MY STORY
For years, escape was how I survived.
Recovery taught me how to stop running from life. Participation taught me how to start living it.
My story isn't simply about overcoming a gambling addiction. It's about discovering what can happen when we stop escaping from our lives and begin fully participating in them.
From Escape to Participation.
THE ESCAPE
Before I Learned to Participate, I Learned to Escape.
Long before gambling entered my life, escape had already become familiar.
I struggled from an early age. I was born three weeks premature, experienced developmental delays, attended speech therapy and special education, and struggled with severe school phobia.
When my parents separated when I was six, life became even harder.
By eleven years old, I was battling clinical depression. I attempted suicide and spent months in an inpatient psychiatric hospital.
I didn't have the words for what I was feeling.
I didn't know how to face it.
So I learned how to escape it.
Years later, gambling would become another form of that escape — one that nearly cost me everything.
THE TURNING POINT
Eventually, Escape Stops Working.
For years, gambling gave me somewhere to escape.
Until eventually, it became the very thing I needed to escape from.
By 2013, gambling had taken over my life. The consequences were no longer something I could ignore, rationalize, or outrun.
But one of the moments that stays with me most happened around Thanksgiving that year.
My daughter was in the hospital.
And instead of being fully present with her and my family, part of me was still consumed by gambling and football.
That realization is difficult to sit with even today.
I had spent so much of my life trying to escape pain, fear, and uncomfortable emotions that I had begun escaping from the very life — and the very people — that mattered most to me.
Something had to change.
RECOVERY
December 19, 2013.
My last bet.
Recovery didn't begin because I suddenly had everything figured out.
It began because I finally became willing to do something different.
I entered treatment and began confronting not only my gambling, but the reasons I had spent so much of my life trying to escape.
December 19, 2013 became the date of my last bet.
But stopping gambling was only the beginning.
Recovery asked me to show up when I wanted to disappear.
To feel things I had spent years avoiding.
To tell the truth.
To accept help.
To reconnect with the people I loved.
And, little by little, to begin participating in my own life again.
I stopped gambling on December 19, 2013.
That's when I began learning how to participate in my life.
PARTICIPATION
Recovery Gave Me My Life Back. Participation Taught Me How to Live It.
For a long time, I thought recovery was about one thing:
Not gambling.
And in the beginning, it had to be.
But as the years passed, I began to understand that abstinence was only part of the story.
I didn't want to spend the rest of my life simply avoiding the thing that nearly destroyed me.
I wanted to build something in its place.
A life filled with connection.
Purpose.
Gratitude.
Family.
Service.
Experiences.
And the willingness to show up for all of it — even when life was difficult.
That realization eventually became Participation Over Escape™.
Not because I had discovered some perfect way to live.
But because I had learned something through recovery that I believe reaches far beyond addiction:
We all have ways we escape.
And every day, we have opportunities to participate instead.
Today, I'm still participating.
And my mission is to help others do the same.