How are you?
Most people answer that question with fine or good,
but obviously it's not always fine and it's usually not even that good.
This is a podcast that asks people to be honest about their pain.
To just be honest about how they really feel, about the hard parts of life,
and guess what?
It's complicated.
I'm Nora McEnerney,
and this is terrible.
Thanks for asking.
I speak at public schools quite a bit,
and I always hold off why I'm there.
They don't know why I'm showing up.
I'm there to talk about addiction,
and then I'll share some of my own story.
And then when I get to that point where I'm like,
I was in this dream,
and driving accident,
six people died,
that's where the room goes quiet.
And people aren't used to hearing that level of devastation.
You've probably seen a car rack on the side of the road at some point.
Cars crumpled into each other,
EMTs and firefighters swarming around.
They're horrible, but we always look.
We want to know what happened.
Maybe you've been in a wreck like this.
Maybe you've lost someone in one,
but you probably haven't been the person who caused it.
But Robert is.
So there was a guy who was dying on the highway,
and I just went over to him and asked,
he was screaming,
and I just said,
you're just being a terrible accident.
And then I just went over and sat on the side of the road
and I started holding my knees and rocking.
It was about the time the police showed up.
And he said,
did you do this?
Missed you, I guess I did.
Robert has spent years of his life
since this accident,
bearing his darkest moments
so that teenagers might avoid the depths of addiction that he faced.
The choices he made because of that addiction,
the consequences of those actions,
some of which are so big,
they can never be righted.
How does someone get back from that point?
A point so low that so few people sink to
let alone come back from?
And how did they get there?
I grew up in a house where there was always alcohol available.
I wouldn't describe my father as having an alcohol use disorder,
but he was, he drank constantly.
Mostly beer, there was wine in the house,
and my sister was religious,
and I don't know if she's ever drunk at all in her life.
So I grew up as like,
you know, an 80s kid
where drinking was very modeled,
like the best,
the shows we watched were cheers and mash.
And in cheers, it was like there was cliff and norm
who went to the bar every day after work,
and then mash,
they had a martini distillery in their tent, you know.
It's just a different time.
I started probably drinking like sneaky drinks
when I was between 12 and 14 around then.
And I started like many of the kids back then smoking weed
about the same time.
weed was probably easier to get the alcohol.
I think that's probably still true
because alcohol is so regulated.
For me, it wasn't like a thing of wanting to fit in so much.
I just was genuinely curious about substance-system cells.
I'd hear all these things and drink alcohol
and make you act goofy,
and you'll lose all your sort of social filters.
And if you smoke weed,
you'll be like, really late back.
And if you take hallucinogens,
you can see things that aren't there.
And so I wanted to do those things.
I just wanted to know what that was like.
I didn't understand how your rank could do that.
I always thought of myself as doing sort of a chemical experiment
with all of the above,
but whatever was put in front of me,
throughout high school,
when bad things would happen in my life,
you know, I had a friend who had been in a drink
in a driving accident.
He ran through a mailbox,
a brick mailbox,
and a brick split his head open.
And he lived through that,
but after that,
he had probably, you know,
the mental capacity of maybe a two-year-old.
And so when that happened,
the way we handled that was not to discuss it.
It was, we got high at it.
That's just what we did, you know?
That was my resource for when things go bad.
This is what you do.
This is how you handle life.
So that's how he handled life.
And it didn't work all that well.
In between high school and college,
Robert ended up in court-mandated counseling
for about a year after a drinking and driving accident.
This was a new scene for him,
sitting in a circle of a lot of older,
tough guys who were bearing it all for their AA group.
I started talking with our fucking feelings.
I was like, what is this?
You know, I'd never seen anything like that in my life.
So I was like, whatever they're doing,
I want to do that.
But I didn't want to not drink.
So I like the community.
I like how open people were,
and now they talk about things so openly.
Especially like older white men,
you just didn't see that.
I wanted whatever they had,
because it felt like I belonged in something.
But they were like, you know,
they were talking about like beating up
little ladies with baseball bats, you know.
And I had never done any of that stuff.
So I was 18, you know.
So I just felt like I didn't fit in.
Then I started going to other narcotics anonymous meetings,
because they had a younger crowd.
And I was joking.
I was like, well, the girls were better looking.
That was why I went.
Even there, I did that for maybe like,
in and out for like a year.
So I guess I was like 19 or something maybe 20.
