This topic here feels way too big to even address, dang, it’s huge. Earlier this week I planned a half-hearted attempt to do something about it, but then stopped. With the subject looming overhead, I tried to just move on with my daily activities, you know, staying busy and trying not to think about it. Alas I could not escape, I had no choice.

A few days ago I started to do something about it, I began planning a public event in Madison for this week, planning it for today actually, for Thursday April 4th.

Lining up a few different critical tasks, I prepared for a Facebook-publicized event pronouncement, but then something shifted, and I convinced myself no, no, I had to stop. I couldn’t, it was too big, and perhaps the chore was also too dirty-ego-centric to follow through on, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I paused, I didn’t do anything resembling renting space, or arranging food for invitees, or the like. Still, the gosh-darn notion consumed me. So, as lame as my attempt may turn out to be, here I will try to explain. If you’re too busy with other tasks, just click on the attachment below and you can listen to me tell the tale instead of taking time to read about it.

Leading with intention makes for a better life, that is if not coming unglued when unexpected results follow.

Time, and change.

Time, certainly a fascinating topic. Is time more about math, or is it rather the accumulation of wonder, hope, hard work, and a little bit of mysticism?

Speaking of time, how long does a decade feel? 10 years, is that a long time? How much change occurs in our individual realities across such span? Are we different today than we were a decade ago? How much have we grown, learned, and evolved in 10 years?

Do our undesirable actions, behaviors, and addictions bubble up time and again as we journey, so to dispel that we have learned anything at all? Or can we say with objective show-me-like truthfulness that indeed we have mastered those habits that once domineered us?

10 years sounds like a long-ass-time. Try to imagine where you’ll be, how will you look, who will you be with, what will you be doing, and not doing, will you be happy, or disgruntled? It’s a long…ass…time.

Hell, five years almost feels like forever. Three years, well, that’s also almost unimaginable. Even a single turn of one new calendar creates question. Frankly, I do not know all that will occur in the next 12 months, both those things intended, awhile the variables flying in from left field. I can barely imagine the final result.

How much control do we actually have over the outcome? Is the freewill to steer our own ship an illusion as some claims say? Is our destination predetermined, and despite all attempts, can we legitimately become someone new, someone different, someone better?

Of course change occurs. Change is one of two life certainties, we have no choice. Change, surely change happens. The other one is death and that’s it. That’s all there is to be sure of in life, those two things: Change, and death.

So ok, we do change our lives don’t we, or maybe is it that life changes us? Regardless, day by day we metamorphosize into a brand new us, forever different than who we were yesterday, we have no choice. By default, we become different hour by hour, day by day, year by year, and certainly, decade by decade.

The book:
Daddy, Why Were You A Drug Addict?: Winning the War Amid My Angel and Devil Within
by Roger Ray Bird
ISBN 979-8218286651
Available on Amazon for $11

Roger's social directory: HERE

How do we even begin to define depression? Well, from where I sit it appears to be an unsettled emotional state that crosses over into a physical ailment, brought on by a belief of being held down or pushed aside.

Under mild conditions we are perhaps agitated, self-loathing, and unhopeful. Advancing then to moderate levels, a helplessness arrives, we seem to seek shelter in the negative, and even our once happy places are then shuttered, verifiably closed for the season. Moving then to extremes, we ourselves become a human snowball, mostly on autopilot and freefalling downhill. Earlier helpless conditions evolve to hopelessness, we abandon interest of self-care, and our internal voice begins a shutdown sequence.

Not all of us even survive level one of such darkness.

For me, this shit is as real as real can be, well, close enough anyway. You may have tuned in enough to know that I lost my dear niece Lexie on September 11th in 2017, when she turned a shotgun upon herself with accuracy, game over. Lexie was a ridiculously bright and sparkling star on earth for all her 25 years, now relegated to a flickering far-away entity in the night’s sky. She was way apart from crazy, operated soundly as a dynamic self-employed business lady, and held an advanced art skill. Lexie’s suicide note still presides on her Facebook wall, and such is a rather sensible however harrowing tale of her conscious search for solace after being pursued by monsters for much of her life.

Perhaps the acceptance and marketing I promote for depression is because the ultimate state of dark has brushed me threateningly close. Within this pod episode, I attempt to explain the what and the why of the previous sentence.

