You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures and iHeart Podcasts.

My name is Nicholas Takowski.

I'm a writer and one of the producers of this podcast.

And when I was seventeen, I fell down the side of a mountain.

Sixteen years later, I finally dealt with the repercussions.

Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were forever altered after having almost died.

These are first hand accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.

Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to remind us all of our shared human condition.

Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for some listener, and discretion is advised.

I guess you start at the beginning.

We had a happy family, at least for a kid.

I had a happy childhood.

You're kind of protected from your parents' bullshit when you're really little if your parents are any kind of decent and mine work.

I had a pretty average kind of suburban life, you know, played outside with my friends, and I really liked books.

I really enjoyed reading.

But you know, my parents, they weren't right for each other.

They didn't got them well, and so when I was ten years old, they sort of split and that was that.

My mother found a guy pretty quickly.

He was my little sister's tee ball coach.

His name was Bill.

His name was not Bill, but for the purposes of this story, his name was Bill.

Bill was kind of a good old boy.

He liked to hunt.

He was a big fan of sports, big fan of anything that took place outdoors.

He really enjoyed Ernest Hemingway, which, weirdly enough, later on I also would really enjoy.

I just enjoyed the writing, but he wanted to be Hemingway.

That meant he fancied himself a man's man, and even as a small child, I knew that's not what I was.

I was a soft I was a gentle lad.

I was a reader.

I enjoyed drawing comic books.

I grudgingly spent time outside in the neighborhood.

Once I reached a certain age, you know, I was not into sports.

My little brother was my little sister to a certain extent, but not me.

I ended up going to performing arts school, and so Bill and I did not get along.

I was pretty sure early on that Bill hated me, I mean really really hated me.

It felt like he would go out of his way to make me miserable.

Then my mother constantly was on him about being easier on me, but he sensed I was soft, and I thought for a long time that maybe he was trying to toughened me up, but it just bread a lot of misery.

I was scared of him.

He was scary.

When I was thirteen years old, I don't even remember what I did, but I do remember that he made me pull down my pants and my underwear in front of everybody so that he could spank me with this belt at the age of thirteen.

Like, that's messed up.

I think it's messed up to hit kids anyway, but man's that's fucked up.

But mostly he just bullied me.

He just bullied the shit out of me all the time.

And I went from being a happy kid to being just very anxious all of the time, feeling trapped, feeling like if I made any misstep or any mistake, that fucking fury of Hell was going to come down on me.

And so that's how I spent my adolescence cowering and fear avoiding his gaze.

In Bill's Journey to Being the Manliest Man, he'd lived out in Colorado for a time outside of Estes Park, and he'd lived in this little cabin with no electricity, I think, with like running water, but he had an outhouse.

It was right next to a creek, and he claimed he lived there for a while, but I'm dubious of that.

I imagine he spent like a month out there when he was in his twenties or something, and then blew it up in his head as like this fucking grand adventure because he had delusions of grandeur because he was that guy, of course, but he wanted to show us Vesta's Park, Colorado.

So my mom and my stepsisters, and my brother and sister and I all jumped on a plane and we went out to Colorado and we rented a cabin and it was a beautiful cabin, and it was my first time out west, and I was enamored with it.

Of course, it was weirdly one of the few happy memories that I have were the days kind of leading up to the event, you know, we went on hikes.

It was all beautiful.

I was seeing this landscape it that was so unfamiliar, that was so sweeping and gorgeous.

I really just this the thrill of the new, the thrill of something that you haven't seen before.

For like a Georgia boy who hadn't really left the southeast very much up to that point.

It was.

It was huge for me.

And then one morning he decided he wanted to take us on one of his favorite hikes.

It's a place called gem Lake, right out on the border of the Rocky Mountain National Forest, and it's just a pathway up a mountain, maybe a two hour hike up, and once you get up to the top, there's this gorgeous little pond that I think is probably snow melt, but in June, which is when we were there, it was beautiful and clear and serene and just a really idyllic place.

I was enamored with it right away, and my brother, who was kind of a daredevil, was as well, because once you get up to the pond, there's more to climb.

There's a giant rock formation that goes up I don't know, maybe another hundred feet in the air, and my brother wanted me to climate with him.

We're like, all right, famously risk averse.

