Loading summary
Transcript18 lines
- [00:00]
Leo
Neighbor game. Oo.
- [00:02]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And, Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [00:12]
Liberty Mutual Friend
Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [00:15]
Leo
Oh, no.
- [00:16]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
- [00:22]
Liberty Mutual Friend
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [00:24]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [00:27]
Liberty Mutual Friend
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.
- [00:30]
Avocado Mattress Narrator
This Memorial Day, shop one of Avocado's biggest mattress sales of the year and fall in love with sleep again. At Avocado, better sleep starts with better materials. Our certified organic mattresses are crafted without compromise, using high quality organic materials that bring comfort and support into perfect balance. No polyurethane foams, no shortcuts. Just a cleaner, more natural sleep experience that your body will appreciate night after night so you fall asleep more easily, stay asleep longer, and wake up feeling refreshed and ready for the day ahead. That's sleep with purpose. This Memorial Day, discover what it means to truly sleep well. Upgrade and save up to 20% on our award winning mattresses. Shop the Memorial Day sale now and get up to 20% off. @avocadomatress.com or select retailers nationwide, visit avocadomatress.com that's avocadomatress.Com
- [01:32]
Leo
this is a story about how a certain betrayal almost landed me in the loony bin. I don't even know how to start this. I don't know how to talk to you. Like, I've been gone for a month. Almost two months. Oh, my God, Literally. Here's the intro. I'm gonna tell you about the betrayal that broke me and the relationship between betrayal and your nervous system and being stuck in fight or flight mode. That's good. That sounds. Yeah, that sounds nice. I've been through a fair share of betrayals in my life. I have trust no one tattooed on my hand for a reason. Everybody's always asking me, how do you handle betrayal? I just got a crash course on how not to, because the betrayal I just experienced broke me fully, broke my nervous system, broke my emotional system, broke me mentally. So I've learned a lot from it, and I want to start with that. Okay. I want to start with the awareness that I've gained around it. And then I can walk you through my experience of what has happened. And, yeah, we'll take it from there. So with betrayal, you know how when, like, you're going through somebody's phone, we can start with this because you know how you go through somebody's phone and you find them messaging somebody else, you find out your partner's cheating on you or something and your stomach drops. It's like that pit in your stomach where it's like you don't know if you want to throw up. You start shaking. Part of you wants to bash their skull through the wall, and part of you is like, oh my God, like, devastated, wanna, boo hoo cry. That is an activation of fight or flight mode. It's also a state of shock when you find something out like that. So I've been stuck in a state of shock and my nervous system has been activated into fight or flight mode. So that was just a stupid example of, like, how it's not an actual threat, but your body will perceive a threat. Because when you find out someone's cheating on you, your entire life is up in the air. Nothing feels safe. You don't know what to trust, who to trust, nothing. It's just like, you go kind of like, nuts. So I wanted to give the relationship example because I feel like we all got like a little bit of like, experience with that. Unfortunately, if you're watching me, you have experience with that. So the new awareness I have around being in fight or flight mode is everybody's body has it. You have a full fledged nervous system and biological system that is prepared to keep you alive. So if you perceive a threat, like you out in the wild, and all of a sudden there's a lie, and it's looking at you like, I'm gonna eat you, bitch. Your body reacts to keep you safe. So you got fight, flight, freeze and fawn. I've never related to nothing but fight. Okay? That's my problem. And when there's not a physical threat, that's when I go nuts. So, like, with the example of it, you catch your partner cheating, you catch something in the phone, or you like, catch somebody doing something or lying to you about something. Catch somebody stealing money from you. Hi. Sometimes there's no actual physical threat, and that's what drives me insane. But sometimes you get the reaction of freeze. Like, pretend you're invisible. Right? Right. And then you got, fleet, get the up out of here. So your body's set up to protect you and keep you away from threats. Right? So I look at it like a loop now. It's kind of how I see it. When the fight or flight response loop is started, you get knocked into it. You're prepared to handle the threat. And then what's supposed to happen is you have resolution. You fight, freeze, or flee. Once you're away from that threat, the loop closes, and your nervous system will downregulate itself. Everybody's experienced that where you get stressed out. Something happens, you got to handle it. And then you come back to a state of, like, rest and a sense of safety. If you do not complete that loop, if you never feel safe after something has happened, you will be stuck in the fight orf flight response. That is when you become illogical. That is when you overread things. You get stuck in hyper vigilance mode and you start seeing threats that are not real. You're not able to see reality no more. You will lose your grip on reality. And I lost mine when I said, this is the betrayal that broke me. This is the one that broke me because I got stuck in it until I literally. It's like a car spinning its wheels until it's burnt the tires off and you're just scrubbing rims. Then I scrubbed my rims flat until the car was just sitting there. I. I spun the fuck out. My nervous system fried