And then all my friends were going off to college
and like partying.
And I was like, I didn't have any like evidence
that this was a problem other than,
like sometimes things went a little haywire.
Most of my friends who were in college
sort of said the same thing, right?
They went off to school.
They partied and we got out of control.
Now I reel it back in.
So it was hard to see the problem.
I just thought maybe I'm just a rather on people,
and I don't know where the right people are.
So if I can go to this place, that'll solve it.
I went to college and it was a party
for all of nine months maybe.
And then I checked myself into a treatment center.
And I met a woman who I spent,
I think the next nine years with,
and had really started to millow out.
You know, we had a wedding and like,
her grandmother's backyard,
like little grassroots, very sweet.
But we never signed a marriage certificate.
In fact, we were very poor.
We went to go by,
go downtown to get the marriage certificate.
And both of us were like,
there was a line.
We had money in our pockets.
So we're like, let's go to the bar,
have a couple of drinks.
And we just never got a marriage certificate.
So we never got legally married.
We were together for a few more years.
And then one night,
I think she had just,
we should point where she's like,
you know, I really had it.
And she walked out.
And I didn't even know there was a problem.
I think we really cared about each other a lot.
I think we grew up together.
We were young when we met.
And we were trying to put a life together.
I think,
I probably, like,
looking back,
wasn't very present for a lot of the marriage.
I think my marriage today is very different.
But we were good friends.
There wasn't a lot of fighting.
There wasn't like,
we didn't argue a lot.
We had very similar worldviews.
And even similar upgrading, you know.
So I think we were good friends,
but my use was increasing.
And my dependence was increasing.
And I think it was just really hard for me
to be present in her life.
And so I just ended up,
like, lose.
I was just high all the time.
I ended up losing my job.
My house was foreclosed on.
So now I'm homeless.
And then the only thing that's actually helping me feel
okay is the drugs and the alcohol.
So I'm not going to stop that.
That wouldn't make any sense at all.
Then I started having a lot of suicide ideation, right?
So then I wake up every morning.
I'm sleeping on a friend's couch.
And then this friend's couch.
And I'm driving around with a toothbrush in my car
because I don't know where I'm going to be tomorrow.
And so then I'm thinking,
like, I'm not sure that I can keep living
at all.
So I wake up every day with the suicide ideation.
And rather than kill myself,
I'd drink.
I'd get high.
It helps me make it through the rest of the day.
Drugs and alcohol are how Robert gets through the pain
of being alive.
He's 32.
And he's been through a series of big losses,
including the death of a very close friend.
He feels like he's coming undone.
And even though it might not look like it,
he is trying.
He spends more time with family.
He spends more time trying to get sober.
Robert's substance abuse has a cycle to it.
And part of that cycle is thinking that he's on shore footing,
playing with the idea of sobriety and moderate alcohol consumption.
But what if Robert's substance abuse has a cycle to it?
But what is moderate alcohol consumption?
Because, and people hate to hear this,
there is no amount of alcohol that is actually healthy for you.
It's just so well marketed.
It's a part of American culture.
Alcohol is American culture.
And how'd you guys like the shots?
I drank all five, bitch.
I'm still sweating out fireball.
My hair smells like cigarettes.
But if we don't keep going,
at least on some level,
we're gonna crash.
You're so relaxed.
And I'm ready to party.
Can I get you something to drink?
Cosmopolitan? Cosmopolitan?
Cosmopolitan.
What's to play a true American?
A man.
A man. That's something great I do.
So it's 50% drinking game,
50% life size candy lane.
Well, it's 75% drinking 20 candy land.
By the way, the floor is a molten lava.
It's actually 90% drinking.
And then it's got a loose candy land-like structure.
Sometimes you want to go
where everybody knows your name.
Societally, there's nothing dissuading us
from participating in the culture of alcohol.
There's only the encouragement to participate
and participate heavily.
The CDC says that binge drinking
constitutes having five or more alcoholic drinks
on one occasion for a man
and four or more drinks on one occasion for a woman.
I don't know about you.
But by those measures,
I was binge drinking almost every time
I consumed alcohol as a young adult and adult adult.
There was zero sense of moderation
and zero incentive for moderation.
My friends and I just wanted to get drunk.
And the more you drink
and the more people you know who drink,
the more normal,
all of this excessive,
crazy drinking seems.
