear?

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My family is a large Irish family in Long Island, New York. A middle class family, always getting together for gatherings, a lot of personalities, a lot of fun. I had a very good childhood. I had friends in the neighborhood that I was very close with.

My parents were there and present every step of the way, and life just felt safe. And so moving into my early formative years, I think I had a very, very strong foundation. And what I mean by a foundation is I had a safe place in my mind. I was surrounded by good people. I had good parents. I have two sisters, one older, one younger. And despite the, you know, normal issues that every child has, I didn't have anything of concern.

My mother was a stay-at-home mom. My father was an entrepreneur. You know, my mother ushered us everywhere. You know, she really went out of her way to give us an unbelievable childhood.

You know, I entered into high school. I had a lot of friends. We had a very good group of people. And each year we just grew closer and closer. And my four years in high school got progressively better every year to the point where I just was surrounded by happy, good, hilarious, fun people. And things were, you know, really, really good heading into college.

You know, in high school, I was a daring, you know, how you want people when best looking and most likely to succeed. I won most daring by a landslide. You know, that was partly because I I like to kind of go to the edge of chaos and see if I could balance. You see how far you can go without getting hurt, without getting caught or without, you know, none of these things I did were malicious intent.

That's always been a part of who I am. I also have a wandering mind. I was on a magical mystery tour of sorts looking to delve into the psyche to understand more about who I am, who we are as people, and what this whole thing called life means.

So when I went to the college in Virginia, unlike high school, I didn't have to be in class. Most of the work is done outside of class, which I never participated in. Unlike high school, mommy and daddy aren't there to make sure you get up. All those things were my Achilles heel. College gave me the opportunity to go out and put me behind, and it put me in a really bad situation to where I was failing my courses.

I never claimed to have too much integrity. So in a last-ditch attempt to save my GPA in a biology course, I cheated on the person next to me. Lo and behold, this was kind of a setup. Five different people in the class got caught doing this. I was asked to leave school for a semester. And that's kind of a point of demarcation for me. It was a gut shot.

It was a few other events that led me to fall into the one and only depression I've ever been in in my life. The only clinical depression I've ever felt in my life. It was also a bad breakup with the first love. You know how that goes. I had broken my leg trying to get on stage at a Pearl Jam concert. That's a whole other story. And for three months, I felt what clinical depression feels like. You cannot shake that. That is not malaise. That is not willpower or lack thereof.

That is a weight on your soul that you simply cannot do anything about. And it invades your thoughts and it paralyzes you to a degree. Oddly enough, it took a visit to my old college to see some friends and a psychedelic mushroom trip that brought me out of that depression. And it was a really unbelievable experience. And I felt that I was able to see behind the curtain a little bit and see into the psyche of both myself and those around me.

Most importantly, it was a very profound experience. And secondarily, and probably equally important, it brought me out of my depression. But that depression did leave a mark on me in the sense that I never wanted that to happen again. While it cured my depression, it didn't cure my roving mind and it didn't make me a more studious person. So in these four years, I started a company with my father.

I saw a future there, but I also watched all of my friends enjoying their college life. So I spent every weekend at a different college up and down the East Coast. So we had a lot of wild times, no trouble, just, you know, just wild good times. And the depression had passed. Life kind of flows along on a river. And I felt like I was back on that river.

So in my late teens, there were a few interpersonal issues with my family, mostly father and son, some real, some imagined. That created a lot of discord in my family, and that discord existed for the next couple of years.

All of these kind of events, these ups and downs and these psychological dramas that we have in our families at the age of 22 after going back to college and still not achieving what I wanted to achieve there, all of it led me to take a cold, hard look

Something was wrong. It needed to be changed. And I didn't have the tools to figure out how to do that. So out of the five psychiatrists that were covered by my insurance, I just picked one. I remember the day that I went there. It was one of those early first warm spring days. I was driving a convertible at the time with the top down and I felt pretty damn good. And things were just going to be okay like they always were.

So I was in a very good place, but I was still going to see the psychiatrist and I was still going to investigate the possibility that there were fundamental changes that need to be made. I just didn't know exactly what they were. I'm ushered into a nurse practitioner's office. Well, I tell her that I am anxious about my future. I'm not feeling anxious. I'm not dealing with anxiety. I don't have agoraphobia or anything like it.

I probably should have said I'm concerned about my future as I'm not doing the things now that are going to set up a foundation of a successful life. However, the nurse practitioner heard anxious.

She had a starter kit of Paxil, which is an anti-anxiety medication originally marketed for people with agoraphobia, which represents about 2% to 5% of the population, but cross-marketed to pretty much anyone who's ever felt uncomfortable, which is the whole world, because you don't make a lot of money if you only sell to 2% to 5% of the population.

