What if you swallowed 48 bags of cocaine? [Rebroadcast #156]
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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. Today we begin our annual three-week winter holiday rebroadcast series. We'll be on hiatus starting today and we'll return with all new episodes starting January 16th. Today's rebroadcast episode, What If You Grew Up in a Violent Gang, originally aired as episode 163 on October 6th, 2020.

I had to go through having taken everything away from me to come to the conclusion that you can have these things taken and that not only are they bearable, you'll come back a person that's wiser and a more full, satisfied human. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 156. What if you swallowed 48 bags of cocaine?

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I grew up in a small town in Ohio with a very large Amish population, very conservative Christian values. And my family and extended family were Christian. We were all very tight-knit.

My family was very genuine and caring, and we never really thought they were almost stoic in personality. Taught me to control my emotions and to try and always think things through, yet did have this piece of them where they were conservative and Christian and

I was a pretty firm believer. I would go to church every single Sunday. I would go to youth group every Wednesday. My family and friends and community in general believed these things. I wholeheartedly believed that Christianity was the right path.

It was something that I eventually grew out of and started to question largely due to the internet, due to my education, just kind of having an inquisitive mind in general. My mind started to change. And so that naturally kind of set my mind on a course of questioning everything around me, not just my parents, but teachers, teachers.

Maybe like 17 or 18, I started taking larger risks. I mean, I was always kind of a troublemaker kid, doing ridiculous stunts and pushing boundaries, even as a young child. But my confidence grew and I began to take on like larger and larger risks. As I began to prepare for college, I started breaking away from the church because I started learning more information that was contradictory to whatever religion said at the time or even what my parents had taught me.

That kind of put me into an existential crisis early on, even before I ended up into college and getting a higher education, because it took whatever I had identified with as a person and ripped it apart.

A lot of the stuff that I was reading was psychological to try and understand why my mind had been so flawed in the first part to have grasped on to religion in the way that it did and to believe it wholeheartedly. From there, I think I transferred over into philosophy because once you recognize your mind as flawed, then you inevitably start to ask what does your mind even know or what is it capable of knowing?

I have no resentment towards my parents at all in any way. They are truly some of the best humans I know and taught me to be a young, confident, truth-seeking man. And although we disagree and we have debates frequently on it, they're never heated and there's no anger towards each other. I know that they taught me as best as what they could.

So going into college in the midst of going to school for a petroleum engineering degree in which I was kind of told that this is the steps to take to be able to end up being successful in the future, I was struggling with understanding some of the harder questions.

I didn't see myself as being a person who just went to school, got an education, graduated, got a job and worked the next 20 years of my life away just to be able to pay off my student loans and get myself into a financial position to where I could finally at one point in time relax. It just seemed like a complete waste of life.

The questioning led to experimenting and searching for more information that would give me bits of truth to get me closer to the right path.

I hadn't used any drugs, never drank alcohol. I had never even kissed a girl. And by the time I got into college, within like the first couple months, I had kissed a girl, had sex for the first time, used weed, used alcohol, used some amphetamines. In my mind, it was a reality shift. I was trying to broaden my mind in a lot of different ways. And so...

The alcohol taught me social aspects. The marijuana taught me introspectiveness. The

MDMA taught me feeling your body and happiness that can come with dancing. And I experimented some with psychedelics, with LSD and mushrooms and experiences, music festivals, traveling, pushing myself to every single limit that I could, whether that be emotionally or physically or mentally, intellectually, and get a different grip on reality.

The goal was to eventually figure out where I needed to be headed. I was told that petroleum engineering was one of the most promising careers out there. If you could manage to get through the schooling, you'd pretty much have a guaranteed six-figure job coming out the bat. And so I was pretty free to experiment during that time.

petroleum engineering isn't something that I wanted to do very long term, but I knew that after having gathered all that debt, I would have to be part of that and have to use that degree to be able to pay off those loans.

Once I graduated, which was 2015, we went through that first big oil crisis and oil went from $100 a barrel down to $30 a barrel. And all of us pretty much got put on hiring freeze. Lots of guys lost their jobs. And it was a series of years before things got any better.

