Hey, guys, welcome back to Path to Warren Podcast. I appreciate you listening. And being here on the last episode, we left off with me describing a little bit just a fraction of the bottom that I went through. I talked about how I had a solar business and it was massively in debt before I get into too much more of the bad and what life was like. I just want to take a second and make sure you understand that life is extremely wonderful. Today. I have a job that I make around $72,000 today, so I’m making back more than I was before I left the farm, and I’m happy that’s the key. I am happy, which is kind of the basis of my whole podcast. So the path of Warren I mentioned before is to really help others find the pathway to happiness. And I want you to know that I’m happy. My relationship with my daughter and my wife is way beyond what I could ever imagine. We’re close. We’re loving each other. My bills are paid on time. I’ve been solvent, meaning I’ve paid my bills every day before they’re due financially. We’re working on being recovered from where I left off, but it’s not just about money. It’s the spiritual piece of it. I have found my higher power. What is known as my version of my higher power. I am working out at the gym four or five times a week, really enjoying it. Eating as healthy as I can. It’s not perfect, but I’m eating as healthy as I can, and I just feel wonderful. I feel really good, and that is why I’m doing this. I’m doing this so that it hurts me today when I see people struggling, I have empathy for them. I have compassion for seeing somebody that is out there using heavily or massively obese. It’s a sickness. It’s a mental illness. It’s a problem. I don’t have all the answers, but I just think that if there’s anything that I can share that will help somebody who’s in pain, as bad as I was in pain, that this will be worthwhile. I’m going to take a break and I’ll be right back. So when I left off of episode one, like I said, we were at the bottom describing what happened when I had this tiny house that I finally completed. Mario and I moved it with my wife’s old antique truck. I ended up having to drive up to Lake Lure, North Carolina, one afternoon, driving in the old truck to pick up a flatbed trailer. That was like something I found off of the trailer. I paid cash to the guy $800, brought this flat trailer back, and we loaded. I don’t know how we did it. Really. Other than the fact that we loaded it onto cinder blocks, using Jacks to raise it up, we were able to actually lift this tiny house onto the back of its trailer. I Haught it down the road without a permit down the road past the University of South Carolina Stadium. And I had convinced a guy to let me put this tiny house and let Mario live in it off of Bluff Road. Welcome back, guys. To this episode. What does surrender mean to you when you hear the word surrender? A lot of times, you hear people say, oh, just surrender that or why don’t you just surrender? Surrender to me is when I had given up when I tried to fix things myself, so many different ways and so many times that I was out of options, I was done. I was completely exhausted. Surrender is when you’re at war and you’re told to surrender and you have to put your hands up, put your weapons on the ground, put your gun down, sit on the curb and be told what to do next. That’s where I was. That is, surrender. Surrender does not mean, oh, I’m going to do a few things that they suggest, but I’m going to continue to do a couple of things that I want to do because this is what I want to do. No, surrender is where I was. I was at the point where my wife had taken my daughter to live with her mom and dad, so I didn’t have my child. And that was the main point where I was like, okay, I surrender. Take it. You’re going to start taking my daughter away. I can’t do this, but I don’t blame her. There’s no way I can blame her for taking my daughter away. I was so sick. I was unstable. I was like a madman. When you add up all of the things that had hit my wife found out that I had spent tens of thousands of dollars. I had taken it out of our personal savings account to help fund my solar business. That was going bankrupt because it was taking much longer than I plan to finish these projects. The application process, the utilities were just slow as can be because they have absolutely no desire to go solar because it takes away from their bottom line. They’re basically being mandated by the government to go solar. They’re doing all they can to slow down people like me who are trying to help customers go solar. So the whole project that I thought were going to take a couple of months. They took three times as much time to actually be ready to Commission. So my paychecks weren’t coming in at all very little. And what happened was my wife was just fed up. I was not being a good husband, not being a good family man. I was all over the place. I was late for family functions. I was drinking too. Excess doesn’t even start to explain how bad I was drinking. I was smoking weed from the time I got up in the morning to help escape in my head because there was so much wrong with my life, the Adderall. I would leave it beside my nightstand next to my bed so that before I got up, I could just take the Adderall. And even if I went back to bed within ten minutes, I’d be wired, ready to go hard charging because of the Adderall. I don’t know if I have Add. I obviously think I do, but I don’t need that. That is a gift from God. That is a gift from my higher power. There’s no need to