because of this. I got stuck in fight or flight mode for a year, really. But the past few months is when the burnout really just, like, hit. So the main thing is not being able to feel safe when you're stuck in fight or flight mode. One thing I want to say before we go into this is betrayal destroys people. Betrayal destroys your nervous system, and it destroys your mind and your ability to trust people. And when you lose your ability to trust, you're not able to complete that loop of exiting survival mode at all. Because once a betrayal happens, you see that you've believed lies and you lose your grip on your ability to trust your own judgment of things. You don't trust people, you don't trust God, you don't trust life, and you do not trust yourself. So exiting survival mode becomes almost impossible. Once you've lost your ability to have trust in anything because you cannot feel safe. That is how you exit and let your body down, regulate itself out of survival mode is to feel safe. When you get betrayed bad enough, you lose the ability to feel safe at all. You are locked in your own mental prison. If you're going through that, I want to voice it to you, as intense as it is and how it fucking happens, but because I get it, like I said, this is what drives people insane. Luckily, I was able to break out of it, and I feel such a heavy Responsibility right now it's about to make me cry to talk about it. I do not want to talk about what the I've just been through at all. But it's like the message in it. And I luckily was able to escape it before something drastic happened where I ended up dead, other people ended up dead, or I ended up in a psych ward, completely lost my grip on reality forever and went insane. This is heavy as shit right now. But that's what betrayal does. Removes your ability to trust and you get caught in survival mode. You can't get out. So this is the way that I found to get out. This all starts with a friend I chose to get into business with. So this friend I had creates brands for people, like clothing brands, and that's what they've built their whole on. I've done merch for a while. I love clothes, I love making stuff. And I wanted to make my own clothing brand, right? So after trying it multiple different times for years with different companies and getting kind of screwed over in the process, not too bad enough where I could swallow it and move forward, I decided to take a chance with my friend who does this for a living. Because a couple years ago when I moved away from Houston, I was friends with this person in Houston. When I lived there, I was there for the opening and when my friend first got his warehouse to start this company of his to make brands for people. And he loves the shit like I do and stickler on quality. His all his thing was always quality and making sure things were good and people were not getting ripped off. So I, after everything I went through, time had gone on, I was there for the opening of my friend's warehouse. I'm like, okay, so once I go through a bunch of shit and have to basically restart my entire life again once I move to Dallas. So now I live in Dallas. After la, I reach out to him because I wanted to start my clothing brand. And I told him all the things and all the issues I had with all these other people and all these other companies and how I got fucked over. And he's like, leo, none I got. You do not even worry about any of that shit. Trust me. So I take a chance and I start working with my friend and his company. He's doing this for a bunch of other people. So over this past year working together, there was like 30ish, probably 40 products I've been trying to make. And the way this company worked, that I was with my friend's company, air quote, big fat air quote, around Friend. I pay them a monthly retainer for their team of people. Basically, I go to them with, okay, I want to make all of these different products. They were supposed to go find the manufacturers that were the best to make those products for me. The quality that I want, the style that I want, I'm very picky, very selective. But the guy that owns this shit is the same as me. He's a stickler about quality and make things better, right? So we started working together and that's just how like the dynamic was supposed to work, right? So we're making products, we're getting samples. Like, I'm getting samples and samples and samples. Nothing is right. Not a fucking single thing is right. And I've talked about it on the podcast for the past year, like here and there. I've dropped like little things about like, okay, I was trying to make this and then it went to shit. I was trying to make this and it just wouldn't work. And I got run around and run stupid, basically where every single thing I was trying to make was taking too goddamn long. They weren't making it right. And it seemed impossible for me to get what I wanted made. And I was like, okay, these are the clear, like, instructions that I'm giving you to give to these manufacturers. You're giving it to them. What they're sending me is not even close. So where is the fuck up? Are you not communicating it correctly or are these manufacturers just stupid? What is the issue here? This absolutely beat me down. And the biggest issue with all of this, I'm just going to be really honest with you about the way that I'm feeling and what's happened and why this was so heavy for me. Because after a few months of going through all the sampling and shit not being right, I'm like, okay, nothing is going to be done anytime soon. So I was like, why don't I make some merch in the meantime? Like, merch? I've always made merch, but I was shooting for clothing brand, higher end shit, like nice stuff, specific custom, custom fabrics, custom fit, everything. So that was my thing. That's what I wanted to do. But I was like, since everything's taken so goddamn long and I'm trusting what you're telling me that, that it's gonna be made right, let's just make some merch in the meantime. So I decided to make some merch. And that still