If you drink like I drink,
Halloween's a great holiday.
Halloween at New Year's Eve
because everybody looks like you do for the night.
So you're not doing anything abnormal.
This, Halloween 2003,
is the night that changes everything.
We get support from indeed.
And this message is for people who are in charge,
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people who have to hire people.
Hiring people is hard.
It just is.
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maybe they always do.
If you need to hire, you need indeed.
I feel like it's a part of my calling to fight against
toxic positivity and the self-help industry
because not everything can be fixed
and not everything can be fixed by you.
And by the way, you aren't defective
just because you aren't always 100% happy,
100% of the time.
The pursuit of happiness can actually make us less happy.
And I have found that it's much more helpful to just
let myself have my feelings and to keep track of them.
So I collaborated with Emma and friends
to bring two of my favorite tools for happiness to you.
The happy-ish guided journal and Oracle deck.
These are the opposite of all that very popular
self-improvement stuff.
The journal is based on my own journaling practice.
It is quick.
It is simple.
It is just a way for you to document who
and how you really are.
And the Oracle deck is a source of comfort
and reassurance to guide you on your way
through whatever it is you're going through.
You can get both for 25% off,
which is truly nuts,
at mnfriends.com slash happy-ish
with code happy-ish 25
that code is only for our listeners.
It is 25% off the journal
and or the Oracle deck.
At mnfriends.com slash happy-ish
the coupon code is happy-ish 25.
We will also link that in our show notes.
Hello, everyone.
I want to tell you about a podcast
that I have been listening to for years.
Since the beginning,
that's a part of my self-care practice.
It's called Forever 35.
Yes, it started out as two friends
just talking about serums,
but in the five years that they've been around,
it's developed into a show about
community and friendship and setting boundaries
and taking back beauty culture
and also serums, also serums.
Once a week,
co-host Kate Spencer,
and Dory Schaffer,
hear from listeners about everything
from dating with STIs
to when you're too old to get your nose pierced,
which is never.
You can always get your nose pierced.
Practice a little bit of self-care today.
Put on a mask,
a mist,
a moisturizer,
sit back,
relax,
and listen to Forever 35.
You can subscribe,
listen, and enjoy
wherever you are hearing this podcast.
Who are you?
Halloween of 2003
is the night that sets everything in motion,
but it's the events
of the following day
that are Forever etched
in Robert's mind.
Robert spent Halloween
like he spent most of his days.
He woke up hungover
and smoked weed.
He did his job assignments
as a tile worker.
And by the end of the day, he was drinking heavily with a group of bar friends, playing
bluegrass music, and hopping around town.
It's now November 1st.
I woke up that morning and I was just hungover.
I was living with a friend named Tommy, and he was a really good, he was a good guy.
But he wasn't there, and I had a little dog named Gracie who had named after Gracie Alan
George Burns's wife.
I just love that dog so much.
And so I woke up and played with her and wrestled and played tug of war and all the stuff.
But I was feeling sick because I was hungover, and I was pretty severely hungover because
the day before it's all a mean.
So I think I was tired a lot in those days.
A lot more tired than I am now.
And maybe a little sad and a little lonely.
And I went to the local, it was a salmon shop, but it was a bar where we all hung out.
And it was like 11 in the morning.
I was just trying to take it easy that day.
So I just had tried to order a cup of coffee and they had run out of coffee, so I ordered
a beer and wanted to make the hangover go away.
It was kind of a normal day for me.
There was nothing that unusual about that day.
I had gotten to a point where I didn't like people to know how much I was drinking, so
I would not spend a lot of time at one bar or another.
So I spent a little, maybe a couple of hours there, and then went to another bar down
the street and spent some time there and saw some friends there and hung out.
And then another bar that evening, you know, but I was just really genuinely just tired
and wanted to go home.
And I had been out late the night before my hangover was mostly gone.
I was feeling like, comfortably, no, I didn't feel intoxicated.
I wouldn't say, I drove intoxicated frequently that time that night.
I didn't think I was intoxicated.
So I got into the van to go home.
Highway 54 in Raleigh, North Carolina, behind the state third round.
And so they teabone into another car and somebody had been heard.
And some people heard that accident or saw that accident and a bunch of people stopped
to help.
Kids go into a college party, I think they stop and see if this accident has happened
and they pull this guy out of the car.
And another guy who's on a bicycle, here's the accident and he rides up.