I was hired into a company, but they were paying me very, very little. And I recognized that I could hardly even meet my student loan payments, which were at $1,200 a month at the time.

For somebody who constantly thought about their mortality, thinking about being forced to pay on student loans for the next 10 or 20 years, it drove me absolutely nuts. So I felt like my happiness was going to be constantly put on hold until I had that debt taken care of. But I think it was even deeper than that. It wasn't just holding me back from personal goals or career goals. It was holding me back from where I found my purpose in life and

the things that didn't just bring me happiness, but brought me fulfillment. And I was willing to take extreme measures to get rid of that ball and chain. That's when I started to get desperate.

The summer of 2015, I began brainstorming ways where I could make money very quickly. And due to the principles of high risk, high reward, I knew that it was probably going to be something that was fairly risky, which I was okay with, but I didn't want it to be immoral.

Once I came to the conclusion that selling drugs was probably going to be my fastest way to pay off the debt, I figured if others could do it, I could, which was obviously a very overconfident, even slightly arrogant way of thinking. But at the time, I naively figured I could go straight to the source and do it all by myself.

I didn't see bringing drugs into the country as being inherently immoral. Yes, it was unlawful, but I didn't see them personally as being immoral because I had such good experiences with them.

So I figured I would try and mix my love of travel with my business endeavor. And I flew to Mexico and did two months of traveling down through Mexico all the way to Panama. And once I was in Panama, I went to a music festival and I...

approached somebody who then took me to somebody else. And I gave him a location in the city. And I said, if you want to make a good amount of money, if you bring me a gram of it, then I will test it. And if it goes well, then we'll continue on from there.

The next day, he ended up showing up and I told him to wear a certain color shirt that way I'd recognize him. And we met in a crowded area. He gave me the gram and I paid him for it. And I gave him a new location and different shirt color to wear and a different time the next day to meet me.

We never exchanged numbers. And to this day, I don't even know the guy's name. But that's how I continued to do it for five days. And so I would get it in small increments, never telling him how much I wanted at the end so that he would never be able to just say, you know what, I'm going to show up and rob him, take his money and be done with it. Because he knew that he would be losing out by not continuing or by screwing me over. And he didn't know how much I wanted. I did it over the period of time until I ended up having 285 grams.

that final deal. I told him that I appreciate it and I shook his hand and I said that I wasn't going to be coming back and I never saw him again. My plan was to get 285 grams of cocaine, fly it back into the States inside of me, get to a hotel and then poop them all out. And that obviously sounds disgusting, but if you're talking about potentially making 40 or $50,000, for me at least was worth it.

I take it back to the hostel that I had been staying in and I start packaging it up.

I had did a lot of tests in different ways. I had packaged them how I wanted to package them and I actually create a mock hydrochloric acid mixture. I took the pH of the stomach acid and I made sure the pH was triple what it was in the stomach. And then I dropped these packages of powdered sugar in the same packaging that I was going to be using into this mixture to be able to allow them to sit there for three days and make sure they didn't eat through the type of latex that I was using.

What I had originally like knew that I should have been doing is eating maybe seven or eight of them every 30 minutes to be allowed to allow them to work from my stomach down to my small intestine. But I didn't allot myself enough time because my plane was taking off really late at night. And instead of doing a little bit at a time, allowing them to work down through my body, I basically forced them all down into my body all at once.

48 of like a large thumb sized pill, probably even bigger than that to be honest. After I got them all in my stomach, I grabbed my backpack that I'd been traveling with and we headed to the airport. It was an extremely uncomfortable ride to the airport and I was pretty nervous walking through the body scanners, but I knew having done research beforehand that they weren't going to pick up anything that was inside the body.

Nothing got set off, no alarms. And I went to my gate and just laid down and tried to close my eyes because it was the most uncomfortable situation of my entire life. It felt like if you had just done a food eating contest and you had never been in a food eating contest in your entire life, knowing that it has something in it that shouldn't be in it.

For a while, I couldn't even talk about it because I'd start to remember the feeling and start dry heaving again. I don't remember much about the plane ride. I think it was only like a two or three hour plane ride. And I might have like just closed my eyes and tried to get my mind elsewhere. Getting off the plane and realizing I was finally in the United States and then I just needed to make it through customs was a good feeling.