I fear for my physical safety, or used to fear for my physical safety, very gillerly.

But you know, it looked like I could, I could climb this formation.

It looked like my brother and I would have a good time, So we started climbing.

My brother was always athletic, I was not.

He moved faster than me, but we both made it up to the top and just had the most beautiful view of the rockies from up there and the forest, and the forest just stretched out so far.

It was amazing.

You know.

We stayed up there, we joked around, we threw pebbles down, you know, we had a good time.

But after about twenty minutes of climbing around up there, we decided it was time to get back down.

We didn't want Bill getting pissed at us.

So my brother immediately goes straight back down the way we came.

I mean, just like scaling down a rock wall like a spider monkey a just like going And I'd seen what I thought was like more of a winding path down, so I decided to take the safe route.

And it was it was there was just like it was kind of a gentle slope down sort of the back of this rock formation, sort of opposite the little pond up top gem like proper.

But I figured, you know, and climb down this and then once you get low enough, you switch back and just walk back on this little footpath that I thought i'd seen as when we'd climbed up.

So you know, I was had my backpack on and I was very carefully walking down this you know, slope, when all of a sudden, my feet came out from under me, and I mean really came out like clown slipping on a banana came out and I landed hard on my back and my ass, and there had been gravel that I hadn't seen, and that gravel caused me to start sliding down this slope.

Now, as I'm going down this slope to the left, there's just this sheer drops.

It's the it's the drop that like my brother had climbed down.

And I don't know how far down it was, but it was at least thirty feet maybe forty feet down this drop to my left, and I'm sliding on my back.

Luckily, my backpack had like inched up my back, so it was kind of like underneath my head, cushioning my head from hitting the rock as I slid.

As I started gaining speed here, and I noticed that I was kind of edging closer to this, to this, this sort of sheer drop down.

This probably all happened in under ten seconds, but it felt like everything was moving in slow motion.

At this moment.

I could see that I'm being edged toward this drop, and so I try to flip over on my stomach, and I spread my arms as far out as I can, and I just grip with my fingers and my feet just barely go out over the edge, and I managed to stop myself.

Now in this I've gotten like scraped up my back.

Was my lower back where the backpack had slid up and pulled my shirt up with it, was all scratched up.

Two of my fingernails were a little bit bloody from trying to like grip sheer stone, and there was grit underneath them that I think I was pulling out weeks later.

But I'd managed to stop my and I don't know how far.

I slid a few yards a little bit more, but I found myself pulling myself away from that ledge and just on my belly, slowly working my way down until I reached a point that was clear of gravel where I felt safe standing up again, and I just made my way a little further down so I could switch back.

But I realized once I kind of got to a stopping point that I couldn't see the path that I thought had been there, and that in fact, I was just on the wrong side of this mountain from where i'd been.

I've always thought that I have a pretty good sense of direction.

I always thought that I that I could find my way out of the maze if I needed to.

But uh, yeah, I don't know.

Maybe the fall had just discombobulated me.

I don't know.

What I do now is that when I started kind of moving in the direction that I thought the path would be, I just got more lost.

Now we were on a mountain in a range of mountains.

I was on the National Forest side of the mountains, so I literally could not see anything but trees and more mountains.

But I knew if I keep just kind of clinging to the side of this mountain and like going in one direction counterclockwise, that eventually I would come out.

I'd see a road, I'd see something.

I didn't know that it would be four hours in the wilderness.

Not I didn't know it would take me so long to get back, but I was, you know, I was worried.

It's already darker than it was.

The afternoon was wearing on and it was approaching evening, and I finally saw as I was turning this one little corner, I finally saw rock formation that I'd seen while I was climbing up and it was my brother had made fun of me for it because I've got like a what my great grandmother calls a noble nose, So it's big.

It's pretty big.

It was especially big when I was seventeen, and like I was just a skinny little kid when I was one hundred and twenty five pounds, like my nose was, you know, it stuck out, it was prominent.

And my brother had said this rock formation looked just like my nose.

And I saw that rock formation again and was really glad that my brother had had pointed it out to me and mocked me because it had stuck in my skull.

And I think that had I not, I would have possibly missed the actual trail that we'd come up on.

