Episode 18: Sometimes Life Forces You to Start Over

I share the progress of my podcast journey and my attempts to rebuild a relationship with my oldest son Ethan during a challenging period of unemployment in Arizona.

Please start with Episode 1. Go to my site BrandonHeld.com

• Creating a website to build community around the podcast, primarily aimed at men based on my life experiences
• Bringing Ethan to Arizona to strengthen our relationship after years of distance
• House rules and boundaries at my girlfriend's home that led to conflict with Ethan
• Ethan's decision to sign a lease in a dangerous neighborhood and disappointment in parent's lack of approval
• The terrifying incident where Ethan was held at knifepoint taking out trash at night
• Struggling through nearly four years of unemployment and health problems
• Finding unexpected health transformation by watching "The Game Changers" documentary
• Receiving multiple job offers after years of searching
• Taking a risk on the highest-paying but most challenging job opportunity

Intro

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:24

welcome back to brandon held life is crazy this is episode 18 i am i would say 85 through what i have planned on discussing up front and putting out there for the world to take in and hear my stories of my life. And I just started working on a website to put this on to. Originally, my plan was to just put this up on regular podcasting stations and I still will, but also I wanted to have a place for people to come to, to communicate with me, to create a community, and just in general, be able to discuss anything in life. And this is about my life experience. And I'm a man, obviously, and I've raised or am raising children. three sons to some degree or another, whether it was by phone and monthly or summer leave visits or by 50-50 custody. And for a while I had a daily fatherly role. And so it's to bring that experience and help where I can with what I know in life and what I've experienced in life. What I am not, clearly is a woman and I have not raised any daughters. Does that mean I don't have any strong opinions about how men should treat a woman? Absolutely not. I do. I 100% have strong opinions on those things and I'd be happy to share that and other things with people if they would come to my website and Tell me what they would like me to discuss or talk about. I'll be happy to bring that up and do a podcast about it. Eventually, I'd like to interview friends and people I know. And who knows where this could go. Maybe I could interview people who just become... Maybe significant or popular as well on the site and other people want to hear from them. I don't know where this will go. Maybe nowhere. Maybe I'm talking into a microphone and five people will ever hear this in their life. I don't know. But that's what I'm working on right now. And this episode, I'm just going to pick up where I left off in the last episode. And that was where I started to date a woman. Her name is Lily. And I was unemployed. And in conjunction with that, I had this brilliant idea to bring my son, Ethan out to Arizona from Ohio and try to Make a stronger adult bonded relationship because we had an insane bond as he was a baby, as I told you before in previous podcasts. And then that got poisoned and lost along the way. And it's sad. It's sad for multiple reasons. One is I have a lot of guidance I can give. and advice I can provide to Ethan and my sons. That doesn't mean I haven't. I have. And Ethan, for whatever reason, still determines he's going to do what he wants to do, which as an adult man, that's ultimately what you should do. You should hear people's advice and you should decide what you want to take in and make changes and do differently or you should decide what you know you think is a better path for you however i also think the person that advice is coming from is significant right if i'm ethan's male neighbor or some acquaintance or whatever, some guy he runs into in the store and they throw some advice his way or at church. Ethan's pretty religious. I don't know what his church attendance is, but I imagine it's pretty high just knowing him. And that advice is good, but no, it's not as good as what's coming from his father. Nobody has his interests at heart better than I do, except his mother. And that goes for all three of my sons. All the advice and guidance I ever give any of my sons, it's because I genuinely want them to live happy, productive lives. And unfortunately, at a young age, they think they know what that looks like for them. And at 51 years old, I can tell you, and as you've heard along the way on this podcast, they don't know what that looks like. They really have no idea what that looks like because they haven't taken the steps on that journey to live a happy life. They're just doing what is making them happy now. And in some cases, that's not the answer for the future, for the long run. So anyway, so I brought Ethan to Arizona and I told him he had some simple rules, right? Some were my rules and some belong to my girlfriend because it was her house. She owned the house. It was her rules. I didn't have to agree with them because I didn't, but I had to respect them because it was her house. And so He had to have a job and he had to be working towards a future, towards changing his life. And so the idea originally was for him to get a job and then hopefully eventually go back to school and further his education or figure out a path forward on what he was going to do for a living. Yeah, when he first came out to Arizona, he worked at a call center. That was actually really the only thing he did while he was here is he worked at a call center taking phone calls for Verizon, I think, or something. And he was the customer service support when you called in. Actually, I can't remember what order this went in, but either way, one of Lilly's rules was he couldn't have women stay in the house. overnight like they could come they could visit but they had to leave at the end of the day they had to leave and she was very hard and fast on that rule she was pretty religious herself in old school and didn't believe young people should be shacking up before marriage which I'm pretty sure she didn't