So I decided I was going to give it a try. I said to myself, well, I've tried alcohol to alter my state. I've tried a few drugs here and there. Why don't I try something that's controlled, used in a clinical setting, and hopefully not have the negative after effects that those other illegal drugs do? So I left the pill box next to my bed and...

I took one in, you know, every morning I would make sure to take my Paxil and start the day with it. Felt absolutely nothing. Was convinced it was a placebo, but was more of a numbing agent. And it was routine to take it every morning, but I kind of forgot the moment I take it that I did or that it was supposed to have some kind of effect. Over the period of about two weeks, I still, I'm still pretty certain I'm not feeling anything.

So three weeks in, I start to feel slightly detached and it's a very slight, subtle lack of response to certain stimulus that would maybe normally frustrate me. And I just feel the impulse to get frustrated and it just kind of disappears. You know, you're supposed to be angry because you always get angry when this happens, but you didn't. Something stopped that impulse from getting to where it would normally go.

There was just a sense of no matter what I do or say or go, where I go or who I offend or not offend, or if I ask the most beautiful girl out at the bar and she rejects me, none of it can affect me. It was a very liberating feeling. So I was very happy to feel this. I was not running to the psychiatrist saying, hey, there's something wrong with this drug. I was happy to feel this, you know, no longer encumbered by my own fears.

We base a lot of our behavior on fear of consequence. When that fear and that consequence are both gone, it kind of opens up the door to any behavior. And so I would continue to push the envelope, you know, going up to a group of people and creating a scene just to see how it would play out.

My unencumbered personality now was getting positive reviews. I was finding that being this extrovert was winning me friends. So more reason to really feel that this is a positive development. I hadn't worked on any of the things that I needed to be working on, but I didn't have to worry about that anymore because consequence was no longer on the table. I just didn't fear pain. So one night I had had a few beers and I had asked my psychiatrist if I could. She said, yes, in moderation.

I probably went a little bit over moderation that night. Came home, was in my parents' basement, and they came down and I was saying something about I have to go. I was experiencing what I later learned was akathisia, an intense feeling of dread, a feeling of impending doom with no specific reason. You don't know where to go. You don't know what to do. They were so perplexed that they had to call the police to take me to a psychiatric unit that night.

As soon as I got to the psychiatric unit, I snapped out of it and I became detached again. In fact, I became even more detached than I was prior to it. I was released the next day. And for all this insanity that just occurred, I felt nothing. Again, that gave me a sense of liberation from my own consequential thinking. So all manner of behavior is on the table at that point.

There is no fear of the future because there is no fear. What fear really is, is don't do this because this will happen in the future. So the future is gone. The past is irrelevant. I call it a synthetic Zen. I was truly at one with the moment I was in and truly unconcerned about the consequences of my actions because there weren't as far as I was concerned. I could do anything.

Well, this kind of mixed in with a movie. I watched a movie, I think it was called Bandits, with Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis. They were bank robbers who escaped from prison. Kind of glorified the whole bank robber thing. This sent me down a spiraling philosophical debate over the notion that we kind of celebrate aberrant behavior once a few generations have passed. And so is it really aberrant?

And that somehow morphed into why couldn't I do something like that? See, normally a thought like that would be overwhelmed by the consequential impulse of all the things that would be destroyed. And I would never follow the train of thought beyond the initial instinctual. I wonder what that would be like. That would be it moving along. But I decided over a period of about a day that I was going to do an armed robbery.

I didn't really have much of a plan. I didn't know what I was going to rob. I, for some reason, decided I wasn't going to rob a bank. I don't know why. I mean, mind you, I didn't need a dollar. I didn't have a drug habit to support. I didn't pay rent. I was living with my parents.

I was doing it for the experience, but that sounds very bizarre. Why would anyone want to experience that? I was so unaffected at this point that I wanted to put myself in an incredibly high risk situation just to see how I could handle it. If I could calmly work my way through it. So I'd always had that daring impulse.

I've always seeked to push the envelope, but I push the envelope within the confines of rational, consequential thinking. I might go to the edge a little bit, but some sort of a bizarre prank. It's not a violent crime.

Me deciding to commit a violent crime, I might as well decide to go to the moon just as easily because those two things are in the same category of possibilities. They're just not going to happen. There's no reason for them. There's no impulse to ever do them. But did the underlying kind of daring behavior mix with the Paxil? It's entirely possible. I don't know. But that element of me would never have attached to that bizarre behavior if it wasn't for the drug.

