99 Problems, But Quitting Was Never One of Them: My Journey to Defy Tomorrow

You know what your problem is, Scott? Your problem is that you just don’t know when to quit.

He wasn’t wrong about that. I’ve faced far more than 99 problems in my life, and not knowing when to quit was definitely not one of them.

There was always the next set of problems, and even the best outcomes came with new ones. Problems everywhere—real problems, and the ones we create ourselves.

I would have used up 99 problems before I was eleven when my father nearly beat me to death because I almost exposed him for abusing me. Those beatings and the abuse were problems until they weren’t. It wouldn’t be long after that beating when I’d start fighting back—and not long after that, I was winning. I stopped the abuse. But I didn’t stop the problems. I just created different ones.

Being locked into a life of tomorrows that you know aren’t yours—that’s a real problem. I had plenty of those too. But the biggest problem? I didn’t even know why I had all these problems until I was 48 years old.

At 46, I decided I needed to know why I couldn’t feel love—hell, why I couldn’t feel anything. That was the realest problem of all. And since I don’t know when to quit, I was ready to go wherever I needed to go to figure it out, even if that meant descending into the depths of hell.

Every burden turns into a gift. That’s the secret, and that’s why you just have to let the burdens out. The biggest gift for me was my wife. When I found her, I knew that no matter what I had been through to get here, it was all worth it. She became my center, and with her, I found my way back to center.

So, there I was, sitting in my recliner, preparing for yet another therapy session, when it hit me: I was ready and willing to face whatever it took to fix this. Wherever I needed to go, I would go—even if it meant confronting the darkest parts of myself. I opened my repressed memories.

And at 48 years old, I finally realized something that changed everything: I wasn’t a broken, worthless piece of shit at all.

I offloaded a lot of problems then, but there was still one more to deal with—a real problem. I had a problem with tomorrows. All of them. My life felt like an endless cycle of tomorrows that weren’t mine, repeating over and over again.

The biggest problem with money is that it’s incredibly dangerous when it ends up in the wrong hands—yet it happens so often. I couldn’t figure that out. And then I did. I was part of the problem. I was making money for someone with insatiable greed. I didn’t know that, or I didn’t allow myself to know that until it was too late. By then, I was stuck, and my money was connected to that money. I got myself into that endless cycle of tomorrows. That was a real problem I had gotten myself into.

For a while, I thought I might not beat this one. I thought this problem had me. And then, one day, in what felt like the blink of an eye, I did it. I had the audacity to say, “Fuck tomorrow,” and I did something I promised myself I would do back in August 2012. I defied tomorrow. And all my problems vanished. Every. Single. One.

In that one blink, I became the creator and co-creator of my own life.

I went from living in a cycle of tomorrows that didn’t belong to me to living my purpose—helping other people. I don’t have any problems anymore, but that isn’t the prize. I won the grand prize.

The grand prize is feeling the feeling of giving and receiving love.

And that’s what I want to give to everyone I can.

I’m going to do that by showing everyone exactly how I did it. At first, I thought that it was just for men. I thought that’s the only people I could help, but then I learned that this is universal. It doesn’t matter about gender or about the source of the trauma—there is no trauma that is greater or lesser than another.

Maybe you know, and maybe, like me, you have no idea what happened to you. But you know something isn’t right. This is not your life.

I’ll share my story, and I will walk you through each step of how I figured it all out and reclaimed my life, no longer confined in the prison of disassociation and the endless cycle of tomorrows that never belonged to me in the first place.