adhere to that advice and she didn't live that life but it's her right to be as contradictive as she wants to be because it's her house. I think she had other reasons. I think it was really more a jealousy of girls being there, not wanting them to turn their attention towards me or giving me some type of attention she didn't want me to have because i know how jealous and insecure she was about everything not necessarily through my actions but just through her history and her past and what she had to deal with in other relationships so anyway ethan was out here visiting living And at one point he broke the rule. He, he had someone stay the night and Lily caught him and she wanted to kick him out immediately. And I was able to talk her down and say, Hey, look, I will talk to him. I'll let him know he can't do that again. That can't happen again. But I brought him out here to help him and get his life on track. And how am I going to do that if I'm kicking him out and he can't He can't make ends meet because he's struggling to survive when the whole goal here was for him to advance in life. And you can't really advance in life when you're struggling to get by. And so she agreed, but made it also very clear that she wouldn't put up with it again. That if he did it again, he was out 100%. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Now, I think the problem with Ethan is he's been able to get away with stuff his whole life. He's a good kid. He's not a malicious person in any way, shape, or form. He just has a little bit of a woe is me complex, feel sorry for me complex, and I think he's probably gotten away with things in his life even when rules were set and supposed to be enforced I don't think they were I think he was used to getting his way and so sadly and unfortunately he didn't take it seriously or I don't know he thought he would get away with it whatever the case was and he did have a girl, a second different girl, stay the night again. And he got caught and that was it. She was kicking him out and I hated it. I literally had no leg to stand on. Here I am unemployed in some way struggling to maintain my relationship with her, myself, because we had arguments and we had fights that Maybe under quote-unquote normal circumstances, I might not have stayed. I might not have stuck it out. I might have moved on. But because moving on for me meant being homeless because I was unemployed, I was stuck. I was in a bad situation. And unfortunately, Ethan had to go, and there was nothing I could do about it. And I hated it. It felt terrible. It was awful. And he had a pretty serious girlfriend at the time he could stay with and one that he had a really toxic relationship with. And I knew all about that. I've been through those. I explained my second marriage to you. And it's hard when you're in it. It's really hard when you're in it to break free. He had qualities that he admired in his girlfriend that he was seeing here. But he also fought with her a lot and it got ugly. It got nasty. It got the ugliest and nastiest any relationship has ever been for him. I think as far as I know, his relationship before with a girl named Bella was pretty toxic at times because she was bipolar. This time with Carly, I feel like it reached new levels of toxicity. And so he went to stay with her and live with her for a while. And then obviously that wasn't working out because it was her and her brother. You add that dynamic to the dynamics of what their relationship already was. And so he just randomly on his own went and found a place and he signed a lease and he moved into a place and He was all proud of himself. And when he reached out to me and let me know about it, I wasn't happy about it. I frankly was mad at it because he just didn't have life experience yet. He found a place that he thought was a really great deal for a really great price. And he had his head held high and he thought he should be proud. But that place was in one of the worst locations you can live here. There's prostitution, there's drug dealing, there's gangs and shootings in that area. And he didn't know any of that because in his young mind, he didn't think about anything like that. That stuff didn't cross his mind. And so I was really not happy with him and neither was his mother from far away. And instead of. taking it on the chin and realizing he probably screwed up he more or less got mad at us as kids do I even keep calling him a kid but he was in his early 20s at that point he just didn't want to be wrong he wanted to be right and he didn't want to hear it and unfortunately but fortunately one night when he was staying in his new place which was I believe like an old motel turned into apartments. So it had a gate and a fence around it, which didn't matter. Any car driving through, you could immediately follow right in or walk right in. It didn't matter. And he went out in the middle of the night one night to take his garbage out to the dumpster, which just goes to show you how he just had no idea understanding of where he was at or what he was doing. Even if you listen to me and I tell you you're in a bad neighborhood, this was not a good place to sign a lease and live. Listen to me. I'm your father. I'm not here to shit on you. I'm here to help you. And so anyway, ignoring everything said by me and his mother and He went outside to take his garbage to the dumpster one night. I believe he said it was around midnight and he got jumped. He said that someone jumped him and put a machete to his throat and tried to rob him or whatever, but he didn't have anything on him. He was just walking out to the trash with nothing on him. And so somehow he was able to convince them he didn't have anything because there were two of them and they let him go. They didn't hurt him. He was a machete to his throat away from death and that scared him. That woke him up a little bit. And I think he wanted to make some changes after that. But unfortunately, he was still young and out of control with his emotions and his thought process. And so where I'm going with that is after three years and 10 months of being unemployed, not gainfully employed, I was trying to do some consulting work on my own. on the side and got some business, but not a lot, not