take medicines to stay focused. There are some people that are. So anyway, I’m not going to get into that right now, but I just want you to know that my life was unmanageable. It was absolutely completely unmanageable. And if you see somebody or you know somebody that’s out there that’s living unmanageably, maybe share this podcast with them, maybe it’ll help them or hit subscribe and listen to the rest of the story. But when my wife took my daughter away to live at my in law’s house, that was the main breaking point. My dad thought I was on cocaine. There was one instance that I remember where I had gotten paid a $10,000 check from a client and one of my partners, Kirby. He was trying to be a partner. He was really a sales rep that couldn’t sell anything by himself. He had to have me to do everything, but I’m not here to bash him. I’m just telling you that he fed to my dad facts that he thought were true. They were not true. But he shared with my father that he thought I was going to use the $10,000. He didn’t think I would use it on the customer’s roof that I was actually going to use it to buy cocaine. One night when I came home, my dad was insistent on this check, and I don’t know if it was a good thing. I’m leaning on the fact that it was a God thing, but the check had actually fallen in between my seat and of the Honda hybrid that I was driving. The check had actually fallen in between the seat and the center console, so I didn’t know where the check was, and I could not produce it for my dad when he wanted the check and I was really devastated that he wouldn’t trust me to believe that I was not on cocaine. I’ve never tried cocaine, and I’m going to contribute that to my uncle. I’ve got an uncle his name’s Uncle Jamie. He had been sober for 30 years, plus in AA, and I had seen him live a very godly life. I’d seen him turn his life around and heard the stories of how he had struggled with addictions and he was an entrepreneur as well, so I could relate to him very well. We got along all the time. Growing up. When I was a young boy driving in the back seat, I was riding in the back seat of my granddaddy’s car. And we were in the car following my grandparents and my parents, who were in the car ahead of us. My uncle shared with me. I think I was about eight or nine. I was about eight or nine years old. My Uncle Jamie sober. He shared with me how he had been addicted to cocaine. He actually shared how he would wake up in the morning, mix cocaine in with his Orange juice, and he would pack for the day cigarette, cellophane wrapper of cocaine with him. And that would be what he used all day to work. And he scared the life out of me when I was a young boy about using that drug, and it scared me to death. I want to know part of that. He told me very clearly that if you try that, you’ll never be the same. And it rocked my world. It had an impact. It had a huge impact. I think if he wouldn’t have told me that if he wouldn’t have been in my life, that I would have probably built up to that point. But thank God we didn’t get there. So my dad is in my house one night. He’s in my house, in my bedroom with me, wanting to know. Where is the check? Where’s the check? And I couldn’t produce it. I have no idea what the check was. I was so disappointed, though, because he thought I’d use it on cocaine. To me, cocaine was another level, but really, what I know now is the amount of Adderall that I was using and being prescribed by the doctor. So here again, this is another segment that could be a whole podcast in itself, thinking that you’re not addicted to something because it’s prescribed to you by a doctor is a lie you’re telling yourself. And that’s exactly where I was. I was sitting there using these things that I really thought were helping me. They were prescriptions. There were prescriptions by my doctor. I told him I was stressed. He gave me Xanax. I told him I couldn’t concentrate. He gave me Adderall. I told him I couldn’t get an erection to have sex. And so he gave me what’s the erection? Medicine. But it’ll come to me. But anyway, my problem was not that my problem was not those things. It was the life I was leading. It was the distance from my higher power. My life was so messed up that I thought I could solve it with a pill. I thought I could solve it with a drug. I thought I could solve it with a plant leaf that I smoked out of a bowl or a joint. I mean, that’s the craziest thing in the world. But that’s all I knew. Let me rephrase that I knew the right way to live. My parents growing up were very religious people, spiritual, and they were happy. There were no drugs in the house. There was no alcohol used in the house. I really didn’t know this higher power that they knew they grew up Presbyterian, Methodist. I had a problem with that because I knew that my God didn’t agree with some of my things that I was doing, but I didn’t know that was the solution to my problems. I didn’t know that trying to surrender my will and let God’s will work. I didn’t realize that was the basic underlying issue with my problem. I thought the solution was more money, more sex, more calmness. I thought that these little pills, more ability to concentrate and read. If I could just read more, if I could just work on these proposals more I need Adderall. That’s ridiculous. Looking back at it today. So by the time my dad wanted me to produce this check, I was so far in debt so far lost. That night, I had come home from a vendor. That’s what I learned is the right term. I had left super early in the