took a little bit too fucking long. But I made merch while I was still working on everything else. The thing that was stressing Me out the most was last year on social media. So I went through a really bad period of having to rebuild my fucking life. And then I finally get back on social media and everything's blowing up, taking off everything's great boots. I've been turned off to brand deals, and I've been turned off to making money through that means. Because certain shit happened in the past, I'm like, I don't want to do none of that. So my whole thing was with making money on social media, it's gonna have to be through products that I can sell. And my whole thing with my clothing brand was, okay, I like nice shit, I like designer shit. I like the quality, I like the fit. I like just the elevation of things. I don't like the cheap Zara bullshit and the fashion nova and the sheen that's gonna, like, rip and whatever. It's. I'm also six foot six. I also found that I'm six' six and not six' seven the other day, which was heartbreaking. But my thing was, I love designer fashion. So let me take all the products I have and love things. I want to tweak about them and change about them, find the same quality of stuff and then not put 1000% markup on it like most of these companies, like Balenciaga, for example. Seventeen hundred dollars for a pair of sweatpants. Those don't even cost 50 bucks to make. I assume that's what I assume after getting into the back end of all this. Yeah. I wanted to make great products with a style and that I like cheaper, way cheaper, where I'm not ripping the customer basically off and have things that I love and I like, because nobody seems to make anything exactly like I like it. So my whole thing was like, I want to make this more fair and I want to make this fun for myself, have my own. I'm tired of paying stupid prices for stupid things. So that was my whole goal, was like, make my own little brain. Right? Weirdly enough, having a clothing brand is something I've talked about since I'm 17. I've been into fashion since I'm little. I used to change my outfit like four or five times a fucking day. When I was little. My mom used to scream at me because I would go through so much laundry. But I've always been into fashion. I've always liked that type stuff. But being my size and my body shape and the specific style that I like, nothing fits me. Nothing's right. So I was going to make it okay. So with the whole Thing of making the merch cool, it was like good. In the meantime, I was making money from it to plan to reinvest it. And as more and more time went on with my social media blowing up, my only way of monetizing my following is through products that I'm gonna sell if I'm not gonna do brand deals. Adsense and shit don't pay that well. I threw away my podcast deal because again, more poor business practices and, and I just couldn't seem to get away from shit. So I'm like, you know what? I'll make good ass products. I'm not going to make near as much money as other influencers because I'm not busting out brand deals, doing podcast deals and doing merch and doing products and doing courses. I was like, I'm just going to do what makes me happy, what I'm content with. I don't need to be a gajillionaire, okay? Like, I'll make some money, have some fun and like live a happy life. Like that's what I was like trying to create with all this. So my social media last year was buku. I gained like 6 million followers in like 3, 4 months. My views were fucking insane and there was all this traction and attention and I had no way to monetize it. So yes, there are ebbs and flows with social media. There are things like that, but I feel like now I missed my moment to make money on so many things because they couldn't get my fucking products right for shit. I. That is an opportunity I will never be able to capitalize on again. It's lost, it's missed. So the devastation of that is one thing. Trying to lead with my heart and do things with integrity and not scam people and rip people off and lie. Hey, here's this product, it's great. And just lie to you for money. I've tried to do this with integrity and it felt like it's bit me in the ass. So even with continuing trying to make my products, they just were not right. And after like seven months of working with my friend, I got to a point where I called him and was like, yo, what the fuck? Like, I'm hopeless at this point that nothing's going to be made right. I'm already noticing like things are starting to level out a little bit on social media. I'm like, okay, I'm missing kind of my opportunity. I need to get some stuff out. But we're months away from anything even being close to being ready if the next Sample is right. So it's just the frustration and hopelessness. I got beat. Absolute hopeless with anything I wanted to make coming to fruition. And I wanted to leave the company after like six, seven months when I had this phone call with him, I was like, I want to fucking leave. And I was like, look, it's no harm, no foul if you can't make what I want. I understand, just tell me. I gave him an out basically of like, just tell me if you can't make what I want. Great. And homeboy reassures me, no, what you're asking for is not too much. What we can do it, it's gonna work, we'll figure this out. Like, do not stress that we're gonna get things made right. So that ended up being an absolute lie and bullshit. Homie didn't take his exit when he could have with me of just, yeah, we're not gonna get it right. So just tell me straight up. And I would have walked off right, like, okay, no harm, no foul. But other thing keeping me stuck in it was I've paid thousands and thousands of dollars for a lot of different products to have mold fees and sample fees and all this shit. And I didn't want to walk away from that. I'm like, if there's still a potential for certain products to be made, I'm already so far into it. Like my tank tops, I've been trying to make like wife beaters, like tank tops that I wear all the time. No brand makes them