And it's not even late, I don't think.
I think it was like around 8, 15, 8, 30.
And I hop in the van and I got to go home.
It's only three miles to my house.
So this is like textbook.
Another couple, a football game had just led out at the local university, NC State University.
People were leaving that and a couple had stopped with their, I think, two of their three
sons in the back of the car and they pull over the side of the highway to help.
So just a bunch of people stopped to help.
And I'm driving home and I took that highway because I knew there wouldn't be any police
on it.
It was a straight shot.
I got to make one right turn and that one.
And I came over to Hill and there's just a bunch of people in the road.
But I didn't know what to do.
So I slammed on the brakes, which didn't work because of anilat brakes kicking in.
And then I looked across the highway and I was like, I'll go across the highway.
There wasn't anybody there.
So I turned it, turned the wheel to try to head that way, which might have been the worst
thing I could have done.
It's been almost 20 years since that night and I can still see their faces before I hit
them.
And I didn't even know that I'd hit them.
I didn't know what had happened.
I was just trying to, I didn't understand why there were people in the way.
So I just tried to go into the all coming lane.
And then I was somewhere in the seatbelt.
So I was thrown out of the car seat because the airbag had gone.
Car alarm was blaring.
So I got out of the car and then it was like such a confused scene.
There were like, there were people screaming and there were bodies and there were people
running trying to help.
And then a kid who had just watched both of his parents get killed said, who did this?
And so I started screaming, oh my God, I can't believe I've killed these people.
Then I wanted to help, but I didn't know what to do.
So there was a guy who was dying on the highway and I just went over to him and I was, he
was screaming and I just said, you've just been in a terrible accident.
And I just went over and sat on the side of the road and I started to hold my knees and
rocking.
It was about that time the police showed up and said, did you do this?
I missed a deal, I guess I did.
And so they put me in the car.
It's one of those things.
Your body doesn't know how to process.
I think about this often with people do hit and runs and we always think that's like
the worst thing anybody can ever do.
I will say, I understand why people run.
I didn't feel like, oh, I got to get away from this.
I'm going to be in so much trouble.
It's more like something that's just buried deep down within us that when you're encountering
this much overwhelm and trauma, then we have to flee.
We have to get out of there.
And fortunately for me, legally, I froze rather than fled.
I'm trying to go help somebody, but I didn't know what to do.
They took me down to a local ATC center or something.
And while I was in there, they said, we have a warrant for your blood here.
You can either fight us and we can strap you down to the table or we can just take it.
So I wasn't trying to be a dick.
You can take my blood.
I was told not to take a breathalyzer.
So we had to wait for blood results to come back.
And I figured, like I might be close to the legal limit, but I wasn't beyond it.
And it turned out I was over twice the legal limit.
But I just had to try tolerance.
So at that point, when we were walking out of there to be taken to the local county jail,
I heard on the television that an alleged drunk driver hit just struck and killed, I think,
six or, and they might have even said eight people, something like that.
I ended up hitting nine people altogether and six of them died.
But even then, I was like, no, I couldn't have done all that.
Certainly, there was so much chaos.
They just don't know what's happened yet or something.
So they took me to the jail and about that time, I think I just started, I don't know,
involuntary twitches and eye twitches and shakes and they put me on suicide watching the
county jail.
They just give you a suit made out of like a paper towel so you can hang yourself and
the cells made out of like, it's like a fish tank.
They everybody can see you so they can see you go to the bathroom, not that by that time
all of everything is shutting down anyway, you don't have to go to the bathroom.
Yeah, that was good.
And I didn't know like enough about the criminal justice system to know like what they do
for anything like that.
Yeah, I'd never thought about prisoner jails.
Is that something you get a death penalty for?
Is that something do they put me in prison for the rest of my life or I had no idea.
And I think the very first time I really went, this is just definitely a problem is I made
me a few days later, it's all mashed up in my head still so I'm, but I was told by my
family that bail had been set and they could bail me out of jail until the trial but they
were afraid to do that because they thought that if they did it, I might drink and get
high or kill myself.
And it was such a huge media event at the time that I was afraid that they might be right.
And then so I could remember going holy, I've been waiting like my whole life for things
to get bad enough.
I've been homeless twice that lost every relationship.
Now six people have been killed and it still wasn't bad enough.
So there's not a bad enough.
During my trial, many of the family members got up to say their piece.