So I get back to the trail and I'm like halfway down it, and I realize now that after like climbing four hours around the side of this mountain, that I now have to walk back up the trail to get to Gem Lake.

And I'm exhausted and I'm bleeding.

My back is bleeding, my fingers are bleeding.

My i'd scrapes on my side, it scrapes on my face.

I was dirty, I was sweaty, I was anxious, and I had to climb back up to Gem Lake.

Although about ten minutes into climbing back up, suddenly my family rounds the bend and my brother and sister and stepsisters ran up to me, and my mom ran to me and putting them like just embraced me and was like, oh my god.

I was so scared.

I was so scared.

And she pulled away and she smacked me in the face upside the head and was like, don't do that again.

I was like, it was it was an accident.

I was trying to be safe.

And that was when my stepfather approached and all Bill said was did you almost die?

And I said yes, and he said good and he kept walking.

And it was one of the few times that I turned to my mom and I was like, what, that's messed up?

And that was when she said, he was walking us down to the car and then he was going to come back up and look for you.

And if we didn't hear from him by dark, then we were supposed to call the park rangers.

But he was going to come back and look for you.

And I said, okay.

So I followed them back down and we got in the car and we went back to the cabin.

The next day there was another hike and I skipped it.

I stayed in and I just read the book that I brought.

But it was Bill's plan to save me that stuck in my craw because even at the age of seventeen, I knew if somebody's lost in the woods, you call for rescue immediately.

You don't wait until nightfall.

It's so much harder to find somebody in the middle of the wilderness in the middle of the night than it is when there's sunlight.

It gets cold at night in Colorado.

I was wearing like I was wearing a light jacket.

You know, it was June, so I brought a light jacket along.

But that you know, the temperature drops into the forties at night.

If I hadn't fallen down and broken my neck overnight, there was a good chance that I could like get hypothermia, and I if my leg had been broken, I could just die die of exposure.

It could be a million different things for you go for the rescue right away.

And I thought, I thought, that's so curious.

And it didn't occur to me until later.

As I got older, Bill became sort of more antagonistic toward me, And one day I realized I was telling somebody this story.

I was telling my friends a story, and I got to the part about Bill, you know, selflessly deciding to come and search for me on his own, not bother you know, the emergency cruise.

And my friend was like, sounds like he saw an opportunity to kill you with impunity, And I knew in that moment that was the case.

Bill saw an opportunity that he would never get again, which is kind of plausible deniability.

If he found me and my neck was broken, bully for him.

If he found me and my neck wasn't broken, he had an opportunity to break it.

He had an opportunity to bash my head in with a rock, and it seems hyperbolic to say that man was going to kill me.

But in the years that followed, when I brought it up to my family members, long after Bill was out of our lives, long after my mother left him, every single one of them agrees with me.

Every single one of them agrees with that dude was just so excited for me to die.

You know, trauma tends to stay in your body.

I think that nobody gets away clean, Nobody gets out of his life clean.

Nobody gets out of their childhood completely unscathed, at least nobody I've met.

But I think that things like having an authority figure in your life who is abusive, who spends so much energy trying to break you down, I think that energy for them as well spent.

Because I came out of my childhood and my adolescence a deeply anxious person, with an innate fear and hatred for authority, with major issues with my self worth, with severe depression that was frequently debilitating college.

I was a nervous wreckthrough.

I think I started with the four point zero average and four years later was kicked out because I wasn't going to classes anymore, mostly because I was staying up all night with anxiety and then sleeping late and then just going to the shit job that I had to pay my rent.

So they booted me out of school and I came home with my tail between my legs.

And that was the summer that the bill was finally gone from our lives.

He finally threw one too many coffee tables, you know, slammed one too many doors, berated us one too many times for my mother, and he was sort of exiled.

I remember the last time I saw him.

I was twenty two.

I was pulling up to the family house and his car pulled up behind me.

He was grabbing a couple of things he was told toward me.

I was terrified he was going to do something, but he didn't.

He grabbed what he'd come for and he got back in his car and he didn't say goodbye, peeled off, and that was the last I ever saw of him.

Kind of anti climactic after years and years of abuse, just to have your abuser kind of drive off.

You hear a lot more stories about the abuser finally just killing the object of his abuse.

But I guess in that sense, I was really lucky.

But it left me in my twenties a wreck.