morning, taking an Uber to North Carolina to talk to a Catawba Indian tribe. I had an appointment. I had a business appointment. This is legit. I had a legitimate appointment, but I had taken an Uber. It ended up costing me, like $300 to take an Uber to North Carolina. I had a car full of papers and computers and monitors to give a presentation. We were going to help this Catawba Indian Reserve with clean solar power. I was so messed up that and I pulled an all nighter. I stayed up the whole night before and crammed an Adderall. I might have slept on my desk for an hour. I don’t really know. I don’t remember. It’s all blurred, but it was hell looking back on it, man. It’s painful. When I came home from that trip the drive back, I was smoking weed in the Uber’s car, which now is ridiculous. He could have called the cops at any time. I made him pull through the Range Rover dealership. It’s kind of comical now thinking about it, but I had him pull through the Range Rover dealership and was convinced that I was going to make so much money on this deal that I was going to own one of the largest Range Rovers possible. Again, that was another sign that it was all material. I convinced myself that all things material would make me happy. Well, I had started this 20 person way call on the way back from Charlotte. That lasted, I think, on and off around an hour. This was around five, 607:00 at night. It wasn’t quite seven. It was around five or six at night. I was driving home in the Uber. I was on such an incredible high because these Kataba Indian folks, the head leaders, the supreme leaders of this group, and my connections that got me there were all in they wanted to go on this project that was going to be tens of millions of dollars in solar and shipping containers and battery storage and generators. And they were, like, all in basically come back with a proposal, and we’ll be ready to go. That’s what it sounded like to me again, through the filter of drugs and alcohol. But I came back, and I was on the phone rambling to everybody that I could get on the phone, that I think I’ve found the secret. I think I know how to do this deal, my dad, because at the time, all I wanted was an Atto boy from dad. I called him, and I was slurring my words. He could tell I was slurring my words, and I wasn’t really making sense. And his first comment, I think it wasn’t anything like, oh, good job. It was like, well, you know, projects this big take a long time, and there’s a lot of approval processes and a lot of proposals that are probably going to need to be done and specifications that need to be done because he knows he’s been around the block. He sold big deals before and knows that it’s not that easy. But they decided to show up at my house because they were concerned, and he knew that I was messed up, and they were trying to help. I come home, stumble in the house. My mother in law was keeping Maddie away from me in the living room. Maddie had this horrible look and crying on her face. She had this horrible look like, Daddy, what’s wrong? What’s wrong? I don’t know what they’re talking about. I think she was maybe four, and my parents wanted to talk. Dad followed me into my room, wanted to see what this check was. He was really concerned, and he says, I think you need to get help. Matt, I think you have a drinking and a drug problem. I think you need to get help. I did not know that he had been talking to Uncle Jamie. I did not know that Uncle Jamie had been feeding information about how to help somebody who is an alcoholic addict. But one of the first things that they started out by saying was, you need to raise the bottom for Matt. You need to raise the bottom. Well, I later learned that raising the bottom means do whatever you can without hurting him physically. Do whatever you can to help him by raising the bottom up. Don’t let him go too deep. Meaning if you’ve got $100,000, which most people don’t. But if you’ve got $10,000 in the bank and he has access to it, move that away. So my wife moved $13,000 of our personal money over to my mother in law’s account. When I heard about that, I flipped out. I thought she was trying to divorce me. I thought she was trying to sabotage me. All the things I was doing. I was trying to do for her and my daughter. I was trying to take care of my family. And here she is taking away what I thought savings were for emergencies. This was an emergency. In my mind, there were so many things wrong that this was not an emergency in her mind. Matt needs help. So that night, dad said, Look, I think you need help. I think we need to go to the hospital. Let’s go to the hospital. So without anything else to do, without any other options, I agreed to go to the hospital. I went to Richland hospital. We walked into the Er, and my dad wrote a note. This is the thing. I don’t even know what it said, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even look or ask him. At this point, I was ready to give up. I wanted help. I wanted help. My life was so unmanageable. And what I did was I just sat down. My dad went up to the counter, wrote out a note to the nurse, handed her the note, and said, I’d like to get him checked out by a doctor, so they ended up letting me stay. I was adamant about not being committed. I did not want to be committed. My sister had been committed for other issues, and I saw what that did to her insurance and her ability to get life insurance and things like that. I wanted to get the assessment and get out of there. So stay tuned. There’s more to come.