My father left me and my mother when I was 6 months old. I never saw him again after that. Throughout most of my early years, my mother was in an extremely abusive and controlling relationship with my stepdad. As young as 4, I saw her slapped, beaten, yelled at, and belittled.
This was a regular occurrence throughout my life, until, one day, my mother had enough. In the middle of the night, she got a U-haul van, woke me and my sister and told us to take anything we could carry on our backs, and took off. I was 7 years old.
It was me, my mom and my sister. We ran away to Iowa where we lived for a year. I don’t remember much about my time there, but I knew my mom was safe and that mattered to me more than anything. Despite this, she wanted to get back into her old relationship, so we moved back to Texas. Nothing changed. In fact, it was worse. She was beaten harder than ever before. Before I knew it, me, my sister and my mom were back in the van again, fleeing my stepdad.
This instability was constant throughout my childhood and early teen years. It made me disconnected from everyone else. Although things eventually stabilized more by my mid-teens, by then, I had become very quiet and reserved. Having my roots pulled out from under me at such a young age made me feel like I didn’t belong, but there was nothing more I wanted than attention and the feeling of belonging to something.
I eventually realized that if I acted out I would get attention, something I so desperately needed and wanted. It didn’t matter to me that I was getting in trouble or that I was getting the ‘wrong’ type of attention, I was just happy to be noticed. It didn’t take long before I turned into a rebellious hellion.
My defiant attitude moved me in the opposite direction from everyone else. I started drinking and smoking weed at a young age but that just ramped up as time went on. By 17 I was shooting cocaine and heroin and eventually became addicted to methamphetamine.
Shooting heroin was bad, but it was nothing compared to doing meth. It radically transformed me and made me far more desperate. It had such a strong grip on my life that I went from being a simple drug addict to a full-blown tweaker who was cooking meth in motels and dealing it to make money.
It didn’t take long for things to spiral out of control. I was eventually arrested and charged with manufacturing and distributing methamphetamine and was thrown in jail. I didn’t learn a fucking thing. The second I got out, I went straight back to cooking and dealing meth.
Shortly thereafter, I was arrested again. They sent me to a treatment facility where I was supposed to get clean, but I ended up running away and became a fugitive of the law. I was on the run for 45 days until they finally arrested me.
I was in trouble so often that I got accustomed to being in prison. It wasn’t home, but it became familiar enough that I didn’t feel too out of place there. Things got so bad that for a period of 6 years, at the peak of my drug use, I only saw the light of day outside of a prison for a total of 6 months.
I had been doing so many hard drugs for so long that what finally tipped the scales in my favour was a 2-year stint in prison and an enforced manual labor work placement ordered by the court. The prison sentence gave me time for my mind to rewire and mend itself to whatever sort of normalcy it could return to and the monotonous job forced me to confront everything that I did in my life that brought me to where I was. There was no single event that manifested the positive change, but if there was any defining period of my life this was it.
When I was finally released from prison, I knew I was going to have to bust my ass to change. However, what I didn’t know was that of all things, cryptocurrency was going to be the catalyst in order to turn my hope of a personal metamorphosis into a reality.
Being a drug dealer for so many years, I had heard about Bitcoin but didn’t really know what it was. To me, it was magic internet money that allowed you to buy shit that you weren’t supposed to be able to. But when I got out of prison, I started reading a lot more about it and really began to understand its depth. To me, it was evident that crypto was a way of empowering people that had the willingness and balls to use it.
Crypto, more specifically Bitcoin and Solana, didn’t care about my past or who I used to be. The anonymity allowed me to get a loan in Bitcoin, which would have been impossible through the traditional financial sector as a five-time felon. I then eventually heard about Solana and fell in love with it. I swapped my Bitcoin for Solana and immersed myself in it. The online community of Solana users and enthusiasts was incredibly welcoming and insightful. It was clear, immediately, that there was something incredible going on here and I wanted to be a part of this in whatever way I could. The community of people made me feel like I was at home and that I finally belonged to something greater than myself.
At the same time I was released from prison and learned about Solana, I was also beginning to learn to paint. Luckily enough this was also around the same time Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) began to explode. It took me a while to truly understand NFTs and how they work, but once I did, it took my initial interest in Web 3.0 and transformed it into a burning passion. It became the main focus in my life. I started turning my physical art pieces into NFTs and for the first time in my life, I was getting paid to do something that was 100% true to me. It helped me transform myself from a convicted drug addict to a paid artist.
Although I was starting to make money from the NFTs that I sold, my ultimate desire evolved into wanting to give back to the community that gave so much to me. I started introducing talented artists to the space and they started launching their own NFTs on Solana and before I knew it, I was considered a significant curator and pillar for the Solana art community. This was such a far jump from where I was just a few years ago
If there is one thing I’ve taken from my journey, it’s that giving back to the community that gives to you is the most important thing you can do. It’s fed my soul and is what helped me stay clear of drugs and out of trouble. In a way, what you end up giving, gives back to you ten times over. That’s why I’ve made it my life’s work to organize 1000 free art classes, give away 1000 free digital art tools, and onboard as many talented artists onto Solana as I can. It’s my way of giving an opportunity to people who otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to belong to something greater than themselves. Ultimately, I think that’s what we’re all striving for in one way or another – to belong.
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@kidonthephoenix