And you know, I self medicated by drinking, and I drank a lot, and I drank a lot.

All through my twenties.

I had a job in theme parks where I wrote and directed children's plays, and it was a fine job.

I didn't have a lot of responsibility, and I didn't want a lot of responsibility.

Anytime that there was room to move up in the company, I avoided it like the plague.

But I was also so risk averse that I ended up just allowing myself to be trapped there.

I was trapped there for a decade.

I did my writing projects on the side.

I had a dream of being in film, being a writer, director, performer, and through being around was able to actually kind of start getting in with people that were making film in my city.

Having that creative part of my personality kind of expanded, exploring and experimenting and just writing and finding finding some purpose in that.

But it didn't take away the anxiety.

The anxiety and the depression became more pronounced as my twenties war on.

I regularly drank myself into stupors and woke up in the middle of the night with panic attacks.

I burned through so much money drinking.

I was always broke.

I was always stressed out about money.

I was always scraping together for my bills.

I was just a miserable son of a bitch at that point.

And then a project that I was working on got into Sundance.

I went out to Sundance, and I was miserable the whole time I was.

My anxiety got the best of me there.

I did not sleep, I couldn't eat before midnight screening, I had to throw up.

I was so anxious.

It went well.

You know, the film got distribution.

I got into the Writer's Guild and I got my first real Hollywood writing job.

And that became the worst year of my life.

The added pressure suddenly of working with these creative executives at this company, which I will not name it broke me.

I stopped sleeping altogether.

I was having anxiety attacks that would last, severe panic attacks that would last for thirty minutes, forty five minutes, an hour at a time.

I was waking up like clockwork at three am and at five thirty am and at seven am, and just having these immense panic attacks, like waking up with adrenaline and cortisol flooding through my system.

I was so miserable that the relationship I was in at the time.

She finally broke up with me and said, you have been hollowed out.

There's no joy in you anymore.

There's just this anxiety and this rage and this negativity.

And I love you, but I can't watch you do this to yourself.

That didn't help.

I reached a point where I was smoking two backs of cigarettes a day.

I'd wake up in the morning riddled with anxiety and exhausted, and the only thing that would fuel me were the two pots of coffee that I would drink, and I would have a sour stomach all day long from the cigarettes and the coffee.

I would usually eat something sometime in the afternoon if I could stomach it.

But we would get to the end of our work days in this little office that we kept struggling through this script that I hated for these people that I was afraid of, and I would immediately upon finishing, walk down the street to the corner bar, and I would drink my calories for the night, stumble home usually after midnight, and pass out until my scheduled three am panic attack.

So over the course of the months that has happened.

I was losing weight.

I lost thirty five pounds.

My skin was gray.

I would get winded walking up half a flight of stairs.

I was throwing up with anxiety on a daily basis, and I was just a horror to be around.

I was on a hair trigger.

And even when the job finished and the immediate stressers were taken away, I was a live wire and I was I became suicidal at that point.

I was obsessed with death and dying, and I thought, what a fucking relief it would be.

What a relief to just not have to carry a load, What a relief to not be expected to produce, What a relief to not have to be in this body and then not have to deal with this broken mind.

A week after we turned in the script they called and passed on it.

I think it was eighteen months from when we started developing to when we turned in the script, and they were on our asses because we were behind on deadlines the whole time.

It was great.

It was like the lowest, lowest level executive called us, like somebody's assistance assistant who broke the news to us.

They couldn't be bothered with any of their big wigs talking directly to us.

They were like, this was great, We're gonna pass.

Thank you.

I mean a week later.

Now I'm just this ghost, this husk of a human being, like blowing around in the wind making money.

However he can doing shitty little writing jobs, rewriting scripts and you know, writing SEO for websites.

And I was hired to write a management training course.

None of it paid well, all of it was exhausting, and through it all, I just like lost more and more faith in myself and my abilities.

And then one night I was sitting around at home and I was just getting ready to just get drunk.

I had a bottle of whiskey and I was gonna just get drunk.

And a friend of mine called and asked if I wanted to come swing by his place and maybe get high.

And I was like, you know what, why the fuck not?

I got no other plans, I got nowhere to be.

I'm just gonna be depressed if I stay here, I'm going to be anxious in my apartment.

