The first time I thought about killing myself I was 11 years old. I grew up without a father and my mother would regularly abuse me. She would slap my face until I bled and would make me kneel on hardwood floors with my arms held out straight for hours. I was beaten so hard that my mother’s hands were bruised and swollen.
My abusive upbringing numbed me. I felt no emotions, no sense of urgency regarding my life. No self-worth. I had no father figure and lacked structure in my life.
As soon as I graduated high school, I joined the army in an effort to find that. In a way, the army provided me with a sort of communal father figure and a new beginning. It was also the first time I experienced shooting a gun. I was hooked. Not long after basic training, I quit the army. I hated getting yelled at and was too unfocused and undisciplined to go from screwing off in school to a life of unrelenting routine like the army. I still loved guns though so I got my firearms license and bought my first gun, a Heckler & Koch Mark 23, shortly after leaving the army.
With no job and no college degree, I looked for any way to make money. I started working security at a hospital. My job primarily involved subduing psychiatric patients when they became erratic. I was getting paid $15 an hour and there was no future insight for me. There was a nagging sense inside of me that I was pissing away my time working at minimum wage jobs like this. The voice grew louder and louder until when one of my co-workers had a chunk of his forearm bitten off by a schizophrenic man on meth…all for $15 an hour!
After that day, the voice inside of me turned from a whisper into a blood-curdling scream and I quit my job and never returned. Up to that point in my life, I had only ever been competent and knowledgeable in one area and that was firearms. I obsessed over guns since I first got to use them in the army. I learned everything I could and in the process found out that you could buy regular firearms from a gun shop and sell them on the underground market for a huge premium. While I wasn’t directly associated with anyone I could sell them to, I had friends that were gangbangers who ended up introducing me to my first clients. The first gun I ever sold netted me $3,000 in cash. I couldn’t believe that I could make that much money off of just one sale. So, inevitably, one sale turned into three sales, turned into seven sales turned into I don’t even know how many.
I was making more money than I could ever imagine. Things were moving along perfectly until one of the headquarters of the gangs I did business with got raided. Drugs, money and the guns that I sold them were all confiscated and taken in for evidence. Things started to get hot. The police had seized the weapons and did some forensic testing to see if they could be traced.
Even though I had filed off the serial numbers on the weapons, the police were able to trace them back to me by submerging the guns in an acid bath, revealing the original grooves of the metal stamped serial number. I knew it was only a matter of time before the police broke into my home and arrested me, so I took my passport, all the cash I had and got on a flight to France to join the French Foreign Legion (FFL), an army notorious for being a place to escape for those with haunted pasts. Men with criminal records or questionable histories are accepted into training with no questions asked with the option to apply for French citizenship after three years of service, making it the best option I had to avoid being arrested and convicted back home in Canada.
With this in mind, I went through the FFL’s basic training, making sure I did everything I could to ensure I was accepted into their ranks. Physically, I was in great shape and managed to pass with flying colours. Despite this, I was given a psychological and mental assessment and was rendered unfit and kicked out. So with very little money and nowhere to go, I returned back home where I was arrested, charged, and convicted of twelve accounts of Arms Trafficking and sentenced to five years in prison.
The life I have lived so far has been hard. There have been roads that I’ve gone down that I don’t think people even know exist but, inspite of all of this, I keep my head to the sky and eyes forward, because those that surrender to what life throws at you sacrifice their opportunity for redemption.