So I still understood that other people would think this was wrong. I also felt that I was existing on a completely different plane of consciousness that they could never possibly understand. I grabbed a butcher knife from my kitchen only because it looked menacing. There were no impulses to use a weapon on somebody else. And that, for whatever reason, was non-existent in me. And I just drove. I drove. It was about 930 at night. And I didn't know what I was going to rob.

And I saw a gas station open. And so I decided, all right, I'll do the gas station. This is going to be interesting. Parked the car down the road a little bit, got out and walked. And I remember distinctly a moment where I felt my chest and my heart was beating incredibly calmly.

Now, this is an extremely high pressure situation. I've never done anything like this before. I'm putting my life, my freedom at risk for no real sane reason whatsoever. Under any circumstance, I should be nervous. And I instantly knew that I was I must be kind of like a psychopath. So I continue to walk in. I hid the knife in my shirt and I don't really remember what I said, but I didn't really know what I was doing. So I made some sort of a small talk with the attendant.

So I took the knife out and he didn't really know if this was a joke, I think, or what to feel. And I just stayed incredibly calm. And I said, listen, I'm going to need you to get the money out of the register and I'm not going to hurt you. Why don't we just make this easy because this is not your money. And he did. He opened the register. I took the money out. As I'm leaving, an SUV pulls right up to the door. Now, I knew it would probably be better to stay and handle the situation myself.

So somebody comes in, probably a few years older than me. I was 22. Maybe he was 25. And the attendant starts screaming about something being robbed, but he doesn't speak English very well. I instantly realized what my plan is. I look at the kid who had come in. I look at the attendant and I go, who's robbing you? I don't understand. And I turned to the kid and I go, I just got here. Something happened to this guy.

Now the attendant thinks that I'm in on it with the kid because we look like we're kind of the same age. So he starts backing up. And I said, listen, I don't know what's going on. I walked in here. He's been screaming about being robbed, but he's not making any sense. The kids just, you know, I just want cigarettes. So I said, you might as well leave your money on the counter. He does. He leaves his money on the counter and walks out. I obviously grabbed that, put it in with the rest, walk to my car and drive off.

I wasn't proud or happy or feeling accomplished or anything. I just felt like, okay, that went to plan. You know, that's the way it's supposed to go. That was interesting. I liked the part where the guy came in and I had to improv to find a way out of that. Well, as I'm driving, I said, you know what? They'll probably be responding to the first one. I might as well hit another one on the way. And I see another gas station. I pull in. I quickly walk in. This was much quicker. I do another robbery. And

and get the money. I was very courteous in a bizarre way. Got the money, left, drove to Manhattan, which was maybe about 40 minutes away from where I was, and went out and spent the money on the town. And a lot of that I do not remember, but I know it was wild. I went home the next day, went back to work with my father. Not a care in the world that I had just committed two armed robberies. And I am a fugitive now from the law.

In a way, when I did that and I felt no remorse the next day, I feel like I had transcended the human experience at that point. I was no longer subject to the rule of cause and effect. I could create any cause and there would be no effect on my psyche. And it was a bizarre sense of freedom to that. Not only am I invincible within the lack of concern about feeling any emotional suffering, which we all want to avoid.

In high pressure situations, the calmest person will always be able to see clearly. And I was extraordinarily calm. So I could manipulate any situation by mere fact that when your cortisol levels are shooting up and your stress is high, the person who's not experiencing that stress can see and maneuver very easily. And when everyone's in the same state, calm, it's much more difficult. But when one is not calm and one is, the calm person has a major advantage. And I use that to my advantage.

I was enthralled by it. I found it fascinating. I saw society as a group of people ruled by impulses that not only did they have no control over, but they didn't understand how these impulses created their behavior. So I am free of that. So yeah, I would say at the time, I thought above and beyond it. I no longer had to play by the rules of the slave to the limbic fear system.

If you were to interact with me under the influence of this, you wouldn't think for one iota of a second you were interacting with an insane person or an affected person. This drug is not affecting my ability to interact with other human beings on a normal level. So I go back to work with my father. Not a care in the world, not a concern that I'm going to be caught. I went about my day.

So after spending the night in Manhattan, went back to work with my father the next day and started off what would be nine more days of armed robberies.

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. A few days go by, and I kind of get that itch to do another robbery, and it became a habit.

It became something that I felt would start my day off. I would, you know, some people go get a shave, take a shower. I do an arm robbery. That's really where it fell in the kind of list of things to do for the night. It was just one of the things I do now. I'm still not concerned for a second that I'm going to be caught.

So, you know, I go out, find the first place that's open and I started getting a little bit brazen. I would go during the day at times and before I could get a word out, I always knew to disarm the person with the notion that I'm promising that I'm not here to hurt them. It's not their money. Let's not make this complicated.