I had played no contest, which is like guilty, I guess.
The family members had all begged over and over, whatever you do, please don't drink again,
please don't use drugs.
So that was done for me.
It was just, for a while, I was like, I'm just going to try this as an experiment.
I think I had this very visceral thing of like, I've been getting high more of my life
than not.
You know, like, what would happen if I just stopped, if I just stopped doing that?
This is so stupid to say, I think this a lot though, but back then, I genuinely didn't
see it as like putting other people at risk.
I was putting my driver's license at risk, eventually I'd get caught.
Many of my friends had DWIs.
It's going to be expensive and annoying, but so what?
So I didn't see it as, oh, this could really harm somebody because I've heard other people
say the same thing.
Oh, I think I'm a better driver on the influence.
I don't think that was true for me, but I think what they're missing in that equation
is that might be true.
You might be able to pull it off all the time successfully as long as nothing happens.
In this discovery, nobody was saying, oh, he was weaving.
I wasn't speeding.
I was keeping it in between the lines.
As long as nothing unusual happened, I would have been probably safe and sound that night.
But six people are dead.
In 18-year-old college freshman, a young father and his friend who had just gone to a college
football game, a couple visiting from Charlotte, a man who lived nearby, all good Samaritans
who had gotten out of their cars to help two people who had gotten into a fender bender
on the highway.
At the sentencing, when the families gave their victim impact statements, the parents
of that college freshman offered to donate his remaining college money to Robert's drug
and alcohol rehabilitation.
Robert was sentenced to up to 12 years in prison.
He served nine.
You can't even complain about that amount of time.
They genuinely could have locked me up forever.
Prison in jail, there's like a parallel process, right?
So you're trying to wrap your head around this whole huge event thing that's happened,
this person that you've become.
And you still have to survive like jail culture, prison culture.
You have to not get stabbed, not get raped, not all the things that go along with that.
I was so sad all the time.
And I didn't think there would ever be a way I could not be sad anymore.
And that lasted for years.
Every day, I would just, I cried so much that it just hurt like my physical cheeks hurt
just from the, I don't know, from the tears.
And they just wouldn't stop running all the time.
I just couldn't believe I'd done this to people, you know?
Not even just the people who had been killed, but my God, their families.
And there's just no way to make it better, no way to take it back.
So I had a friend, Dino, who I was locked up with, he'd been locked up since 1957, still
they'll never get out.
And he was just immensely helpful for me.
But I remember asking him one time, how do I make amends for this thing?
And Dino was like, you just do it by the way you live, by the way you live your life.
And so I think that became really profound for me.
I had been passively suicidal for a couple to a few years.
The yard had just closed and I was going back in from the yard.
And I couldn't even tell you the time of year, but I remember going into my, I was lucky
I was at a single cell unit for a while, so you got had my own cell, which is actually
nicer than being surrounded by Bronx, but I had, so I had, I went back to my cell and
it was sunset.
You can't see out of the windows, they're just lexan and they're all scratched up, so
you can't see anything, but I remember the lights coming through the windows and I had
this sort of epiphany where I was somehow obsessively making this whole thing about me
still.
And like all I could think was like, poor me, oh my gosh, I can't believe I've done this,
I can't believe how I've heard these people and their families and how am I going to
be this person who walks through the world as it's done this horrific thing as I'm fixable
thing.
And it was, I just kind of, it was just this great moment of, oh man, I'm still making
it all about me.
I'm not even grieving them properly because I'm not giving them the space for their grief.
I'm still being self-obsessed and I remember thinking like that dishonors them, my sorrow
and so I don't want that misunderstood because I think it's important to have sorrow and
grief, but there was a point where my sorrow was doing them a disservice, did the opposite
of honoring them.
Then I was able to think, okay, well, what should this look like?
How do I turn this into something that can be useful and helpful?
And I didn't know the answer to that question.
So that's, it wasn't like, let's clean out the old burn and put on a show.
But that was the moment where I think I started realizing, oh, I think I can heal and I can
get out and I get help and that the story doesn't have to just be a tragedy that there
can be that this can actually help other people too.
Where do you start?
That started in prison.
I was Christmas and they'd ask me to join the men's club in prison.
So the men's club is just like this.
They take pictures during visitation of people with their families, they sell the pictures
for two dollars and we raise money for different things around the community or whatever else
we can do.