how I want them. 14 different samples I went through, couldn't get them right. That's just added headache with everything. But basically I did my pop up store back in March for my birthday of I wanted to meet you guys, hang out with you in person, do a pop up store with the inventory that I had, right? It was mainly just merch stuff. But I had dropped my sunglasses and the sunglasses are their own absolute situation from hell. There was like around 800 pairs that were defective once they were made. I don't even want to get into all of the shit with the sunglasses. But that was kind of my breaking point of like, okay, I'm done with this. The pop up store was something I was trying to do. One to make money to invest into making more clothes and doing stuff. The people I hired at the Pop up claimed that they were so experienced, they knew what they were doing, they were going to do this all the whatever, absolute letdown, absolute disappointment got over big time by the venue owner who has now changed their company name and is Evading anything because I made a video on TikTok like, yeah, fucking that venue owner. Everybody was already up their ass, but they've changed their whole company name. It's just a scammer in the works. So there's two people who own the company I was working with. I hired one of their wives who was an event planner and knew how to do all this. She tried her best, but I don't think she was cut out for the scale of what you guys made the pop up be because y' all came boots. But the store was not set up to be efficient and it was not set up for sales to go as good as possible. I ended up breaking even on the pop up store. And that put me in a situation of kind of like hyper vigilance because I did so much and put so much into it. All of the things that I had said, these are my concerns. With everything in writing to everybody, all the shit I was worried about happening still happened, even though I already pre planned for it. So I felt like it was useless for me to be hyper vigilant. Handing things off to people is just. People are not trustworthy is what I saw it as fully. So I was in a state of financial absolute stress and potential ruin, but also with no hope of going forward. So all the products, by this point, I was hopeless. They were going to be able to be made right. I was so beyond pissed off. Hopeless. All the things you can imagine. Okay, one more thing to thicken the plot that happened before I left the company. I forgot to add this in, so I'm recording it now. There was one employee at this company who was actually great, and me and him worked really well together. He was facing the same frustration that I was when we would send critiques and changes to be made to certain products and the manufacturers would send them back. Not listening to shit. So we were both irritated with it. And I asked him, is there some other manufacturer we can use? I want to switch at this point. And he goes, yeah, there's actually this other manufacturer who I think is great, but the owner of the company that I was working with, my friend at the time, he resisted like a bitch. When I wanted to switch to the new manufacturer. He, for like almost two weeks was like pulling like, no, no, we're not switching it. We're not switching it until I put my fucking foot down. And I was like, I don't care, I'm paying you now. Switch my shit. The new manufacturer nailed my tank top in two tries. So 14 samples. We've gone through once a month. Every time I send a critique, a new sample comes back and it's wrong. This new guy, the new manufacturer, nails it in two tries, literally perfect. I've been trying to make tank tops for four years with different companies. Just this one was 14 samples. And I knew I was not the fucking problem. I knew what I was asking for was not that goddamn fucking hard. It takes somebody that takes pride in what they do and can listen to basic instruction and detail to make it. The manufacturer I made them switch me to nailed it on the second try. There is not a single thing I would change about it. And I got one of those samples in my hand. I have it. So after the pop up store, as soon as I got home is when I got the invoice for ordering these tank tops. I'm like, finally, I'm gonna order them. And I was starting to speculate all this going on and I was like, okay, something's off. And when I got the invoice for ordering my tank tops, finally the price that I remember discussing was a little bit higher that they were trying to charge me. And that's when I started getting red flags of like, something's fishy. Why all of a sudden is it more? I literally felt like God was dangling things right in front of me to take them. Because I finally get the tank top right. And this is when I start putting pieces together and this is when I finally can order it. But I'm not going to. You know what I mean? It's like it's finally done. I felt very betrayed by every single person that I was working with, doing anything with. I felt like I couldn't trust anyone. And when you're in survival mode, you're in hyper vigilance mode. Yeah, you don't want to trust nothing when people have betrayed you. You get an aversion to human beings. You want to push them all away from you like a wild animal. It's like you take a dog who's been beat by every person it's seen and it gets to a point it just stays coward in a corner and just shakes when people walk by it. If you try and walk up to this dog, it's gonna attack you. It wants to be just left alone. That's how you start to feel emotionally when you get betrayed by too many human beings. Your fucking system, your nervous system registers humans as a threat. That's the state I was in, especially with my entire past and everything that I've been through. Everything was getting flared up. But with that first manufacturer that I was with before I switched myself to the new one, I was the one holding things up because I wasn't. I wasn't like, allowing them to make me settle for shit quality, like putting me in a time crunch, putting me in