And so I went over to my buddy's house.

My buddy, my buddy Bernie.

I will use his real name.

I get to his house and uh, you know, he's got a nice little back porch and they've got they've got the teaki torches lit, and you know, he hands me, hands me a drink and says, so I'm going to do an impression of him here.

So I I got these.

Uh, I got these shrooms, and they're they're not great.

They're they're pretty weak.

But uh, you know, if you wanna you wanna like trip a little bit, yeah, well we can, we can weaken trip.

And I thought, well, fuck, why the why the hell not?

I was in a terrible headspace, I mean absolutely terrible headspace.

And you know what they say about psychedelics, uh set setting and dosage, the headspace you're in your mindset where you are, you know, you're setting and then uh dosage.

And these were supposed to be really weak shrooms, but they weren't.

We took them, and we're just he had to run inside and do some stuff.

So I went and I sat in in his living room and it was nice and quiet, and when the trip started, I realized immediately that these were very very wrong mushrooms.

Thirty minutes in, I just I noticed that the walls were felt like they were shifting a little bit in and now it felt like the walls were breathing, and I was like, oh, oh, I'm going to be in for a night.

And you know, I tripped a quite a few times.

At this point, I enjoyed it.

I'd had good trips and i'd had like not great trips, but I'd never had a frankly bad trip.

But I was already so anxious and really primed for a bad experience, so I was unsurprised when I started having a panic attack on shrooms.

I walked outside with Bernie and we were smoking cigarettes and I had a drink in front of me, and the tiki torches were lit, so it's really pretty and I was having like just nice visuals.

But I was really anxious.

And Bernie, he's a talker.

He loves talking about movies, so we started talking about movies.

But in the meantime, I was going back into my head my ex girlfriend's dog.

We were still living in the apartment together.

She was out of town.

I was in charge of the dog that night, and I realized, as I started tripping hard that I would be unable to get back to the apartment in time to let the dog out, and that the dog was going to pee in the kitchen, and that she was going to feel bad about it.

She was such a sweet dog.

When she knew she was in trouble, she would get that look, that hang dog look that just broke your heart.

She had the saddest eyes.

And that thought, the thought of my dog and how I was failing my dog let me into this spiral.

Because it wasn't just the dog.

I'd let down my parents.

I had to ask for money too many times.

I'd let down the people that I worked with.

I didn't do a good enough job writing.

I wasn't a good enough writer to hack it.

There was a reason that I wasn't getting produced.

It was because I was so fundamentally flawed that I could not get my shit together enough to be even competent at any of the things that I chose to do in my life.

While I'm going through all of this in my head, I keep also going, it's the drugs.

It's the drugs.

This is the drugs.

They will be out of your system and you will be fine.

It's the drugs.

And I would ground myself by zoning back in to Bernie, who has been talking this whole time without cease.

He's just been talking, and I've just been in like my own headspace is my own personal hell, and I keep checking in with Bernie, and just for a really unreasonable amount of time, he has been having this conversation with himself about how Peter Jackson's King Kong is criminally underrated, and he is telling me the whole story of it, and he's telling me what the critics have said, and he's telling me about how Joseph Campbell would agree with him that the structure of this film was perfect, it was the perfect mono myth, and he's just going at this.

So I would check in with him, and I'd realize how absolutely absurd it was that I was having this like total fucking meltdown in my skull.

But then I'd get pulled right back into it, thinking about my poor fucking dog and thinking about what a worthless piece of shit I was, and how I only was capable of hurting people and bringing anxiety into the world, and all of a sudden, I thought about Bill, and I thought about that mountaintop, and I thought about how it almost died in that one moment, and how Bill had wanted to murder me, and I thought, maybe he was right, Maybe he saw something in me that I just haven't wanted to see.

Maybe he saw that I was worthless and I wasn't worth saving.

And in the moment, I decided, I'm going to go back to that mountain and I'm going to finish the job.

And I was sure that night that I was going to kill myself, but I had to let the fucking dog out first.

And it was around this point that Bernie actually kind of paused in his rant and looked at me and said, are you okay?

You look like there's something really horrible going on in your head.

And I said, I think I'm having a bad trip right now.

He said, okay, well, why don't we just go inside and watch something on TV.