And so I was in the men's club and it was Christmas time and I had been called down to
programs to wrap Christmas presents that somebody had gone out and bought for us to give
to other people's kids, men who were incarcerated, they were at home so they couldn't provide
presents.
So we would wrap presents and their kids would get some presents.
And so I'm in programs and I'm laughing because I'm like, I have to be now monitored in
my life to manage tape and scissors.
I am that dangerous to society that I can no longer have tape.
But it was okay.
It was Christmas time.
I was in programs and I'm wrapping these presents and I'm like, man, this is actually kind
of awesome.
I feel pretty good.
You know, this is what I should have been doing the whole time.
This is what you're supposed to be doing with life.
And then it turns out that I have that epiphany and then they don't let you go.
And I'm like, okay, you get it now.
You can leave.
I think I still have like six more years to do after that.
But it did sort of add to the, oh, okay, it's really, that's what it's about.
Service to others.
You know, maybe not everybody, but that's certainly what I'm here to do.
And when I do that, I'm living my sort of right life that's, there's nothing that can
compare to that.
There's no amount of money.
There's no amount of stuff that just can compare to I can help other people.
There's not much use in you just spending the rest of your life wearing a hair shirt
and beating yourself with a whip.
Get to work.
Go do something.
Find a way to help people.
And so that was a huge for me because all of a sudden I went from being another person
in this accident.
His life had been devastated to being a person in this accident who had a purpose.
What did it look like to build a meaningful life once you were already dead, once you
were already in prison?
I don't know if this is a true story, but our book, Mr. Fuller, was a sort of famous
and vener.
And back in 1929 during this talk market crash, he had lost everything.
He was a newlywed and he had stood on the edge of a cliff and he was like, that's it,
I'm going to take my own life.
He just couldn't go on like that.
And there's also a great quote from the movie Heathers from the 80s, from the 1980s that
Christian Slater was either guy said this in that movie too, that was similar.
He goes, now that you're dead, what are you going to do when I kill my life?
That's my Christian Slater impression.
But that was book, Mr. Fuller, as long as I've reached this point where I'm no longer
alive, then I can do anything.
If life is empty and there are no rules, then I get to decide what my life is going to
be.
All the norms that we grew up, all the expectations that we grew up with for ourselves, thrown
out the window.
And now I'm empty.
I'm just a vessel for life and I don't have any expectations or norms, I can go anywhere
with that.
The question becomes, how do you make that meaningful?
So you can fill that bucket in a lot of different ways.
But if you want to have a good life to me, it seems the way to do that is to really embrace
the joyful moments, really celebrate everything that we can.
And I kind of thought of my sobriety as ad of like, all right, I'm going to stay sober
and I'm not going to hurt any more people, there's no way in hell I'm going to do that
anymore.
So we'll just see where this thing goes and if it reaches a point where I have to drink
or get high again, I'm going to take my own life because I'm just not willing to, because
every time I've gotten high, it's gotten worse and I'm just not, I don't know what's worse,
but I'm not going to find out.
Robert seems like he got everything he could out of his time in prison for the crimes
he committed.
He then gave him the time and space to actually reflect on his life and what had led him to
that prison cell.
It aided him in getting and staying sober, at least at first.
He even met his current wife through writing letters to her while he was in prison, that's
a whole other podcast, but what comes after prison?
Who is Robert nine years after the worst day of his life?
And the last day of six others.
Elise Lunin is one of the smartest people I know.
She's the host of the New York Times bestselling book on our best behavior and she's also
the host of the podcast pulling the thread.
Every week Elise sits down with today's leading thinkers, authors, experts, doctors, healers,
scientists, to try to answer life's big questions.
Why we do what we do, how we can know and love each other better, how we can heal ourselves
and our world.
You can listen to and follow pulling the thread with Elise Lunin, an Odyssey podcast
available now for free on the Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts, new episodes
every Thursday.
It seems to be recording.
All right.
Okay.
Those are some good bird sounds we have.
Yeah.
Actually, I've got the window open.
We live across from like a farmland, so there's not much here.
Is it going to be a problem with cars driving past on occasion or should I close it?
I like a little texture to audio.
Like I like hearing you.
I like hearing a crow.
I really do.
As I sit down with Robert, I don't know what to expect.
But a harmonica solo definitely wasn't on my list.
Can I ask one favor real quick?
Megan, yeah.
Megan.
Megan.