desperation to get things out. You still couldn't bend my values. You still could not get me to sacrifice my integrity to make bullshit and try and sell it and be like, oh, yeah, this is great. Knowing, like the truth in the back end wasn't happening. But at this point, I started thinking, like, really hyper vigilance mode, Leo, trust no one type shit. And I started putting pieces together. I had been paying invoices when they would send me invoices for my merch and things that I was buying to have made, like paying the manufacturing fees for everything. I started wondering, are they up charging me? Because I'm preparing to be in bed with snakes at this point. So I'm like, are these motherfuckers upcharging me? Have they been up charging me this entire time of everything I've ordered? And so I sent it in the team thing, like the base camp where we all discuss. And I put it where everybody could see it. And I tagged the owners and was like, have you all been secretly up charging me on everything that I've ordered? Just, I'm just curious. And that's when the owner that I was friends with called me, and that's when I got to do what I do best. I know how to have conversations and make people rat themselves out. He clean admitted, yeah, we've been upcharging you on every single thing. Basically, the monthly retainer I had been paying is one way they were getting me financially. Two, they were secretly up charging me on every single unit of inventory that I ordered through them, posed as manufacturing costs, right? So the third thing is I was paying them to do my fulfillment. So they had all of my inventory at their warehouse and they would do fulfillment for me, and I was paying them for that. Okay, so that's three. Then through the conversation, he admitted without exact details. There were supposed to be like a ton of manufacturers of different products I was trying to make. Most of my stuff was being pushed through this one manufacturer and this one manufacturer wasn't getting shit even close to right. I'm talking piss poor quality, like Alibaba plastic bullshit clothes. Nothing was right. Fabrics were off, fit was off. Never listen to anything. Right. Okay, we get it. I asked him, are you in business with this company? Because I see him all the Time, like overseas. And he's talked to me about so many different big companies he's worked with in factories and manufacturers and all this shit. And I'm like, are you secretly in business with them? Like, are you a partner with them? Actually, let me ask that, because now my brain's putting it together, pushing everything of mine to go through this one manufacturer. Even though they're not getting it right, you have no concern. They're not getting shit right. You have no concern that I'm not making money. You have no concern that my products have taken a year and none of them are even close to being right already. So I was like, are you a fucking partner with them? Homeboy admits that he can't legally be in business with a company overseas. Like, he's like, no, we can't be in business on paper. Word for word is what he said, we can't be in business on paper. So I said, well, you can still get money from them. Imposing, like a kickback. You can still get kickbacks, right? So I'm like, you could still get paid, right? Silence. This is my suspicion of it is there was some kind of setup where they're not in business, they're not partners, allegedly on paper, but there was some kind of kickback he was getting for getting his clients to order from this manufacturer. He didn't admit it, but I know how to put the pieces together, you know, so that was enough for me to say, you know what, we're done. That is four different ways you are capitalizing on me financially. And I told him, if I knew you were secretly going to be up charging me from the beginning, I wouldn't have worked with you one or two. I would have negotiated a fixed percentage because homeboy was just charging whatever the he wanted to charge me. There was no fixed percentage of upcharge. It was just, oh, well, you're doing good. So maybe I could do this. Maybe I could charge you this much and you won't notice. That's how I see it has happened. And I don't know the exact amounts of money. It's over a few hundred thousand dollars that went right in his fucking pocket that I didn't find out about, I didn't know about, and I didn't have a chance to know about it because I didn't fucking know until my hyper vigilant shit starts and I start nitpicking and just like sitting there thinking about every single thing that could be going on. Like, as soon as you set me free like that, I'm going to find it. And after our conversation, I'm like, yeah, it's pretty much everything I'm speculating seems 99% accurate. So I decided to fucking terminate the partnership. And I was like, yeah, fuck this, I'm done. I had to swallow the fact that all the money of all the mold fees, of all the things that I've paid, I'm never going to get it back. All the products I've been working on dead stopped. And I'm not allowed to contact the manufacturers that they found and use. So their fear is being cut out of transactions. So it's like it's in the contract that you can't contact them. And then when my sunglasses came over, 800 of them were defective. And there's no coverage, there's no warranty, there's no shit for it if something's wrong. So you're, you've connected me with manufacturers and got me making products with manufacturers that I offer no warranty, no quality control and no refund or anything. If something's off, like, oh, I just got to fucking eat it. So I'm looking at it like, okay, I got to walk away and everything I've been working on is done. My future of seeing how I can make money is done. That's a whole financial crisis I was under of. There is no hope of potentially making anything anytime soon. I'm going to have to go back to months of, of sampling and trying and new manufacturers and all this. So like, financially everything's stopped for me. What I have is all the inventory that I have. My