Troy's Times - December 2007


www.TroyEvans.com

Troy@TroyEvans.com

 

Hi Friend!


Welcome to Troy’s free monthly electronic newsletter, developed for people interested in overcoming adversity, adapting to change and pushing oneself to realize their full potential.

(Some ch^racters in th1s newsletter have been altered to keep it from being filtered out as spam)

IN THIS ISSUE


“It is not important How we come to the events in our lives, but how we Deal with those events”- Troy


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This Month's Featured Article:

You’re as old as my mom and dad. What do you know?

You’re as old as my mom and dad. What do you know?


"You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long
enough to make them all yourself."

Sam Levenson

Do not make the same mistakes that I made.

I am about to lay some of the incidents of my teenage years out for you to see in absolute detail and I’m going to tell exactly how I felt back then. I want you to read my story carefully, because more than likely, you will face some or all of the same decisions that I had to make at some point in your life. I am asking that you learn from my mistakes so that you don’t have to suffer the consequences of making them yourself.
I mentioned briefly before that I moved to a new town and a new school the summer before I started high school. I had to leave my friends behind. The life that I knew and everything that I was were gone. I had to start over from scratch. Let me tell you something. I was ticked. Actually I was so much more than ticked, but I’m not sure that a G-rated term for how angry I really felt exists. It felt like the whole world was against me and my parents didn’t seem to care if they ruined my life or not. From what I could see, all they were worried about was my father’s new promotion and making sure that the family didn’t embarrass him.
When I complained about the move, their response was that I should go and make new friends, so that’s exactly what I did. School was out so I made friends with the kids in my neighborhood. I was especially drawn to one group because they hung out with a girl who was gorgeous and was an athlete like me.
She played soccer and she was the top scorer in her summer league. School was out, but I heard that she was smart. Just to add a little intrigue to the situation, I found out that she had an older brother who was a drug dealer and that she herself had the dark little secret of occasional drug use. She would smoke pot on the weekends and sometimes at night.
In short, she was not only good looking, but she was exactly who I wanted to become in this new town. She was an athlete who did well in school, and she was accepted by just about every click in the school. She could hang out with the jocks, talk books with the nerds, she was beautiful enough to be a cheerleader, and she had an edge about her that helped her fit in with the stoners. If I was the newbie outcast, she was the exact opposite of that. When she agreed to go out with me, it was the best thing that had happened to me since we had packed our bags in Phoenix.
The first time that she offered me a joint, I barely hesitated to take it. There were so many reasons that I could think of for not turning her down. I didn’t want to seem like I wasn’t cool. It seemed that I was the only one who hadn’t smoked pot before and I didn’t want to stand out. I had heard all of the “don’t do drugs” campaigns before, and yet, here was this wonderful girl who did do drugs and seemed to be highly successful. If she could do it, why couldn’t I? Most of all, I had just found a group of friends and a new girlfriend. I wasn’t alone in a new town anymore. I was part of something. I didn’t want to screw that up. In the end, they barely had to say a word. I was going to smoke pot because they did it and that was a good enough reason for me.
In truth, I didn’t know a thing about it. I knew that my dad had told me that it would make be a deadbeat, but that seemed to be such a general statement and I thought I was seeing proof to the contrary in my girlfriend. I didn’t know how wrong I was.
As I said, my girlfriend’s brother was a dealer and he kept his sister in short supply. She would share her supply with me, or I would take a hit or two from some of the other people in the group, but after a while, that just made me the mooch of the group. My friends were happy to give me enough to get me hooked, but their generosity had come to an end. I was going to have to start buying my own pot and I needed to come up with the money to do that.
At first I was able to con the money out of my parents, but it didn’t take them long to figure out what was going on. They started trying to intervene, but that just made me more angry with them. I remember thinking that they were only upset because they didn’t have the perfect little family anymore and it might make dad look bad. Then I thought, good, it’s his fault anyway. If we hadn’t moved, none of this would be happening. Every time they yelled at me or grounded me, it just made me more angry with them and I would push the envelope just a little farther.
It didn’t take long before I was trying more than just pot. Cocaine, acid, you name it. If it was around back then, I was trying it out. I knew that it was wrong and yet I still did it. I figured that pot didn’t seem to be as bad as my parents had said, so maybe cocaine wasn’t that bad either, or acid, or mushrooms. I kept telling myself that none of these drugs seemed as bad as they had made them sound, all the while, I had started failing classes, been kicked off of the sports team and was in trouble with my parents all of the time.