And it would usually work. You know, one time I was hit with a mop before I could get a word out. The mop hit me in the face. I put my arm up. As it's happening, I'm annoyed that I didn't say something first. I'm still thinking calmly throughout this. I am dancing on the edge of... Actually, no, I'm all the way in chaos. And I am seeing how calm I can stay.

So finally, one of the last robberies I had attended, who was very easy. I went to shake his hand and thank him for, you know, I had a few difficulties. I told him this one was nice and easy. And he said, I can't shake your hand. It would look like I was in on the robbery in the camera. And I go, you know what? I didn't even think about that, dude.

And I said, give me the pound. So I put my fist out and he goes, what are you talking about? I said, a pound is not like a handshake. It's more like a fist bump. You know, at this point, he's like, this is the craziest. What is this guy doing? And I leave without my handshake. I wasn't concerned about getting away. I was really honestly almost offended that I wasn't getting a handshake. That story details the complete departure from reality that I was living in at that moment.

When I speak about this, it's very much almost me speaking about somebody else. After each of these, mind you, I would go to Manhattan. At one point, I wound up in Harlem. I got into a fight and was stabbed in the thumb. I wound up going home with a car full of blood and a family asking me what happened and me telling them I scraped my thumb in the Burger King, which made absolutely no sense for the amount of blood that was in the car. They attributed it to alcohol.

So they left for Florida towards the end of this. The last robbery was unplanned in the sense that I was visiting my then girlfriend in the Hamptons, went to a surprise party. She and I got in an argument. There was a knife still in the car. I grabbed the knife, went to one of the local gas stations in the Hamptons, robbed it, spent the night out, probably made a fool of myself because I got very drunk that night. And I think someone called the police as I tried to drive away.

But I didn't know if it was the police for a DWI or if they were pulling me over for the robbery. So I stayed unnaturally calm. When the officer asked me if I was drinking, I said yes. Stayed very cordial with the officer, wanted him to like me. I was taken in. I kind of made friends with the deputies there. I thought it was kind of hilarious that I was being arrested for a DWI and they had no idea that I was the one that did the robbery.

In the squad car on the way to the court, I was having this unbelievable epiphany and I was trying to explain the meaning of life to the two officers in front of me who I thought were absolutely blown away by my theories because no one was saying anything. About five minutes in, one of them turns around very slowly and goes, shut the fuck up. And I was mortified because I really couldn't conceive of the fact that what I was saying wasn't blowing his mind.

I get to court. I'm still in a really, really positive mood. And they released me. There's this kind of shit-eating grin in the back of my sociopathic head at that time. My parents are absolutely mortified. A lot of their friends say, get him in a rehab. I sign into a detox, which you need to go to in order to go to a rehab. And I was having the time of my life in this place. I was enjoying it. Not a care in the world.

A month goes by and I call home and my mother picks up and I know, obviously, you know your mother very well. She's silent. I instantly know something's wrong. She goes, you're all over the news. You're the most wanted criminal in Long Island. What the hell have you done? What is wrong with you? I was not surprised or concerned. This was going to be interesting because life was an improv stage at this point.

I had no answer for her because how do you explain the unexplainable? They tell me to stay in the rehab because it's an anonymous program and the police can't get me in there. So I do so. My roommate, a former Marine, grabs up all the newspapers and runs into my room and says, I'm going to protect you. I'm not like anybody else is going to see this. He had a big stack of newspapers. Later that night, that room was empty.

He wasn't hiding the papers from everyone else to protect me. He was doing it to make sure he could make the phone call to get the $1,000 reward. So police swarmed the hospital. My family said, this is insane. We are harboring a fugitive. What are we even doing here? We're turning you in and we're dealing with this. So I was turned in. When I went to the police station, I was still completely 100% disassociative.

I was arraigned on multiple armed robberies. And now I was in jail for the first time in my life. I was the life of the party at that jail. It was a really bizarre five days. I mean, you know, I was a jail celebrity because my name was in the paper. It was just very bizarre.

I had been on bail for roughly eight months fighting the case when eventually my lawyer came to me to state that the final offer was going to be for a six year sentence of which I would do 85 percent. So I would do five years and a few months. I had to take that plea. No ifs, ands or buts. And so I did.

He also informed me that my judge was going to essentially do me a favor by not remanding me to jail right then and there. I could stay out until the sentencing. So I would have a few more months of freedom before I actually started the six year sentence. So I was bailed out after five days. I'm so happy to be out of this place because the Paxil is I'm going through withdrawal. I didn't think I was going through withdrawal. I thought I was reacting to being in jail.