I went through customs. I didn't have any issues. And I thought at that point in time, after walking through there, that I was home brave because you could see the light that got me out into Fort Lauderdale in Florida. And it just was sunny day and super nice. And I thought for sure I had it.

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I get in a taxi and have him just take me to a hotel. I was outside of the hotel and my side like was really starting to hurt me at that point in time. All of a sudden, like my side just starts like shaking violently.

I had read that there was a potential for the packages to get lodged in there and then to free up and to have like some stomach issues there, but not to worry about it too much. People tended to prematurely check themselves into a hospital, even though they were actually okay. At that point though, like my body started reacting very violently. I tried to get into the hotel and check into a room as quickly as possible and

As I walked into the hotel, the lady at the front desk could tell that there was something wrong with me because I wasn't speaking to her because I was fighting the urge to puke so bad. And I basically just hand her my card and managed to say I want a room before I went silent again. And she's just looking at me.

She can feel my pain. It's just apparently so clear on my face that she's obviously able to tell. And so she asked me if I want an ambulance called for me. And I just shake my head and I managed to get out the words like I need to use the bathroom. I go to the bathroom and I'm still dry heaving, but nothing's coming out. But at that point in time, whenever I puked, I could feel one of the packages come up into my throat. I knew that like they were so big that they could potentially choke me.

I'm trying to keep it quiet because I'm in a lobby hotel bathroom trying to hold it together and still thinking that I could take care of it myself. I walked out of the bathroom and I immediately just got my card from the lady and left the hotel. And there was a subway restaurant across the street that I walked into and got two big bottles of water so that I could force the packages back down out of my throat and back into my stomach if I needed to, to help myself avoid choking on them.

At this time, I was alone and I started to get pretty worried because my body was just handling it so poorly. I was sitting back around some storage units by myself because I had walked away from the subway to get away from anybody who could see what was going on. I just sat there for a little while trying to deal with the pain that was in. That's when I started to feel the effects of the cocaine. I felt the euphoria. I knew what it felt like from previous experiences.

I think that when my body was shaking, that that was the point where one of the packages actually ruptured. Because my body was rejecting the ruptured package and the cocaine so heavily, that's when I knew I was in a lot of trouble.

I had a million thoughts going through my mind at once because what that meant is now there's something that's leaking or ruptured inside of me. And as the feeling gets stronger and stronger and I could tell that there was a good bit of cocaine introduced into my system, I basically knew that the only way to save myself would be to turn myself in.

I had done enough research getting myself into this that I knew that there was a pretty high likelihood that I would die because I knew the purity of the cocaine and how much was in each package and how much that meant my body was going to be taking all at once. A body can't handle six grams of completely pure cocaine all at the same time. And that now time was of the essence. And if I didn't get to the hospital as quickly as I could, I could potentially pass out and die.

Before I called the hospital, I called a couple people that were extremely important to me in life. I told them that I was sorry and explained what I did. I told them that I loved them and to let my parents know that as well. They were in India at the time and I wasn't going to be able to reach them.

It started euphoric and it worked its way into an uncomfortable high, then worked its way into my mind isn't controllable right now. And I hate this feeling. And that was the point where I called 911.

I knew at that point in time I had to do everything I could to be able to maintain consciousness, to be able to relay the information to the surgeons or the doctors, to be able to keep myself alive. And so I came completely clean with the cop. This is what I did. I came in this morning. I took this amount and it's in my body right now. It definitely confused him because I just looked like some moron.

white kid who had just done too much cocaine and didn't know what he was talking about. And so even once the ambulance got there, they just sat there and they wouldn't let me get in. And they just kept trying to question me on it, trying to ask who I got it from, which at that point I didn't know, but they were keeping me from getting in the ambulance. And I had to really push to be able to get in and get taken to the hospital.

And eventually I just left my backpack and I told them like, I'm getting in this ambulance right now. Like I need to get to the hospital or I'm going to die. My heart was racing like crazy. Again, I knew I needed to stay conscious to get to the hospital and like be able to tell everyone what had happened, even though my urge was just to lay back and like fall asleep.

