My story begins in childhood because that’s how life works. First you have a childhood, then an adulthood, then retirementhood or grandparenthood — which aren’t really words, but I like them since I made them up and I’m using them. (Hang on — yes, grandparenthood is actually a word. Good for me.) If it worked the other way around like Benjamin Button I would tell it from that direction. Now that I’ve scrambled your eggs a little, let’s begin.
I grew up in an environment shaped by alcoholism, addiction, and abuse. From an early age I internalized the belief that if someone around me was unhappy it was my fault. Nobody told me that directly. I constructed it myself from the misery in the room, the way kids do when the environment is too unpredictable to leave unexamined. I wanted happiness so badly that I convinced myself I could only have it if everyone else had it first. That became my operating system for a very long time.
The more I tried to fix other people’s unhappiness the more evidence I collected that something was wrong with me. The harder I tried the more I failed. The more I failed the harder I tried. For decades I morphed into whoever the room needed me to be, driven by a deep and unexamined belief that who I actually was wasn’t good enough. I let other people’s emotional weather run my internal forecast. I lost the thread of myself entirely.
That led where it leads. Addiction. 25-30 airplane bottles of vodka per day. Self-destruction dressed as coping. At some point I decided it would be easier to be more miserable than everyone else — at least then nobody could accuse me of not caring enough. That didn’t work either. In fact it made everything exponentially worse. I slipped into a life built on self-hatred and substances, never giving myself the room to find out who I actually was underneath all of it.
What did four decades of that produce? A 40-year-old man, 75 pounds overweight, standing naked and crying in front of a full-length mirror in November 2017. That moment cracked something open. Days of releasing stories I had been carrying since childhood followed — an avalanche of ugly crying that had been building for a very long time.
Over the following months I started eating better, moving more, meditating. I felt clearer than I had in years. I started doing things the old Neil would never have done — things rooted in actual self-respect rather than self-management. By April 2018 I had lost 75 pounds, had zero cravings for alcohol, and published my first book. Writing it required me to say out loud things I had hidden for years. That was the beginning of understanding that honesty — even uncomfortable honesty — is the only foundation worth building on.
In June 2018 I went to a doctor for tests. My last diagnosis during a detox had suggested my organs might not survive the year and gave me a “2 weeks to live” prognosis. Twenty months later the results came back so healthy the doctor was genuinely shocked. I wasn’t surprised. I had changed the inputs. The body reported accordingly. That’s how it works.
What I learned through all of it — and what I write about now — is that the programming installed in childhood runs the show until you see it clearly enough to recognize it isn’t you. The compliance training, the people pleasing, the self-diminishment dressed as humility — none of that is original equipment. It gets installed before you have any defenses against it by people running their own version of the same program. None of that makes it yours to keep.
The work is seeing it. Naming it honestly. Getting back to the foundation that was there before any of it arrived.
I made a promise to myself in 2017 that if I ever got free I would do my best to help others do the same. I keep that promise through my writing, my content, and the work I do every day — but only for people who are actually willing. Willingness is the whole thing.
I am the author of the Bullshit Machine series, the Kuba and the True North Compass children’s series, a blogger, content creator, handyman, and founder of BeHigherBeings and The Bullshit Machine. I live in Texas. I have a son named Jacob. I build things with my hands on real land.
Self-care should come Firszt. See what I did there? What a great laszt name.
The Bullshit Machine 