So we went inside and we watched some corny ass Roger Corman film, and after like three or four hours, as it was getting on dawn, I realized that I was safe to drive, and so I said goodbye to Bernie and I drove back to my shitty little apartment and I walked in the back door into the kitchen to a lake of urine, and there she was with her hang dog expression.

So worried that she was going to get in trouble.

And I knelt down and I gave her a big hug, and I scratched her behind the ears, and I was like, it's not your fault, baby, I'm so sorry.

That was my fault.

I should let you out.

And she wagged her tail and you know, wagged her body.

She would have a habit of doing that.

And I walked outside with her and she used the restroom again, and then I came inside and I fed her and gave her more water, and I mopped up all the urine.

And at this point, it's you know, eight or nine in the morning, and I was like, okay, I have to sleep.

So I lay down and passed out and woke up six hours later.

And when I opened my eyes, I realized immediately that I felt incredibly calm, and I realized that all of the fucking nightmares of the night before were gone.

I felt better than I had probably in a couple of years that morning.

Then I knew I wasn't gonna kill myself that day.

So I went on a walk, and while I was walking, I did a lot of thinking, and I realized it was time to reach out and ask for help, that I needed to curb my drinking, that I needed to cut to therapy, I needed to get on some medication to deal with my head.

And that's when I started taking care of myself for the first time in my life.

I'm not going to pretend like everything got better right away.

It didn't.

I'm not going to pretend that my anxiety went away.

It did not that I was able to banish my depression forever.

I don't think that's possible.

Even ten years later.

I recognize it as something that's never going to go away, but I also recognize it as something that is manageable.

And through a decade of the right drugs mixed with talk therapy, mixed with I think just the sort of natural mellowing of aging, I find that I deal with things easier Now.

I still feel the anxiety, but I am able to functionally work through it and utilize that energy.

I have a kid now.

I never thought I was gonna have a kid.

I thought I was too selfish.

I thought I was incapable.

I thought I didn't have good examples of fatherhood and that I was too intrinsically fucked up.

And I didn't want to drag another human being into this world just to mess them up myself.

But I just try to be for her who I needed when I was a kid.

You know.

I apologize when I'm wrong.

I listened to her.

I try not to be condescending, even though she's three years old and she is condescending enough for the both of us.

I have to stick around.

I owe it to this person that I dragged, kicking and screaming into the world to be there to protect her, to guide her, to be a soft place to land, to celebrate her for who she is and who she becomes, to be a dad.

And I think that's what finally finally brought me some peace.

Weirdly enough, the world is terrifying, but you can cut out space for yourself, and you can make yourself worthy of your own respect.

And all of this obsession in my youth of being these grandiose ideas of being this famous filmmaker, this great man.

I think it's more important now to be a good person.

I think that kindness is more important than success.

I think that the best way to fight back against Bill and again, and I think the sort of psychological damage that he may have caused me is to forgive him, to forgive myself for as much as I can, and to be strong in a different way than he wanted me to be strong.

And that's being strong by trying to be selfless when you can.

I fail all the time.

I fail all the time at selflessness, at kindness.

I struggle with it sometimes.

But I think that in the long run, all of this has made me a better dad, a better person.

I quit drinking.

When my kid grows up, whoever she grows up to be, I want her to be able to look back at her youth and say, it may not have always been easy, but I was loved and I was supported.

I don't know.

I think that'd be a great legacy to have.

Welcome back to Alive Again.

Joining me for a conversation about today's story are my other Alive Again story producers Nicholas Dakowski and Brent Dye, and I'm your host, Dan Bush.

Nick on Nick Nicky Swiss, Nick on Nick Action.

So Nick, why did you pick this story?

Why did I pick?

What was it like meeting Nick?

Honestly, there is a lot of navel gazing.

Guy did talk about himself?

Yeah?

No, what drew me to this?

Story.

Is that it shaped my entire life?

Was it was?

It?

Was it therapeutic for you?

I mean, I'm serious.

Were you thinking, man, this would be kind of therapeutic for me to kind of, you know, review this story.

I think publicly, I I think I thought that until I was actually sitting in front of the microphone and just yeah, it's really it's really really hard not to sort of as you're going second guess yourself when you're telling these stories, as of just as somebody who's producing this stuff.