As odd as that sounds, whenever the cocaine got to a certain extent, I felt like just closing my eyes because I wanted all the thinking to stop. I was in the ambulance and they were sitting there and the guy wasn't turning on the lights to the ambulance or anything. We were basically taking a leisurely stroll to the hospital.

I hope I asked nicely, but who knows? But I was like, "Hey, would you mind getting to the hospital faster? I think that I'm in a really dire situation." And he turns around and he tells me, "I don't tell you how to do your job. Don't tell me how to do mine." The EMTs who were back there at the time then hooked me up and took my vitals. And they told him, "We need to get in there ASAP." And then he turns on the lights and we start flying to the hospital.

The hospital gave me activated charcoal and I was drinking that and they gave me stuff to throw up. The detective who was in there was just asking me all these questions. I told him pretty much everything because there was nobody else that was going to be hurt by it but me. I told him exactly how much I had taken and where I had gotten it from in Panama.

It was just me and him and the doctors were doing some tests or whatever. And so he was going to get up and leave. And I was so bad mentally. I asked him to stay with me and to just sit there. And he agreed. And we sat there and we just talked about life and how I had gotten there and why I had gotten there. Talked about his family some and my family some. It kept me sane enough until the doctors managed to get back.

having many, many thoughts race through your head at once and trying to like connect with each one and identify them. But them happening too frequently to manage to do that, it just makes you feel like you're insane. You can't make sense of the things that are happening in your mind. And so you just feel out of control and crazy. At this point, I was pretty convinced that I was going to go

I knew that I was fading out. And so I just, with my last sense of coherency, I asked them to please not let me die. And I don't remember anything after that. When I came to, my parents were there crying and saying that it's going to be okay. And I was looking around. I knew I was in a hospital bed, but it was very difficult to know exactly why I was there.

I looked at my hands and I had balls like of cloth wrapped around my hands. They were balled up because at one point in time, they tried to wake me up and I was too violent, I guess, and didn't know what was going on at all. And so they had to put me back under. I still had the tube down my throat helping me breathe. I remember having the tube pulled out of my throat and eventually like my hands were unballed up.

They asked me if I knew what day of the week it was. And I know I didn't know that. Like the first day, I thought it had been like several months for like probably the first good number of hours. I thought the reason that I was in there was because of one of my hallucinations I had while under the coma. And I thought that I had somehow become a homeless person.

I had made it to the hospital, but they weren't able to contact my parents or anything. And so I had basically managed to survive the surgery, but it had destroyed my mind. And I was just a homeless person on the street for a long time. I remember starving and...

eating food off the sidewalk and eventually some police officer stops and like picks me up and somehow they find an ID, an old, old ID in my pocket and they find my address and contact my parents from there. And then they had me sent to Indiana and that's where they like put me into a mental health place. And that's where like, I thought I woke up and was meeting my parents for the first time, but I have memories as a homeless person of,

long, long facial hair and super long hair and just walking around on the streets and the dirt and sleeping out behind buildings. So for like the first good while, that's why I thought I was in the hospital. Eventually my mind started to clear up more and somebody finally told me that I had been under for 10 days.

My memories from the 10-day coma were a lot clearer than what you might expect. It felt like I was living these lives and that I had spent a very, very long time in each one. Some of them, it's something as simple as me owning a ranch and having horses and having a family. I could describe areas of the house.

Another one was I was a meth addict and I was trying to go into a house to buy meth and it ended up being kind of like my house for a long time. Another one, I was in the military and I somehow did something dishonorable and had basically committed treason against the states. And so I was on the run for a while.

There was one memory where I lived with a good community of people in this weird tree house. It was like a teepee, but it was massive, like hundreds of feet tall. And we'd live in there and it was like a commune. That was a really good time. And we were all trying to reach some sort of transcendence by working together to understand more by using certain drugs to get us closer.

Another one, which is my most memorable for sure, was I had died and had been brought back, but only by being hooked up to like an AI of sorts. That particular memory was me waking up, seeing my body and like I was completely torn apart and burnt up in a lot of places. And then I kind of came to the conclusion that I had died and I started crying and

And then there was somebody there, they somehow turned on this machine, and I was connected to this machine. And I remember the second they turned it on, it feels like just like a rush of consciousness. It felt like I knew everything about what the universe was, zooming out and seeing things on very broad structures to zooming in and seeing like cells and atoms and the interconnectedness of them.