My body was experiencing these bizarre electric shocks. I felt completely out of it, dizzy, uncomfortable, unable to form coherent thoughts. I said, well, okay, this is obviously the stress from being in jail, but it wasn't. It was textbook SSRI withdrawal. As soon as I left the jail, I immediately started the Paxil again and the withdrawal symptoms abated immediately.

So I went to a bar, sit at the bar, have a few drinks, have a conversation with the bartender, explain to him that I'm going away for six years. He says, oh, I had a friend go away for two years and he was never the same since. Well, that's all I needed to hear. I said, oh, two years destroys you, then six years will absolutely destroy me. On balance, it makes sense that I just simply don't go to jail.

I could probably just become an armed robber again who just goes across the country robbing to survive. And that'll be what I do. I can't tell you how simple that thought process made perfect sense. Went home, grabbed a different knife this time, drove to the first gas station, stopped, robbed it, got chased out by the auto mechanic, ran up a hill. And then something odd happened. My shoe fell off.

I paused in this weird frozen state. I could not decide if I should go get this shoe or not. And it froze me for a long period of time for someone who's trying to evade a robbery. Finally get to my car, go down a street. A police officer does a three-point turn and comes behind me. So I pull over. I know I have no chance here. There's a bunch of cash and a knife and I've had a few drinks. Soon as he gets to the car, I hit the gas.

I'm in a 96 Camry. I'm driving as fast as this car can go. And there's got to be, including unmarked cars, 15 to 20 cars following me. And then eventually the helicopter is out. At a certain point when it became very obvious that I wasn't going to make it, I looked at the knife and said, okay, very unemotionally, game over. I took the knife to my neck and I pushed as hard as I possibly could.

Not doing this out of anguish, just doing this as a logical solution to the problem. And I heard a loud pop. You know, the neck is very thick and it took a tremendous amount of pushing to get to that point. After stabbing myself in the neck, I continued to drive and I was waiting for my eyesight to get hazy and to start the slow process of dying.

But I don't die. In fact, I don't feel any pain. It wound up being just a minor puncture wound. I decide, okay, I'm not supposed to die. I'm going to continue to drive. I take, you know, I go on this wild three-town police chase. My strategy now is to go back to my parents' house and run through the woods. And I got out of the car. I tried to run. I wound up twisting my MCL, jumping down a hill. I was immediately arrested, and they saw the puncture wound, so took me into the hospital.

I had just tried to end my life, and as I'm laying in that hospital, I remembered that this was the hospital where I was born. It almost seemed like two bookends to a life. As I'm slowly coming out of this bizarre, almost comatose state, I am starting to understand the consequences of my actions.

It occurred to me I had just done another robbery after pleading guilty to six years for eight-arm robberies and that I might go to jail for 25 years or more. I still wasn't in a state of pure cognitive understanding of what that meant, but I was getting there. And I had these waves of terrifying fear bubble up through my mind and my body, knowing that this was really, really bad. And I may have destroyed my future life.

And I may never come home. And if I do, I'll have missed my entire 20s and 30s and all the years of my life. And as the night wore on, I got more and more entranced by this thought. And I couldn't believe it. I still wasn't quite at the place where I could really appreciate consequence. But I was somewhere in the middle. The next day, they bring me to the arraignment. I get arraigned. I go to the jail. They put me on suicide watch.

I am coming out of the Paxil haze each day. Overwhelming is not the term. It is beyond devastating, confusing. The mind almost has to find a way to prove that it's not real. This cannot be happening. There were tears.

Called my parents who told me that the judge is absolutely out of his mind livid. He allowed me to stay out until sentencing, which they don't always do, especially in a violent crime case. And I repaid him by doing another robbery. He said a minimum of 20 years. And that's if I'm lucky. And it was just a nightmare compounded by nightmare. So a couple of days go by. I wind up having a conversation with somebody on the tier and talking about somehow antidepressants came up.

So he says, yeah, you need to check into that shit, son, because that shit is no good. I was on it. A lot of shit they don't tell you is hidden under the radar. And you need to look into that because that might have had a part in what you did. And instantly that statement clicked in my mind. I knew that Paxil had played a part. It all made sense. Now, I kind of knew already. I just need somebody else to say it.

I called my mother, who then went online and found a lot of underground information very specific to my behavior. Eerily specific. Not just the robberies, but other things that they were saying. Over the course of the next year, I and my parents became experts on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,

on the congressional hearings into the safety of these drugs, how they can be extremely dangerous for a certain percentage of the population that takes them. SSRIs have caused a lot of carnage in our world, including a tremendous amount of school shootings.