Okay.
If I can, I'd like to play harmonica for a minute.
Can I give you the background story behind it?
Yeah.
All right.
I've always played music and I've always played something.
I was in high school band and then I started playing harmonica years and years ago.
And when I was in active use when I was drinking, down south, they had liquor houses.
That doesn't really exist anywhere but the south anywhere.
So liquor houses tended to be in people's neighborhoods.
They were usually like in black neighborhoods way back in the day when black people weren't
allowed to own businesses down south, they would just start selling liquor out of their
living room.
And so most of the neighborhoods that I went to that were like poor neighborhoods had liquor
houses and I would go there and hang out and you kind of had to know somebody.
And we'd play music and I'd play harmonica, right?
And so what I thought was like I was like Alan Lomax who was the music ethnologist.
I was like, so I'm studying this culture that's going away.
The truth was I was just staying from all the time.
So I would do that and I'd play in bars and clubs and everything else.
And then when I got locked up, I was in the prison choir, which was just a blast of
playing harmonica there and I was like, I don't know and I'm not religious.
I just wanted to play music and that was the only way I could navigate that.
So when I got sober, I was like, I don't know, I'm going to play music anymore when I get
out because I don't really go to bars, it's not really my scene and I'm not religious
so I'm not going to play churches.
So now I do a lot of public speaking at different places and I always have this sort of captive
audience and now I'm like, now I can make them listen to me play harmonica.
It also helps me relax a little bit.
So I wanted to play harmonica for you guys if that's all right.
In the almost 12 years since he was released from prison, Robert got married, had a daughter
became a therapist.
So describe, I guess, a day in your life.
I don't do like traditional sort of therapy anymore.
So a lot of my job yesterday I was, I still do like a lot of the same sort of stuff that
you do in therapy.
So I still use motivational interviewing CBT a lot of the other stuff, but I just don't
like being in an office very much and I don't think it's good for other people necessarily
either.
So a lot of the clients that I worked with, we went kayaking yesterday and this morning
I met somebody and went for a hike in the woods at seven in the morning and then I went
to the Zen Center and sat meditation for a while.
I'm a long-distance runner so I tried to run a few times a week.
So I'll have my work day which is just interacting with clients.
It's been a lot of time talking about addiction and trying to help people through challenging
moments.
So I'm on my phone a lot.
I like a lot of us because I'm texting clients a lot just to try to help out there.
And then at the end of my day we sit down at a table in the kitchen.
We have dinner, we laugh and joke and play and eventually my daughter goes to bed begrudgingly.
She goes upstairs and my wife and I make tea hot tea just about every night.
We sit down and watch some form of media or we play games or we do a puzzle and that's
kind of it.
You know it's kind of boring but I also think like so that's what's never lost on me.
I watched two guys when I was locked up get into a damn knife fight over a pillow over
who wound the pillow in this cell and they were fighting each other.
They're trying to cut each other off over it.
So give me boring.
I'll take boring.
That's great.
I love a good boring night at home.
There's nothing better.
Right.
I was working with somebody recently who was in a drink and drive an accident somebody lost
their life.
So we're talking about preparing for prison and I keep saying to them like honestly some
of the best people I've met in my life were in prison.
Just because we're also vulnerable and it's stripped down and there's just nothing left
to hide and it'll ruin you for conversations on the outside.
Most of us want to have good big deep connections you know.
So I think that really helped in prison was like just being able to sit down and talk
with a complete stranger about where they've been, what they've been through, what happened
to them.
And then you hear just the most devastating stories over and over and you realize that this
is all of us.
It's easy in prison because it's the very obvious how did you get here.
But when you get outside of prison you find out that that still holds true.
We're all in this.
We're all going through some stuff.
My wife actually had, she had gone to a talk and came back and I was working the yard
and she was like I just heard this great thing.
You got to hear it.
And it was we are all the victims and perpetrators of trauma.
And I just loved it and just think it captures the whole thing.
I think what people are going to wonder is how a person can carry what you carry.
And your wife had such a great quote that she was able to share with you, which is we
are all victims.
We are all perpetrators.
But something of the magnitude that you are carrying is really rare.
And to maybe people who have lost family members in a similar way, like you are the big
bad wolf.
Right.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there's no way to ever make that better.
I was actually just going to 12th step meeting the other day talking about this.
It's a very specific thing.
I like all people, like most people, I shouldn't say all, but I want to be liked.