That was the most peaceful time that I can remember ever. It's like I somehow knew everything. Like I could process so much information at once and it felt like a true experience of enlightenment. That was for sure that memory, the most at one with the universe that I've ever been in my whole life, even though I wasn't conscious.

Some of the memories were years. Some of them were as short as a day. But I'd say most of them were at least several weeks long, maybe several months long. I felt as if all of these were as real as my waking conscious life.

It was as if you were having a dream and then you take a step further than that and it's a lucid dream. And then you have like your normal waking consciousness. And it was right on par with that, just as real as what being alive and listening to this is right now. Over the course of 10 days being in a coma, that's a lot of time for your brain to have unregulated thinking.

I have seen how powerful the mind is and how easy it is to be deluded and the consciousness that it can create out of nothing if the limits of the laws of physics aren't enacted on it. And so I don't put a lot of credibility into the things that I was experiencing.

For my own personal reasons now, I think that it was just due to the fact that my mind can create certain experiences and that there's not necessarily a deep meaning associated with it. But I've never felt so at peace in my whole life or understanding of like the universe in quotations. Some of those experiences that I guess I had during that time felt so real even when I woke up that I didn't know why I was in there or what exactly happened there.

And so I would pop in and out from understanding and making memories that were coherent and saying, you know what, this is definitely why I'm here and what I did to I wouldn't have any idea why I was in there. And I'd be visually hallucinating and I'd be auditorily hallucinating. I was having auditory hallucinations constantly. I thought the nurses were trying to kill me. I thought that everyone was trying to kill me except for my parents.

It got to the point where my mom, basically, she needed to leave. And my dad stayed down there with me for about a week until my mind started to come back.

I'd have moments of clarity where I'd see their pain and the doctors would let them know that they didn't know if I was ever going to recover mentally. And I would again want to be put back under because I didn't want to see any of that and I didn't want to think about any of that. And I was okay with dying at that point in time too because I hated the paranoia.

I hated not being able to think clearly because my mind is what I valued more than anything. And to live a life in which I didn't have that would have been, I would have rather just not lived, I guess. I think that if you were just in that insane state, it wouldn't be a problem because you wouldn't recognize yourself as being insane. I think it's whenever you realize what you could be and you aren't, that it's a problem.

I think that that's one of the most painful experiences of my life because a lot of what drives us as humans is to have that control, to be stripped of it and to be kind of out of control and recognizing that you are delusional and that you are the one who's like the problem. How you believed your identity to be is continually stripped of you as you transition between insane and sane.

The first night was by far the worst. Once my parents went back to their hotel room and it was just me alone in the bed with my thoughts, but while being awake, I was just so paranoid that the nurses were killing my parents. I could hear them plotting to kill me, even though it was fake. It was like the auditory hallucinations that I was having. I could hear my parents' voices yelling for help and my siblings and

I was just so sure of it because I was hearing it that the first night I didn't sleep at all. And I actually didn't sleep for three days straight. Thankfully, after like three or four days of going through that and after the first day and my parents recognizing that like I was in such bad place, my dad stayed with me 24-7 throughout the next week.

And was my rock in finding mental stability. And so everything that like I would have fears of or whatever, he'd always sit there and try and quell it. And he wasn't capable of truly like stopping me from having these thoughts. But he was always there to say, you know what, that's not true. That's not true.

constantly having somebody there to say that you're wrong and to correct your train of thought and whatever it was on. I think that's the only way that you can get closer to truth. And that's what enabled me to get away from that.

After four days, probably, I started to think more rationally. And I started to question whether some of the stuff that I went through actually happened. And I started to come to the conclusion that some of it didn't happen. But there was definitely still some things that I was adamant totally happened, which now I know definitely didn't happen. Probably after a week, I was pretty much back to normal.