People say, well, millions of people take them. How come I don't hear about them having these problems? Well, you don't hear about them having these problems because they get swept under the rug or the victim gets blamed saying that's why you were seeking help. Something was wrong with you. That is the go-to explanation when the drugs cause bizarre side effects. We were very surprised to learn that the judge agreed and removed the six-year plea and we started from scratch. We hired one of the top experts in the country, thanks to my mother reaching out to him.

So he went and wrote a 26-page report detailing how and why this was a direct result of Paxil-induced mania and that I was not responsible for my action because I could not form intent. Now, mind you, I was in county jail for two years during this time, and that was a hell of an adjustment. County jail is a very difficult place to be. It's not made for long-term living. It's made to put pressure on you to agree to a plea agreement.

It's exhausting. It's loud. The officers are your biggest enemy because they're the ones who have the most control over you and can cause you the most damage. They can extend your sentence. Some of them are sadistic. You have a lot of people who just feel just like you. They don't belong there. They can't believe they're there. And you're both kind of in this together and you have to laugh at the absurdity of it.

Now, this case only has merit as the drug was prescribed by a physician and I was not made aware of the potential side effects due to the fact that the maker of the drug had hid the potential side effects and they didn't come out until congressional hearings forced them out in 2004. This was 2002, so I couldn't have been made aware of the potential side effects.

So that's very important to know because you can't go drink alcohol or use a recreational drug and do a criminal behavior and say, well, I was intoxicated, therefore I'm not guilty. That will not fly in court because you chose to put yourself in that situation. Whereas with an involuntary intoxication, a doctor is telling you to take something. So that's our case.

The minimum that I would have received at trial had I lost was going to be 25 years. That's the maximum for one robbery. And I had a total of nine at this point. My heart and soul wanted to prove that this wasn't me. And I wanted my good name back. You feel like you got to stand by your principles. But then that falls to the wayside when you're faced with the decision of potentially doing the 25 years or doing much less, even if you think you're innocent. You might take that lower plea deal.

So a few days away from jury selection, I asked my lawyer to get a plea deal. The judge has my lawyer come to me and say, listen, even if you prove that you were legally insane, you have to go to a mental institution for further evaluation and be held there indefinitely. And they could drive you so crazy there that you'll become crazy trying to prove you're sane. So he said the final offer is 10 years flat. And on that, you'll do eight and a half years. You have two in. So that means you have six and a half left.

I could physically feel myself being pulled in both directions. And I mean physically. I felt my soul, or whatever it is you want to call it, say, we've got to fight this case. You've got to prove your innocence. You've got to do this. And it was a very manic feeling. Then I felt myself sway back to the plea of 10 years, and a peace came over me. That's all I needed.

I allowed that peace to guide me. And I said, I'm taking the 10-year plea. I'll be home by 32. I'll have a chance at a life. If I lose trial, I'm not getting home until my mid-40s. I can't start over at that point. I stood up. I accepted a plea deal of 10 years in prison. I walked away from that, and I felt a sense of relief. It's an odd thing to feel after agreeing to 10 years in prison, but no more unknown. I knew when it was going to end, and I was okay with that.

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Prison is a different environment. They call it the upside down kingdom for a reason. The bad guys are on top and the good guys are on bottom. People who are the worst of society are the most revered in there.

Adjusting to the prison environment was a long, arduous process, and it really took a lot of intestinal fortitude to change essentially who I was to meet the unique demands of a very high stress and intense environment where violence was the solution to most confrontations.

It is impossible to be in 100% accordance with the rules 100% of the time. It is absolutely impossible. And if this correction officer does not like you, he will find that you broke one of the rules and punish you for it. So...

That's a very delicate balance. You got to know when to step out of the way and when to hold your ground. And if you do it wrong, you become a victim. And the other way, you'll get in an unnecessary fight and you'll be sent to the box. I did probably a total of 100 days in solitary confinement. If you add them all up, the longest was 30 days. I agree that solitary confinement is torture. However, it was also very interesting.

You have one friend and one enemy, and they're both inside your head. And being in that sensory deprivation environment forced me to really look at the things that I was doing that were self-destructive and understand that that was me. Nobody else influenced that.

You are alone with your thoughts and you spend probably three to five days in absolute denial that this could be happening and searching for a way out. And when you finally submit to the fact that there is no way out, I think what happens is you decide by sheer necessity that you have to become essentially friends with yourself again. You have to make your mind an ally and stop allowing it to beat itself up.

And so what you do, or at least what I did, was to delve into all the positive memories I had from childhood and adolescence and replay them over and over and to kind of search for new ones that I hadn't thought of long ago and find a piece in that that transcended the stark cold and dark room that I was in. And it worked.