I want people to like me.
And I had to come to terms with that that those family members are never going to like
me.
It doesn't matter what I do, it doesn't matter how much joy I bring to the world or
how many people I help, they have the absolute right to hate me.
And I can be big enough to be hated for that.
That's okay.
If that's what they, if that helps them heal, then I owe that much.
So I think about them all the time and everything all the time.
I think about the people who lost their lives in every joyful moment that I have.
That's something that I took.
It was that ability.
There's no way to make that better.
And I wish I could.
It's just not.
And I think I'll always be sad about that.
Robert still commemorates the anniversary of the crash, though it looks different every
year.
He will always carry the significance of November 1st.
I did a marathon fundraiser in prison, I almost got thrown in the hole for it because
I was trying to reframe that date.
And so I had been along Mrs. Runner and I was going to, and we had snuck out me and
some guys that worked in the wood shop had snuck a tape measure out.
And we went out and measured out the go track around the edge of the fence, just measured
out how many laps so we could do the math and figure out how many laps were a mile.
I'm afraid I was 182 or something like that last.
So I had talked to Kara who was outside and she was outside of the time, we were dating
at the time.
And I said, I wanted to do a fundraiser for mothers against home driving.
Just as a personal, let's do that.
And so she did all the fundraising outside and was like writing family and friends and then
I'd write it letters to anybody who would make a contribution.
And the only day I could do it on was November 2nd.
At that time she was allowed to come to the prison and bring food so she came on November
1st, which was a Sunday and then I fueled up and ate everything I possibly could eat.
And then Monday did the sort of marathon.
And we ended up raising over like $5,200 or something, over $5,000.
You'd said that you make amends by the way you live.
How do you live?
How do I live?
So I tried to model joy to others all the time and all things.
So I had a client, a woman I've been working with a lot of dearly, but she said, some
people are a glass half empty and some people are a glass half full.
You're a glass full person.
At that time we were talking about rainy days and I was pretty excited about a rainy
day.
So it took me a while to figure out, oh, it was because on rainy days, when I was locked
up, you could go out on the yard and nobody would be on the yard so you had the yard
yourself.
So you start learning to love rainy days.
But I do think I'm pretty optimistic and I think I really try to convey that to other
people.
I try to live really joyfully in everything I do.
I think it's really important.
I think my victims lost everything, everything.
I owe them a joyful life.
Otherwise, it's just that much more wasted.
My friend, Mary, and I've said this on the podcast about a million times, but she had said
to me she lost her husband and then maybe a year or so later she lost her son.
And she said, we have a sacred responsibility to live fully in the face of loss.
And the next line of the email was, it's a bitch, though.
Yeah, yeah, it's not always easy, you know.
It's a bitch, but I do think like you do have, it does feel like a sacred responsibility.
Yeah.
It feels like it could also be a lot of pressure.
It's a lot of pressure.
Maybe.
I don't know.
It feels really good to me most of the time.
You know, I feel like, oh, like you said, I have the sacred responsibility and I think
not everybody is fortunate enough to wake up every day knowing what they have to do.
We have a sacred responsibility to live fully in the face of our losses.
And we also have a sacred responsibility to live fully in the face of our mistakes.
Our mistakes, no matter how fatal, how tragic, how irreversible those mistakes are.
Because there is no math that will ever make what happened to the six people Robert killed
okay.
There's no number of hours that Robert can counsel people through addiction, no number
of people he can guide through the criminal justice system, no amount of money that he
can raise every November first for the rest of his life that will ever make what happened
okay.
You can't do math with human lives.
Beautiful, vibrant lives that did not deserve to end on the black top of a highway on a
cold November night.
Your value and worth is immeasurable, unquantifiable.
You simply can't balance an equation like that.
You cannot do math with human lives.
Robert knows this.
He came to terms with this long ago during his time in prison.
And that doesn't make his efforts to do as much good as he can with his life futile.
He simply has the fortune to carry out his sacred responsibility.
This has been terrible thanks for asking and I'm Nora McEnerney.
This episode was really hard to make.
There are so many layers of pain within it and I want to give major credit to Megan Palmer
for discovering this story, uncovering this story and working tirelessly to produce
a story that honors the humanity of everyone involved.
Terrible thanks for asking is an independent podcast produced by our independent podcast
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I think that's it.
God, I'm so sweaty.