sunglasses that took a year to make, I'm not going to be able to make more. I'm not going to trust that manufacturer to make more. So all that's done. If I want to make more of my sunglasses when they sell out, I got to restart with a whole new manufacturer. Just a lot of hopelessness, a lot of fear. And on top of all of that, social media has like come down to like a slower pace for me now. And there's been new ownership of Tick Tock. You don't get paid off TikTok no more. YouTube has some kind of switch. You don't really get paid that much off YouTube. So pretty much every means of me making money got wiped out. I'm just giving you this background so you know where I was at and where I'm at mentally. Okay, so let me back up a little bit because after the pop up store, like I said, it wasn't set up for sales and there was a lot of people who were trying to buy a lot of stuff. And employees there were just saying, oh, no, it's out of stock. Like, it's sold out because they didn't want to go look through boxes to find it. So a lot of my sales were prevented. So after the pop Up, I saw I barely broke even. And I was like, okay. People are asking online for me to release the products I was selling at the pop up online. So I'm like, okay, let me do that. So as soon as I get done with the pop Up, I go home, I don't get to rest, I don't get to chill. I got my family here, I got my friends here. So me and my friends do a quick photo shoot and I go fill up the website and get everything set up to launch it online. I launched the merch from the pop up online and as it was selling, doing its thing, it was doing great. Like, you guys came through and I appreciate you so much. You have no clue how much I've, like, appreciated your support right now. Especially when you buy stuff. So there's no break. It was just fight or flight mode. It was paranoia, fear, no rest, no nothing. Then comes the ending of our partnership because they were still doing my fulfillment for the online orders. The warehousing fees were not bad. Like, I didn't think I was getting fucked over on the warehousing fees, the fulfillment fees, and stuff like that. So talking over email, I'm like, okay, we're done with the partnership. We have a 45 day notice of, like, terminating it. So I'm like, okay, let's make this as fucking easy as possible and as smooth, smooth of a transition as possible. So while you're sorting out all the you're sorting out, I'm gonna plan to come get my inventory. They tell me, no, you can't come get it. All the inventory I paid for, they said, no, no, no, you can't come get it until all our invoices are paid. All the that we say that you owe us numbers seemingly they pull out of their ass. We have to go. We have to total up everything that you owe us, and then we can let you come get it. You're not allowed to come get your inventory that you already bought and paid for. Okay. My brain immediately starts kicking, like, okay, if I show up there to go get my. They're gonna call the cops because they're scared and they're not gonna let me take my inventory. So I'm like, okay, well, I actually have to, like, play this kind of smart. I was like, I'm gonna get when they send me their final invoices. But my only way of making money right now is to get my inventory from Houston, bring it to Dallas and do fulfillment myself. That's my only means of making money. So I'm like, okay, they're gonna me on the invoices, but I gotta just eat it so I can get my inventory and then make some more money, right? Like I just cut. That's kind of how I was seeing it. Like, I'm just gonna have to do what I'm gonna have to do. All they offered after me finding out all this was $10,000 toward fulfillment invoices. I had an invoice for like 40 grand worth of shit. So 10 grand after hundreds of thousands of secret up charges have gone on, that seems pathetic. And then they offered 3,000 pairs of replacement sunglasses frames to make up for the ones that were defective. Okay, 800 were defective according to their accounts, which are unfucking reliable because they were still missing shit, right? The thing was, with the whole offer of 3,000 glasses frames, they were just trying to give me the frames as replacements. I don't sell just the frames. I sell them with the case, the hard case. I sell them with the leather pouch, the accessories, the cleaning cloth and gold screwdriver. And then inside the box, there were items that. Some of the boxes were damaged, some of the cases were damaged, some of them were damaged, and some of them were defective. So I did not know any exact counts of what was actually sellable inventory. Their offer of the 10 grand plus the 3,000 frames, I can't sell those frames. That's not how I fucking sell them. And I told them that, but they had me in a pinch of they stop fulfilling my inventory and pull all the stock out of my website. I wake up and just see it gone. I'm like, we were supposed to discuss this. I'm sitting there waiting for them to make me an invoice and tell me what the fuck I owe you so I can pay it, so I can immediately go get all my shit. I finally send the invoice. I'm like, go fuck yourselves. But I pay it. And then the next day, got in a truck with my dad, rented a 26 foot truck, booked it to Houston and got all my inventory, and then brought it back to Dallas, put it in a storage unit. So I don't know how much sellable inventory I had available. And I was losing my mind a lot. Like, I was just stuck in, like, literal Fight or flight mode. Don't know what the future holds. Don't know what I have. Don't know anything. I just know all the products I've been working on for the past year. None of them are going to be made. I'm not going to have anything to sell past my current inventory for a while. So I was panicking pretty bad. So I get home and I'm like, okay, now you can't sit down yet. You have to go find a little office space and a little warehouse where you can do your own fulfillment. Leo. Like, there's no time to sit down. So that's what I did. I spent a few days and found a warehouse. It's