enough to sustain any type of living, especially because this was COVID had hit and obviously everyone was feeling that pain. So after that, I finally got employed, got a job, but I'm skipping a lot of steps here. But the point of this is I was not on my feet for a long time, for a long time, three years and 10 months of unemployment, three years and 10 months of, of not struggling the whole time because I had, I was able to survive for a little over a year with the severance pay that I had gotten from DSI when I left DSI. but nothing was just working out. I had tried working as a part-time furniture salesman and I was doing that pretty well. And that just didn't work out after several months because it just wasn't a good place to work. And I was struggling with my health at that time. I was really dealing with some swollen joints and back pain issues that I had only assumed where from being in the military and from playing sports and being an athlete and lifting weights my whole life. But dealing with my health and being unemployed and all those things and struggling in a relationship with a girlfriend and I can't quite understand. And struggling in a relationship with my oldest son that I was really trying to create a bond with and create a relationship with. I was questioning everything. I didn't know what to do. My girlfriend at that time, her faith was really high. And I joined in that with her for a little while. And I went to a local mega church here in Tucson with her because that's where she goes. And it did give me hope. some relief it did give me a sense of somewhere to turn and somewhere to to help me and that's what faith and religion relies on right they rely on you having that need you filling that void and that's where I was and I needed it and it was great for me at the time and it's really hard for me to get on board with some things religion teaches. And so ultimately, I do believe in God. I do believe there's a higher power. But I'm just not a man of organized religion. I'm just not. I tried it again in my life. I grew up with it. I didn't tell you that. My great-grandma used to take me to church weekly, sometimes twice while I was growing up, and my mom made me go. So it put The fear of God in me as a small kid and a young man. And I stepped away from it for a while because I thought it was a bunch of BS because as I got older and I got wiser, Bible stories just didn't make sense to me. They were just exactly that, Bible stories, right? How can the whole world start from two people, Adam and Eve? And then the rest of us exist, different races. It's just, that doesn't make any sense to me. Noah's Ark, there's just lots of stories in the Bible and the Bible contradicts itself all the time. And so anyway, I realized at the end of the day, I was a believer of God, but not a believer of religion necessarily. And that's my personal walk, my personal journey. I don't Look at anyone differently that feels any other type of way, whether you are not a believer, whether you believe every word of the Bible is true, whatever your faith and beliefs are, that's your journey in life and all the power to you. I hold nothing against you for it, and nor should you hold anything against someone who feels differently than you do. My son, Ethan, he's very religious. He grew up with it. His mom's from the South. She's from Tennessee. And it got ingrained into him and he has it. He has the strong faith and he loves organized religion. So that's for him. And that's great. I have never, ever tried to make him feel any other type of way about it. And so anyway, I was dealing with all this and I turned to faith to help me through these times. One day I randomly watched a movie, a documentary on Netflix called The Game Changers. And it talked about, if you've ever seen it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't seen it, I suggest you go watch it. I don't think it's on Netflix anymore. I think they took it off for some reason. I'm not sure. But if you can find it somewhere, it's called The Game Changers. And I was lost. The way you look at things when you have faith is you can look at things like, oh, I got on Netflix. I was looking for something to watch. I found The Game Changers. Or you can look at it like God pointed me in the direction of this documentary and I watched it. And it's whatever perspective you want to take. But the point is, it was all about what meat does to our body. And it was some very scientific evidence and proof to what meat was doing to people's bodies and how the strongest, most athletic, most marathon, cardiovascular type people were turning to football, Athletes, NFL football athletes, they were turning to plant-based diets and veganism. And after I watched the documentary twice, I decided, what do I have to lose? I've been praying about my health and it wasn't changing on its own. No miracle was happening. But I was sent towards this documentary, The Game Changers, and I decided to go vegan. And I did, and I cut meat out of my life. I cut eggs out of my life. I had cut dairy out of my life. Like I went pure hardcore vegan and it changed everything for me. I went from being someone who could barely stand up and walk to the refrigerator or stand up in church or whatever, without being in some type of pain. to being someone who could move freely and painlessly and eventually get back into the gym and exercise and lift weights again, which was something I had lost and I couldn't do. And that was like step one. Step two, I was finally getting interviewed for what I would call real jobs, career type jobs, not fillers jobs. where I could get back to the life I was used to living with the salary that I could have. I was used to having, I should say, everything was turning around for me. My health was getting better. I did get a job. I had three job offers at one time. And I took essentially the most risky job because... A, it paid the most upfront, but also B, I took a risk and a belief in myself and God that it was going to take me to the right direction, that it was going to help me out and point me in the right direction and get my life going again. So I accepted this role and I'm going to pick up from there. on the next episode. So thanks for joining.