I was taking risks with more than just drugs too. By that time, I had talked my girlfriend into experimenting with some harder drugs as well. She was losing her edge athletically and we were throwing caution to the wind in just about every area of our lives.
Not only had we started having sex, but since we both had basement bedrooms with windows that opened, I had started sneaking over to her house to spend the night. I would creep into her room late at night, stay there until 4:00 in the morning and then walk back home.
One night, we forgot to set the alarm clock and fell asleep. When we woke up, everyone in the house was already awake as well. We were whispering back and forth trying to decide what to do, when her mother heard voices. We could hear her coming down the stairs asking who was in the room. It was all I could do to throw my naked body under the bed while her mother banged on the locked door and my girlfriend rushed to put clothes on, all the while telling her mom that she had heard the radio.
I watched as her mother’s feet circled the bed, stopping first at the closet, then swinging the door open to check that I wasn’t hiding behind it. It didn’t take long at all before I saw her drop to her knees and peer under the bed. She barely had time to tell me to get out from under the bed and begin calling for her husband. I grabbed a sheet off of the bed as my only cover, jumped out the window and ran past all of our neighbors, retrieving their morning papers, mowing their lawns, knowing exactly what was going on.
When I got home, my dad had locked me out of the house for sneaking out once again. I banged on the door and as he opened it for me, surveying me and my sheet, he shook his head and said, “Now you’ve really gone and done it haven’t you?”
Moments later, the phone rang and my dad came into the room. He told me that my girlfriend’s father had just called and that I was to go back there immediately. I told him there was no way I was going back there, to which my dad replied, “if you’re going to act like a man, you need to go down there and take responsibility for your actions like a man.” And with that, he sent me back down there on my own to face her father.
There I sat in front of a Marine General who keeps swords as wall decorations. Any one of those blades was within a moment’s grasp and he was telling me about how he was going to kick my head in and bury me in the wilderness if I ever so much as touched his daughter again. I had never been so scared in my entire life.
Three months later, I got his daughter pregnant. She was absolutely torn up by the decision to have an abortion. She had to pick up the emotional tab for that and left for the procedure a wreck. My main thought was that I had to use the money I had been saving for a car to pay for it.
Of course you can tell that her father didn’t follow through on his threats, although I am certain that he wanted to several times over the next few years. My girlfriend was 16 when she had her first abortion. Even then, our parents couldn’t keep us apart and we were too dumb to know just how much we were screwing up our lives. All we knew was that we were “in love” and that nothing could come between us.
I was a year older than her and made it out of high school by the skin of my teeth. By the time her senior year came around, any thoughts of athletic or academic scholarships had long left her dreams as well.
She was about to enter her adult life and she had even fewer coping skills that I had when I left school. By that time, I had graduated to dealing drugs, which is exactly what I was doing the day that she almost lost her life.
It was Senior Skip Day for the graduating class. This is kind of an informal day for seniors to miss school and blow off a bit of steam before their ultimate release from high school. For our high school, this usually meant a huge party with several kegs out in the woods.
My girlfriend wanted to go and wanted me there as well, but I had arranged a huge drug sale to a guy who was driving over from Denver that day and I had to wait around for him while she headed to the party alone. We had arranged for her to come and pick me up a few hours later.
So, that’s what she did. After a few hours of drinking and doing drugs, my girlfriend got in her car and set off to pick me up. I sat on the front porch waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Finally the phone rang and her mother told me that she had run a red light and ploughed into a trailer truck. She had just driven her car right under it at 60 miles per hour. Had her car been inches taller, it would have taken her head off, but she had managed to escape with traumatic damage to her face and internal bleeding.
I went to visit her that day in the Intensive Care Unit and her face was unrecognizable. She told me that they expected that it would take approximately seven surgeries to put her back together. She had tubes and cords coming off of her body in all directions—adding fluids here, removing them there, monitoring every single event that was taking place in her poor mangled body. It was truly terrible.
The next day I snuck her some marijuana, just to help bring her spirits up. In fact, I was able to sneak her pot several times before a nurse finally caught us and brought an end to it. We had learned nothing.
A few months later, we finally broke up when she came to a party and made a scene because she was pregnant for the second time. I told her that I didn’t believe that the baby was mine, even though I knew it was. That was the end of our high school romance.
I continued on to become a drug dealer and a bank robber; she ended up shacking up with a drug addict who beat her on a regular basis. Each of us had been stars at one time, athletes, college bound. With drugs running our lives, we were nothing short of pathetic.