small, but it's what I. It's like. It's cute, I feel. So I find the warehouse. I have to go clean it and then get it painted, get it situated. I got all my inventory moved from my storage unit into the warehouse. I spent like a week with my sister and my mom moving all of the stuff, cleaning, setting it up, counting my inventory. Upon counting my inventory, certain things they said were out of stock a long time ago. I'm finding it. I'm finding so much shit that is in stock that they said was out of stock. There's stuff that you guys placed orders for and paid for and they told me months ago was out of stock. So I refunded. You guys said, sorry, it was out of stock. Now I'm finding all kind of stuff. There was one point where I had a lot of inventory in my house. Like, there was some in the storage unit and some in my house. And like, after the chaos of all of this, it was like one day I came down downstairs in my house, and inventory was everywhere. It was like, overrun my house with boxes and stuff. My garage, too. I started to lose my mind because I didn't recognize my house. I'm caught in fight or flight mode. I can't feel safe. I don't have any kind of normalcy or sense of safety at all. Of the future or positive or hope. I have none of it. I got through that. And then once I got my warehouse and I got everything out of my house, I feel a lot better in my house because it's like, okay, work is separated, but I'm having to open a full warehouse on my own, a full fulfillment warehouse. And I don't know anything really about that. So I've been figuring out as I go. Irritated, just angry, resentful. The anger had been like. It started to wear my body down. Like My gut is the first thing. Like, since I'm little, if I get too stressed out or if I get too angry or I'm just like panicked, if I'm in fight or flight mode too long, my stomach turns and like I shit water. Like I have fucking diarrhea so bad. And then that starts impacting my sleep even more. So I'm waking up in the middle of the night having to go shit, and I'm just like mentally a wreck physically. I start to fucking deteriorate and sleep in. I'm not really eating. And through this whole period of setting up the warehouse and getting everything situated, I was smoking a little weed pen that I found that I forgot about. I was like, oh my God, saving grace. Because I'm not eating. So if I can hit it at night to calm myself down because I can't sleep, if I can try and knock myself out and also get an appetite, I can eat and then fall asleep. So that's what I was doing for two weeks. I was smoking weed every single night to eat and put myself to sleep to stop stress. And I would wake up, fuck, and just start running again. But I was working like 12 hour days at the warehouse. Like full fledged physical labor, mental labor. Everything you could think of, I was getting it done. I got that warehouse goddamn set set up. So this is something I need to tell you about that really sent me over. And God put his foot on my neck and stomped it. So there's this woman who runs a baseball team for disabled children and she was posting videos, like the kids usually will say, like, who their dream people would be to show up at one of their games. And they pick their favorite celebrities and influencers and all that. And the woman that runs this team made a TikTok and posted about it. And then they named me. The kid's number one pick was me. So my mom ended up seeing the video and it tugged on her heart and she really wanted to, like, get me to go to it. And she started messaging with the woman who runs this team for these kids and was telling her that, like, we'll be there. Like, my mom wanted to go with me and like, make me go to this thing. I'm like, okay. When I first heard about it, it was right before my pop up and I was like, okay, it's in like a month, month and a half. I can plan for some point at that time. This is before everything got bad. But I was like, it's in the back of my head. Okay, I'll tell them. I'M going to go. Like, I would love to go do that. You know what I mean? Like, I feel like it would be very heartfelt and with all the doomsday shit I've been feeling and how bad I've been feeling, I was like, that could be a good, very heartwarming and like, good experience for me. Like, I kind of need that. And then the woman that runs the team comes to my pop up in Houston and she brings me a T shirt she made and it was the kids logo on it in gold. She made it and it was for me. And I was like, oh my God. It's like I'm really committed. Like, okay, I'll feel better. I'll feel like up to it when it comes. So the date for their baseball game falls right in the middle of when I'm trying to set up my new warehouse. I had one day off Saturday that I was going to take off and finally just like rest for a minute. And that was the only day I could have gone to the baseball game because it was right before their last one. I was like, mom, I really don't feel up to doing this. I'm exhausted, I'm tired, I can't do it. Like, I can't get myself to go do that. And she begged me, please just do this for me. I feel terrible to cancel. But I was like, I know I need to go. But I was like, I'm like, I'm trying to reason with myself to get myself to go. My mom said she started to cry and my mom rarely ever cries. And she was like, son, I don't know what it is, but God has it so heavy on my heart to get you to go to this. I don't know what is going to happen, but I can't let it go. I have to get you there. And I keep talking to God, just telling him, I'm going to try, I'm going to do my best, I'm going to get him there. But then get off me. Like something was going on with my mom where she just felt so intuitively to get me to this baseball game with these kids. And then my mom tells me why it's also on her heart so strong, is because I never knew this when I was really young, like a little kid, she said that she came into my room one morning and I was like slumped up in my bed, just drooling. I couldn't talk, I couldn't speak to her. She