Because of the effects of the cocaine and because of the amount of time that I spent in the comatose state, I had went from 170 pounds down to 130 pounds. So I was extremely weak. I couldn't walk for a while. I couldn't go to the bathroom by myself. I couldn't do anything. But after a week, I had managed to get to the point where I could walk. And I wanted to get out of the hospital really, really bad because I hated being in there.

They managed to release me. And so me and my dad ended up flying back from Florida to Ohio. And because I lacked so much body fat, I was always cold. I was taking like five or six baths a day to try and get my body temperature to be up. For the first month or so, it was always nightmares. I'd constantly wake up throughout the course of the night. And some of the dreams that actually take me back to those memories that I had in my comatose state and remind me of those lives in quotes.

It took me two months to where I felt physically strong enough to work. At this time, I was out on bond and I knew that I was going to be facing a good amount of time. So I was going through the emotions, trying to stay sane, knowing that I could be spending seven or ten years in prison and that these might be my last few months of freedom.

The one thing that I had throughout the whole time was my family was constantly there for me and my friends. I can't express how thankful I am between my family and friends. They were the people who got me through all those hard times. It doesn't surprise me at all when people end up in very rough spots because they don't have any of those people in their life to keep them going down the right rabbit hole, I guess.

It made my heart really kind of go out for homeless people. I recognize that kind of not having your mind there is the scariest, worst thing that can possibly happen to a human. So whenever I see people out in the streets, I feel for them very intensely. It really hurts me now to hear about people who commit suicide, to recognize that they were in a position where their mental state was so bad that they just wanted to eliminate it. It hurts.

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We were negotiating a plea deal and the testing came back. So basically they weighed out what I had and it somehow managed to be less than what I actually had. And that put me under a minimum mandatory sentence of seven years and knocked me down to three years, which

Which then after going back and forth with the prosecuting attorneys and their supervisors and them looking at like my previous criminal record, which was zero and my education levels and potentially negative factors that could go into me being a harm to society. We managed to get it done in 21 months.

which at that point in time, I was like, okay, that makes my life a little bit better. It's not going to completely like take out a big chunk of my life. I knew that the sentencing was going to be that going into it. I know I was, I knew I was going to be getting 21 months. We all knew I was going in and it was a hard time for,

for everyone, especially like my mom and my sister. But I had time to prepare for it mentally. And I was ready to just go in there and get it done as fast as I possibly could so that I could get back out and get on with my life.

Before I got into prison, I was anxious about it because there was so much information out there that was saying this is an incredibly dangerous place that you're going to be taken advantage of. You're going to have to fight. So going into it and having that fear, anxiety, I was obviously very reserved. I tried to stay to myself as much as I could.

because I obviously didn't want to bring any attention to myself, but it was actually quite easy to make friends with people. There was obviously differences between us, but at the end of the day, if you look for good qualities about something and ignore the fact that you're in there with a bunch of other people that society deemed unfit to be around each other, you can find goodness in the person. And

I think coupled with my extroverted personality, managed to make some good relationships with people in there from the get-go.

There was occasionally times where I could tell that I was being tested by people that were around me, especially when you get into a new prison, you get moved around. There's a lot of people that you don't know. And I found that as long as you stay to yourself, stay out of the drugs and the gambling, don't lose your temper about anything, even when things don't go your way. There are other people in there like you just trying to do their time. And you don't have to be part of any of that.

Unless you give off the impression that you are weak or that you could be somebody that could be taken advantage of, in which case people will prey on you.

I immediately took to working out and reading books and playing sports. And I found that prison, it wasn't nearly as scary as what people made it out to be. And as long as you minded your own business, were a kind human, but not naive, and stayed busy trying to improve on yourself, your time actually went quite fast. I think I was probably the most privileged person in the whole prison system. Having friends, family, and a girlfriend who traveled all over the country to see me and support me.

At the very beginning, when we first got in there, they did a series of tests, simple IQ tests, in which they would judge your educational level and how smart you were, I guess. From that, which was largely due to my education, I was able to immediately get in to the law library. They took me there without any law experience, and they just started educating me there so that I could eventually work and help other prisoners navigate their own cases, because a lot of them

didn't have reading abilities or writing abilities. I did a lot of like trying to help a lot of guys get their GEDs and I worked as tutor for quite a while in several different prisons. I went to a work release and I did some work there. I was on a like Department of Transportation team for a while and so did some concrete work there. I read so much. Like any free moment, I would get out of my own mind by delving into a book.