uuu

As an adult today, I can’t help but wish that I could do more than simply tell this story to the kids that I speak to. I wish that I could make each and every child and teen feel for just one moment what it is like to look back on your life with so much regret.
I said it in an earlier article, I was supposed to be a ball player. I was supposed to know what it felt like to go to college with other kids and live in the dorm rooms and take study breaks with pizza. I was supposed to make my mark on the world.
Never, for one moment in time, did I think that the first hit that I took off of a joint would be the first step to losing it all. In all, I lost 12 ½ years of my life to drugs and seven and a half more to prison. Even today, I can’t vote, I can’t travel to Australia or New Zealand, I can’t own a hunting rifle, and I can’t even meet a new friend without the knowledge that at some point I’ll have to tell them about my past.
I can’t undo the pain that I inflicted on my parents, my friends, or my high school girlfriend, my first wife or my son. I can’t pretend that I wasn’t the cause of two abortions or a lifetime of heartache.
All I can do, is talk to you now and say, DO NOT make the same mistakes that I made.
There will always be people who are your so called “friends” who will encourage you to do the things that you know to be wrong. Go against the grain and you will risk being called names, being treated as an outcast, and standing out from the rest. But then again, why should you care. If they call you names it is only to demonize the fact that you have the strength to make a better choice than they did. If they make you feel like an outcast, frankly it’s from a group that you probably shouldn’t want to belong to anyway. If you stand out from the rest, be proud that you did and then go find a group that shares your values and goals.
High school is tough. Knowing what I know now, I would love to be able to go back and change the decisions that I made, but instead I’m left with the responsibility of living with those choices for the rest of my life. Prison is full of people just like me—the ones who wish that they could change that one key moment in their life when they got off track. Don’t let that be you.
Make a choice today to live every day of your life with the purpose and dedication to fulfill your dreams. If you find yourself feeling pressure to do something that you know is self-destructive, listen to that little voice in the back of your head that tells you to say no. If you need help, ask an adult that you can talk to—a parent, an aunt or uncle, a counselor or teacher—anyone. You may be surprised at how easily they remember facing similar circumstances when they were your age.
Every time you consume any drug, yes even marijuana or alcohol, you are putting yourself and others at risk. There is no such thing as a safe drug.

Read a letter from a recent client - Click hear to read!


I am approached hundreds of times a year either immediately following one of my keynote speeches or through my website by p^rents, aunts, uncles, brother and sisters who are concerned about a young person in their lives who is either using drugs or is about to enter that age where drugs will become accessible.

I often had a hopeless feeling knowing that all I could offer were words of encouragement and support and the sharing of my own downfall....that was until I became partners with a company called DrugTALK.

DrugTALK is a v1rtual life coach dedicated to helping families, parents and young people overcome the threat and dangers of drugs through the privacy of their home. They do this by delivering the insight, tools and activities needed for parents to protect their children by putting vital protection principles into practice, often without parents even realizing it.

Their programs and tools are based on decades of research and supported by a dynamic team of communication experts, family intervention specialists, treatment professionals, narcotics intelligence officers, life coaches, parents and---most importantly---teens who have faced the world of drugs first-hand.

The CEO of DrugTALK happened to attend one of my speaking engagements and after talking I skeptically took one of his Drug Reference Guides and a DVD. Having lived through the hell of drug abuse I had my whole adult life been conv1nced that nothing short of expensive in-patient treatment centers could break the hold that drugs have on our young people. After thoroughly studying what DrugTalk has to offer I was blown away- I can honestly say that h^d these tools been available to me during my teenage years that I most likely would have avoided the hell I put myself and family through.

I have agreed to partner with DrugTalk and encourage anyone who knows of an individual that is either us1ng drugs or is reaching that critical age where drugs c^n be a lure to visit their site at www.drugtalk.org Please also pass this on to anyone who may benefit from this unique program.

One of the stipulations I made in agreeing to partner with DrugTALK was that they needed to make what they offer afford^ble to anyone- drug use does not discriminate by class and it is important to me that these tools are available to anyone...therefore if you enter the promotional code TEG123 when ordering you will receive a 10% discount. This d1scount is only offered to those who I refer to DrugTALK.

Thanks as always for your time and let us as a community and nation finally make a dent in this plague that effects us all.

 

Featured product for this issue!

NEW HARDBACK BOOK -

"FROM DESPERATION TO DEDICATION:
AN EX-CON'S LESSONS ON TURNING FAILURE INTO SUCCESS "…Click here to order

Other Products:

If you live in or near one of the following cit1es where Troy will be speaking over the next few months, please contact The Ev^ns Groups for details on an opportunity that does not come around often- see Troy present for free!
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About the Author- Troy Evans is a profess1onal speaker and author who resides in Phoenix, AZ with his wife Pam and his dog Archibald. Troy travels the country delivering keynote presentations, and since his release from prison has taken the corporate and association pl^tforms by storm. Overcoming adversity, adapting to change and pushing yourself to realize your full potential- other speaker’s talk about these issues, Troy has walked them.


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602-265-6855
Fax: 602-285-1474
Troy@troyevans.com
http://www.troyevans.com