It taught me that the mind is capable of much more than we are aware of. And then I transitioned to, okay, what can I do to make this a productive experience? So I investigated the possibility of going back to college. And I went to, you know, Ohio University. It's an accredited correspondence program that anyone can take, not just prisoners. I learned more

more in those eight years, both formally and informally, than I ever would have learned in this society that we live in, that demands our attention every second of the day. I was given what I call almost a personal renaissance. I had the opportunity to read, read, and read. And I became a person who appreciated exactly what, and this was the opposite of who I used to be, exactly what an education is. I graduated from college with a 3.8 GPA. I

After seven years and 11 months in prison, I was being told that I was about to be released in 30 days and I was overwhelmed. My release date is approaching and I'm on pins and needles counting the hours.

And finally, the day comes. I don't sleep. I'm up all night. I'm making sure that I haven't broken any rules, even the most minor of rules. I'm doing everything I can possibly do to stay in good graces. They call you down. You have clothes that you change into. And as soon as you change into those clothes, you're all watching the dreams that you've held for years manifest in front of your face.

I came home to a family that supported me. I would narrate everything I was doing. I'm taking a shower in my house. I'm watching television in my room. You know, it was just unbelievable that I was doing this and really took a few days for me to stop narrating the experience. What I did was I focused on reacclimating to society. Now, the biggest difference in society is the amount of decisions you have to make in a day.

The drive to work requires more decisions than an entire day in prison, let alone everything else that goes on on the job. And I was tired a lot. I was tired because I was physically fit. I was in great shape. I had been working out for years, but it was mental fatigue and anxiety.

I didn't want to let anybody down. I didn't want to make one mistake because I wanted to prove in every way possible that I didn't belong in prison. So I wanted to do everything right. And I put a lot of pressure on myself. And I think I put too much pressure on myself. When I look back on the actual crime, crimes, unfortunately, that put me in prison. And so the question becomes, do I blame the antidepressants for my crime?

And it's very difficult for people to accept that an inanimate pill approved by the FDA used by millions of people could possibly cause such a scenario where someone would commit this bizarre violent crime and that the individual isn't somehow responsible. They want to say, well, it's something about your psychological makeup that's different than my psychological makeup. So therefore, you're guilty because you allowed that drug to have that effect on you.

I am not a saint, and I have made many mistakes in my life. I was not a responsible young adult. I was abusing alcohol. Therefore, everything that I was choosing to do and slash not to do put me in the position where I would then be potentially prescribed a drug I didn't need. Now, there's culpability on the part of the drug maker. However, I'm not an armed robber.

Couldn't have happened without Paxil. I don't care how many drinks I had one night.

I've come to peace with not litigating my case. If people want to tell me that I'm crazy, that it was me, that it was something about me and the drug is an excuse and how dare I, more power to you. I have so much more to worry about in my life today. I'm not going back to prison for it. You can think what you want. I will say this, and I think this is a very important takeaway message.

If you are going to see a psychiatrist, be your own advocate. Shop the psychiatrist. Do not use a commercial as a basis for whether or not you have a symptom. If you are prescribed an SSRI or any other psychotropic drug, do your research before taking it.

That being said, if you're incredibly depressed, don't be afraid to speak to a psychiatrist and think about getting on a regimen. And you need to have somebody in your corner. And you might need to try these drugs because they can be effective in some people who take them. Just be your own mental health advocate and make your friends and family around you aware that you're starting a drug regimen. And if they see any bizarre or odd behavioral changes,

to make you aware of them, to then make your prescribing physician aware of them. If your prescribing physician shows no concern whatsoever, that's a red flag. Be aware and be willing to try something different if it doesn't work. It's postulated by Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, that depression and anxiety are chemical imbalances.

Now, these drugs are marketed as mood regulators, but serotonin is a misunderstood molecule, first of all. Serotonin is fundamental to all human behavior. There are so many more functions, and mood is a side effect of some of these functions. But when you're speaking about the serotonin molecule, you're speaking about one of our primal sources of behavior and motivation. And that's

that is the place where morals and values and essentially all fear and anxiety come from. That is the foundation upon which we build ourselves. It is the foundation upon which we build our society. So,

So without fear, the human race wouldn't be here today. We need to fear the bear that is in the woods. We regulate our behavior through fear. And anxiety and fear are kind of two sides of the same coin. We now live in an environment where we are not as readily under attack by various forces of nature as we were throughout the history of man. But those fight or flight mechanisms are still in place. We all know what fear is.