It was the best way to escape prison because these worlds made you feel as if you weren't there. All the stressors that you normally have with your jobs and your relationships out here, trying to stay fit, just having all these responsibilities all of a sudden wiped and you can use all that extra free time to invest in yourself and

improve yourself physically with your working out, to read books to educate yourself, to stay away from drugs and alcohol. It really forces your mind into this good space where you can find peace and improve on yourself. It was probably the largest period of growth in my life. Yes, we're byproducts of our nature and nurture and things that are outside of our control. We are also byproducts of the choices we choose to make on a daily basis.

Same concept applies when people start feeling bad for me and say that I was just a casualty of the corrupt educational system that had taken to have taken on these loans and been forced to do something drastic to get out of it. In the same way that if you had a friend out here who is continually making bad choices and you knew that they could do better, the same thing happens in there.

I've seen guys who have gone ahead and I've helped them get their GEDs or other teachers have helped them get their GEDs and they get out and I'm still friends with them on Facebook and they're doing really well for themselves because they invested in themselves while they were in there, even though they didn't have much. And they came out a much better person with a much better life.

Because of good behavior, I managed to get out in around 18 months rather than 21. And whenever I got out, it was so much choice and so much of having all the plans that you had designed for yourself, being in prison and not being able to fulfill them, all of a sudden handed to you and you being able to do that, that it was very anxiety producing because you

Now, you had this list of 100 things that you wanted to do when you got out or the changes that you wanted to make in your life or a business that you wanted to start or whatever it was. And now they were at your fingertips and all you had was time and the only person limiting you was you.

Going from not even just a zero financial position, but actually being in a very deep negative financial position, not only with my student loan debts, but $50,000 in restitution type charges, another like 20 grand in attorney's fees, and then medical bills on top of that. I was so deep in the negative that I've been constantly working and constantly putting energy into getting that taken care of.

Every day that I go out and work and try and improve my financials position is still me learning and dealing with the consequence of my action. Even my social situations, if I go swimming, anyone asks me about the cut down the middle of my chest and I have to now navigate a social situation where the people may not respond well to the fact that I did something so extreme.

job prospects. There's just loads of people who won't give you a chance if you've gone through the prison system at all or have any record. The physical aspects that come with potentially having long-term poor health. So I try and work out almost every day. I stay pretty physically active. We don't really know what the consequences are going to be of having your body shut down in the way that it did.

The mental stuff is still there whenever I think about it for very long at a time or think about it very much. There's painful things that come back and so I have to navigate my mind state to try and not allow those be present all the time. So there's just loads of things that I'm still dealing with on a daily basis from that experience.

I had met a girl at a music festival while I was out on bond and she had come down to visit me in Florida several times. So she was around and we're still together to this day. And my family was there supporting me and I worked my butt off. I went back into the oil field and although I had a felony, I could work as a rig hand. And so I was on the rigs working and getting myself back into a good financial position and,

I was rebonding with all the friends that I hadn't been able to see, which was easy and natural because they are great people. The hardest part was coming to terms with the fact that I wasn't going to be able to force my life into what I wanted it to be just by willing it to be that way.

people too often go through their lives acting in a way to just make you comfortable, try and deny your death or trying to deny your non-existence, running away from pain than they are running to new life. So it's like they're more driven by the fear of what bad could happen than the idea of what good can happen.

Even in the midst of having a wrist completely blow up in my face, it was a time where I grew more than I've ever grown in my entire life. And I learned more and I understand more and I felt more

It's like I was stretched out on all fronts of my being. And to not only have the things that you pride yourself on be removed, but to have kind of your meaning and what brings you fulfillment to have that removed. And then to have to work up from ground zero and knowing that that's going to take forever.

Today's episode featured Luke Himes.

A version of his story originally aired on the podcast What Was That Like? by Scott Johnson. To find out more about his show, go to whatwasthatlike.com. You can also find out more about Luke on Instagram at luke.heims. That's L-U-K-E dot H-I-M-E-S.

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