I'm like thinking, it's really hard.

You had to have two brains.

You had to one be honest and tell the story and then at the.

Same timeritializing my own brain like I'll probably gout this and.

Yeah, well you did a magnificent job.

It's a it's a very very compelling story.

And I was I think so.

Having like listened to a lot of these now and told my own story, there's something that is very gratifying and meaningful about telling your story and then listening to all these others and realizing how much of a thread there is through the human experience of you know, of just being alive and suffering, you know, and and hearing people like Katie Preston who survived the Nazis, and sitting down and talking to Delaney Tarr who survived the Parkland shooting, and these these big moments in time where they are these they are these people that are swept up in this sort of like ocean of history and just drawn out to see listening to those stories and listening to, you know, stories of somebody just dealing with a very personal experience that's only happened to them.

But having all of these people kind of come to the same conclusions about humanity and about their own place in humanity and their own place in the world, it's deeply gratifying.

And I think that if there's one takeaway that I really had from telling this story is that I got to feel, for a moment as if I was really deeply connected, you know, spiritually if you want to say it, or psychologically with all of these other people that we've spoken to.

I felt connected through all of these like disparate lived experiences, many of our separate conclusions ended up being very similar about humanity and life and what is worthy and Worthwhile you know, Brent, you were talking earlier about family, finding like deep meaning in that and really being able to experience that.

And I think that that, yeah, I think that that's something that a lot of people came away with, is more compassion for the human experience and more connection to the human experience than they might have had otherwise.

I just love that all of these stories end in that space, you know, in that whether somebody has a an experience that's defined by some spiritual interpretation here on earth, or whether it's a completely agnostic conclusion or whatever they come away with, there is something very for lack of a better word, spiritual about what everybody goes through.

And so many of these stories are are cases of people dealing with cancer or a car accident or a traumatic event like a fire or an earthquake, And yours was kind of a spiritual death or a death of the soul, a shedding of of self.

And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, Like it sounded like when I read about you waking up after your six hour recovery sleep after your acid trip, It's like you woke up in a new set of skin, And I'm wondering what caused that transformation and how did it?

How does it?

How hard has it been to become this new person sort of value became.

I mean I think that, yeah, though I don't believe that the sort of trip itself, like drastically is not responsible for all these large scale changes in my life since then.

It was the It was definitely the trigger point, like you're talking about, and uh, you know, I think that, Uh you know, I think that like waking up the next morning and actually not feeling bad and getting up and taking a walk, which was not something I'd been doing, and like starting to like look for therapists and stuff like that.

I mean, waking up and in that plasticity, I think and I think it was the just the act of getting up and going on a walk, setting an intention for the first time, uh in possibly a year, at that point where I was like, I'm going to get up, I'm going to I'm going to go for a walk because I think that'll be good for me.

I think that like opening in that moment of plasticity with something healthy.

Making that decision that next morning to get up probably was the most optimistic but important thing I did in this whole story.

A huge part of your.

Story, Nick, is is this your battle with your pre designed sense of what success was for you becoming a filmmaker, becoming a writer, and you got really close to that, you had a studio hire you.

And that's part of your story too, because it's it's the mountain plus your drive, you know, to to become successful in your own narrative about what that meant for you as a means, I guess to defeat yourself loathing and the self and your the sense of like I'm not if somebody wants to kill me, what's wrong with me?

Well I can fix that.

Becoming a famous director or a filmmaker or writer.

It seems like that was the trend and that you know, came to a head when when that was you didn't find your what you would define successful wasn't what happened, and then you walked away in the end.

Do you have this quote that I just love you said kindness is more important than success, And there's this idea that love and support is essential to human health and survival, yeah, than self reliance, those two ideas.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

It's just yeah, I mean I think that I think that you know, when I when I really did start like pursuing my career and and when when it started popping a little bit.

A lot of things happened in that year.

I mean that one of the other big things that happened in that year was that I was cast in a major motion picture which ended up being a terrible movie and a failure.

But I went through an inner an audition process that I mean, I went in front of producers like six times.

I was alone in front of the director the last time, justye and I and the camera.

And I mean this was like two weeks of just like coming in and doing this, playing this character over and over again.

And I got cast in this thing.

And then two days later I got a callback from my agent.