It's there to keep us alive. That's it. It's entangled with the ego, but fear keeps us alive. So the impulses that influence our thoughts and behaviors are there for a fundamentally important reason. They are there to keep us alive. And without them, we as a species would not be here in the first place. So my identity is built around my reaction to those absolutely necessary forces within me.

When I was a teenager and I thought I knew everything, I wanted to supersede and transcend fear. It's the opposite of what I want to do today. I want to find balance and understand fear. And I want to understand why it's there in certain moments, come to find peace with it and not run away from it, but turn and look at it. I think when you don't face a fear, it actually manifests and it becomes more real had you just turned and looked at it.

So I see who I am as someone who has no longer the desire to transcend fear, but rather to come to terms and become in balance with what it represents and what it's trying to tell me. I think there is a wisdom inherently built in to all human beings. And I think it's a wisdom passed down through DNA, through shared experience.

And I think it's a beautiful and wonderful thing. And if one individual can take a drug and change their identity and no longer be influenced by those fear mechanisms that keep us alive, that doesn't make those fears and anxieties any less important or real. It just means that we are just advanced enough to tinker with the neurochemicals in our mind that we can kind of supersede the evolutionary process, which leads to disastrous consequences, obviously.

I know exactly how it kind of separated me from the human condition. And I know exactly how it allowed me to do things that I would never normally do.

I also know now that there are plenty of other drugs that can separate us from ourselves. And those I stay away from. I'm sober today. I don't drink. I don't use any drugs. They don't serve me. They're all forms of escape. And the more you try to escape, the faster whatever it is you're trying to escape catches up. The bigger it gets, the scarier it gets. And now you really can't face it. So now you really have to escape.

Escape is not an option. Kind of ironic that I also learned that in prison. Escape definitely wasn't an option, but it's not. Escape is not an option. We have to turn and face it. On April 1st, 2016 was the day that I got off parole. Eight years in prison, five years on parole. That night, my wife told me that she was going to labor with our first child. And my baby girl was born the next day, April 2nd. I didn't want her to have an April 1st birthday.

Having my daughter born was the most important experience of my adult life by far. And every parent can, you know, but that has made the past almost worth it because I got here to be with mine. She's now four years old.

I have been probably one of the most lucky people I've ever met. And it might sound kind of counterintuitive, but I should be dead, first of all. So I'm kind of living on playing with house money. I had plenty of opportunities to go in the wrong direction pre, post, and during prison. And a number of positive people came into my life at times when I needed it most.

During this pandemic, we had some tough times. My wife, we're in New York. We got hit hard right in April when nobody knew what was going on. And her father was diagnosed very early. One of the first, one of the really early diagnoses of COVID. And she got a call from a doctor saying, I'm so sorry. You're going to have to say goodbye. We have to put him on intubation. And I sat and watched my wife say goodbye to her father over the phone.

As soon as we had a moment to figure out what was going on, she was diagnosed. And I slowly watched her lose her ability to breathe. I thought I was watching her die. And we had her quarantined in a room and we did our best. And my two children didn't know what was going on. You know, eventually I had to call the ambulance because she had 104 fever and she had childhood asthma and she had those preexisting conditions that made her a candidate to not survive.

I thought when I called the ambulance that this might be the last time I ever see my wife and my two children are not going to grow up with a mother. And it was pretty intense. And I got on the phone. I put my kids in the car. I went for a drive and reached out to my friends and family. A few days later, she was released.

She came home. I watched her get well again. Somehow I never got it. I have no idea how. And not only that, her father was one of the 20% that gets taken off intubation. Three months later, we celebrated his 73rd birthday in our backyard of the new house we just bought. And I said to myself, you didn't lose it. You didn't give in.

All your fight or flight mechanisms were kicking in and shutting down the mind, but I knew what was going on in my head. So losing my identity for those couple of months actually taught me more about who I am than anything else and has actually helped guide me today and probably will for the rest of my life. And so today, when I look back on my life, I think I have a choice. I have a choice as to how I want to perceive it.

I have bad days like everybody else. And I have burdens. And I feel like I can't. Not today. This is not fair. I've already been through enough. And now this. I let them pass through me. I try not to fight them. I try breathing techniques. I try not to outthink them.

Life is hard. Life is hard today. Life's going to be hard tomorrow. And it's always going to be hard. But there's something incredibly gratifying about not giving in to life's challenges, to facing them as best you can. Now, I live my life according to how will my decisions affect my children. Where I was once impulsive, I'm the opposite. Where I was once confrontational, I will mull over the best possible solution

Today, I feel that I am giving and not taking more often than not. And there's something wonderful about that. If you want more information about today's storyteller, you can email him directly at aliveandwell11 at gmail.com. That's aliveandwell11 at gmail.com. Thank you.

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