The very day when Lexie won the war against her monsters, I was actively pursuing a way out of my own misery. When my favorite middle sister Beth called me frantic with the news that Lexie was dead, I accepted it as a sign. Literally, I believed Lexie was inviting me to join her. Just months prior, two publicly famous individuals also took their lives in dramatic fashion, best friends Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington, so once Lexie was gone, it felt to be the perfect storm and time for me to finally jump overboard and into the stormy sea, no life jacket.

By my accounts, Lexie suffered much because of trauma encountered in her early childhood. Knowing a thing or three about adverse childhood experiences myself, I see that much of my own unsteady footing is because of missing safety and love in my youth, meaning I entirely missed that shit under the age of eight.

So, after recently escaping the grasp of my seventh great bout with depression, I have chosen to open more on the subject. Here I divulge never shared detail, as well as uncover some of what affords me the tactics to NOT accept an early termination of my human operating system.

Once more and again, why do I do these things? Why, so to help, because some of our humanoid experiences contain crossover, or withhold some slight similarities that we can all learn from. And if one of us holds some insight, I believe it is best to give it away, even when unpopular or painful to do so.

But can we not just figure shit out on our own and skip the drama? Do we need such hard topics to be spewn out in front of us, isn’t this detrimental to our optimism and inner light? Maybe, but not for me. I would rather know too much than too little because I know how coming up short feels and it

The book:
Daddy, Why Were You A Drug Addict?: Winning the War Amid My Angel and Devil Within
by Roger Ray Bird
ISBN 979-8218286651
Available on Amazon for $11

Roger's social directory: HERE

There is so much adhesive hardship in life, aka trauma. Within this vibrant episode, my dear gal pal Shequila and I discuss substance abuse, poor mental health, and more. Shequila knows the all-consuming grip of addiction too-too well, having witnessed her mother's struggle with abusing heroin and other substances for three decades. She shouldered the role of caregiver to her four younger siblings while still a child herself, then found interludes of refuge at her grandmother's apartment in the Allied Drive neighborhood of Madison Wisconsin, where Shequila spent time with 15 other grandchildren.

Shequila and I have known each other for more than a dozen years and last November, her and I joined forces to present a communal exposition panel on substance abuse at Garver Feed Mill in Madison, the full-length live recording which you can find within podcast #24, two episodes prior to this one. With over 100 community sisters and brothers in attendance, that Garver event was spectacularly informative. Please give it a listen.

After being honorably discharged from the United States Navy because of an injury, Shequila went on to earn her master’s degree in social work and is currently employed as an intensive outpatient and transition therapist. Shequila helped launch Madison's ‘CARES’ team in 2021, providing an alternative response to behavioral health-related 911 calls. While working to break down barriers to mental health care, she soldiers on toward a Doctorate in Social Work.

Tragically at 20 years young, Shequila’s youngest brother Michael died of an accidental drug overdose in the most ridiculous manner. Also here within episode 26, we land on the topics of helplessness and hopelessness for a while, as well as conversing what it does to us fundamentally to grow up without a mother. I ask Shequila about her family’s most dysfunctional dynamic, the question arising somewhat because Shequila’s parents were both 15 years old when they had her.

Shequila fires back to me with the query of what used to make me happy, but no longer does. She then questions the relationship between taking care of others, meaning our acts of kindness and service, aligned with who we ourselves are. Shequila charges me to contemplate the difference between love and addiction, asking me what I learned about love from my parents.

Shequila masterfully explains to me the condition of ‘abandonment trauma’, meaning parental wounds, and here specifically, ‘mother wounds’. What do mothers do for their offspring anyway, and when growing up without one, why do we often face the world ourselves to provide others the care we missed? Additionally…being without but still yearning for a home. And being without but still desiring access to nurturing support and comforts.

I raise the scenario of fearing my clinically insane mother, awhile avoiding the indoors, and specifically the fright of being trapped behind school walls. Shequila shares her scariest life experience…the terror of being left at the park all day while in care of her younger siblings, when she was eight years old. Not going into detail, but Shequila mentions the times her mom overdosed at home, and I riddle Shequila why she chose social work, I wonder about the toll that the line of work extracts from her, and inquire if she has any regrets in life.

Shequila shares her confusion after being discharged from the Navy, and I ask her what she thinks holds her back from her best life right now.

The book:
Daddy, Why Were You A Drug Addict?: Winning the War Amid My Angel and Devil Within
by Roger Ray Bird
ISBN 979-8218286651
Available on Amazon for $11

Roger's social directory: HERE