This was going to be like a month on set.

It was gonna be a shit ton of money for me.

It was going to be like really life changing.

At the same time that we were getting this job, this big writing job for a studio.

So there was this moment in my life, literally two days in my life, where I was like, holy shit, everything has fallen into place.

I've had this film at Sundance, I've got this studio, the studio job as a writer.

I've gotten cast in a major motion picture where I'm like an actual named character with a shit ton of lines and a month on set.

And then two days later I get a call from my agent that basically says that, like, hey, they this was too close to a real life person and they rewrote the character to be a woman, and I was like, well, I can't play that convincingly.

So that terrible year, there was this, There was just this, these constant blows, and even with the success, I was realizing how miserable I was that like this studio job writing it sucks.

It's super stressful, like we can't seem to please them, it's you know, and realizing that like I was never going to achieve enough success to like make me feel good about myself as a human being.

I started focusing more on you know, I got into a romantic relationship where we ended up getting married and having a kid, and I think that by the time I had my daughter, I'd allowed my career to be something that I took seriously but didn't take to heart because I realized that there was just misery.

If you made that your entire personality and your entire ego and your sense of self worth relied on that, then when it went badly, you were going to lose everything.

When it went well, you might feel great but in the moment, but it wasn't sustainable.

Your story is interesting because it starts off with you suffered a stressful sort of home life with a stepfather who, as far as is makes sense, was yeah, I wanted you dead, and then perhaps hoping to prove yourself as somebody worthy of life to yourself by achieving these things in the industry and then coming out of it and having a kid, and now you have the opportunity to not, you know, say that your kid doesn't have to suffer what you suffered.

You know, my stepfather was he he effectively was a contractor.

He he was a very successful contractor.

He did a lot of big jobs, like big corporate jobs.

But nobody was happy to see him when he came home.

You know, my mother would, I think, fawn and make him as happy as she possibly could, but I think that there was fear in that.

There was absolutely fear in her as well.

And how when he was away, my siblings and I were boisterous and joked a lot, and when he was there, we were quieter, we were a lot more reserved.

The spirit of our household was dampened.

I never wanted to be that for somebody.

Now, the most satisfying thing in my whole life is seeing my child's eyes light up.

She runs to me, she screams, screams out dead and runs to me, arms out and wants to be picked up and held.

I can be for her what I desperately needed when I was younger and didn't have.

I got to ask what happened to Bill?

Where is he now?

And why did your mom put up with this asshole treating her children this way?

Two questions because she was a victim too.

She was put under the same psychological restraints as we were.

And I think that the alternative in her mind was being out on the street.

We were poor, we didn't have a lot of options, and it was maybe a false sort of choice.

But for her, I think in her brain, I think, and I think he helped to convince her of this.

It was either going to be live with him and be provided for, or you and your kids just suffer and starve.

And where's where's he today?

I have not spoken to him in twenty two, twenty three years, but the last I heard, he's remarried and just living on a lake.

Nick.

I got to say, you have really bad luck with hikes, because the first time I met you was on a day march out in near Los Angeles.

Dan, what was that trail?

It was Solstice Canyon.

I am never going any with you again.

Man.

We yeah, dude, I we didn't even have enough We did not have enough water to be walking around in the fucking height.

I think.

I think if we would have been lost for four hours, Dan would have been like, did you almost die?

Good?

Good?

Excellent.

Next time on Alive again, we heard from Scott Jenkins, whose steady descent into a drug fueled madness was only stopped when his small town rallied to help change his life's direction.

All I remember is waking up by myself thrashing all around in the bathtub.

There's no reasoning with it.

You can pray about it, and you can meditate.

I remember thinking that, like, if I continue on this line of thought, I'm going to go insane, and like I'm not gonna come back from it.

Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die, Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelbaum.

Music by Ben Lovett.

Additional music by Alexander Rodriguez.

Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young.

Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support.

Our studio engineers are Rima L.

K Ali and Nomes Griffin.

Today's episode was edited by Mike w Anderson, mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez.

I'm your host, Dan Bush.

Special thanks to Nick for sharing a story.

Alive Again is a production of iHeart Radio and Psychopia Pictures.

If you have a.

Transformative near death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.

Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.

That's a l I v e A g A I N p R O j E C T at gmail dot com.