was trying to talk to me and I just wasn't moving. Like I Was a vegetable. Just, like, sat there propped up on my bed, just drooling all over the bed, laying in a puddle of drool. And she said she screamed for my dad. They grabbed me, take me to the hospital, because I couldn't talk. I was like, no, I wasn't there. Like, nobody was home. She said that she got to the hospital and the doctors put me into a coma and they were trying to run all these tests and they could not figure out what happened to me because I went to sleep normal and. And I woke up gone. Like, I was not there. And the doctors were telling my parents, you guys need to come to terms with the fact that your son might wake up like this. Like, your son might be disabled. Like, we don't think he's brain dead, but he's paralyzed. Like, we don't know what's happened. It's not a stroke. They've run every test they can, and they could not figure out what was wrong with me and my parents. I was in a coma for a few days. Like, they were waiting to wake me up till they could run every test and get my parents broke. Embrace to the reality of, like, your son might wake up in the same state that he went under and he might be like that for the rest of his life. We don't know. We can't tell you. My parents didn't leave the hospital. They said. They said that they were there the whole time I was there. They woke me up out of the coma, and I was right back to normal, like nothing happened. Like, I snapped back up and was like, I'm hungry. Typical. My first words. And I wake up, go. I eat cigarette. That's what I would say now. But little me was like, I'm hungry. But my mom told me that, and she's like, that's another reason I'm so. I want to get you to go there because that could have been you. Like, those kids could have been you. Because there's kids on this baseball team that have all different, like, degrees of physical disabilities and mental disabilities. So I ended up going, and I had to be up at 5am on Saturday on my one day I could sleep. We had to drive two hours away in Texas to go show up and surprise the kids. It was a great experience. It was so heartwarming. It was so genuine and pure, and some of the kids were so honest, and I loved it. They didn't give a fuck. It was so, like, refreshing and, like, they were so just, like, full of joy and just happy. There were certain elements of it that were sad, but I got to pass out to the trophies to every kid. Like, it was. It was such a. Like a heartwarming experience. But I was tired. Like, when I left, I was tired and I went home and I started cracking that weed pan. I start hitting it and then I started to get a really bad, like, panic and fear to go to sleep. I was terrified at any moment I could wake up and be back in that paralyzed state because the doctors never knew what happened. So this kicks on a whole new absolute fear for me. And with talking to some of the kids at the game, there was one like, I don't, you know, I don't treat disabled children different. I don't talk to them different. It's like there's some kids that were like five, six years old. There's some kids who are like 16. They're like teenagers. And I was talking to one girl and she's like, thank you for. I'm not going to imitate her voice. I'm not going to do that. But she was like, thank you for talking to me like I'm normal. These kids understand jokes. They understand humor. They're funny as fuck. Okay, People baby them. And this one girl, she was like 16, she's like, thank you for talking to me and thank you for swearing around me and being fun. Because one thing I hate is my parents always put on cartoons and I don't want to fucking watch that. She's like, I'm 16. And I was like, girl. I've also taken care of patients in the past when I was a nurse, that people who are mentally disabled and physically disabled. Some people have a full, functioning, normal consciousness brain. They perceive the world like we do who don't have any diagnosed issues. And they say that it's like just being trapped inside a body that doesn't work. They know what they're trying to say, but it can't make the words. Sometimes some people can't make words at all. And some people, it just won't come out. It's like being trapped inside a body you can't control. I have that understanding and that knowledge. And then my mom telling me that story of when I was little, me already being in fight orf flight mode, exhausted, tired. I started to panic about that. And when I woke up the next morning, I was stuck in fear. I was so terrified to try and move because I was like, God is clearly me up right now. This would be his last laugh. You've dangled in front of me so many things in My life with my social media. I've been given an opportunity of a lifetime. I haven't been able to capitalize on it. I haven't been able to, like, have it go right. I feel like I've been nerfed by things outside of my control. Anything in my control, I will do it and it will get done. Anything I ask people for help for, with anything I have to rely on outside forces for will fuck up no matter what I do. And I've just lived so much experience of it. I have so much past experience, way in the past of it, but it's just like the current stuff. And I'm like, if God really wanted to get his last laugh on me, he would trap me in a body that I couldn't move in. And I. I was so convinced God was against me. And I was like, if that happens, what do I do? I can't kill myself. That, like, sent me over a lot, like, in a lot of ways mentally, of like, that being my fear. And that made it harder to sleep every night. Because every night I would go to sleep, I couldn't because I was terrified to fucking wake up. I didn't know how I was gonna wake up. So being in hyper vigilance mode made me lose grip on reality. And this became a very real thing I was living. Every morning I would wake up, I would just lay there before I would try and move because I was scared shitless. I do still kind of have that a little bit. Like, I'm trying to work on that one. But the other thing is, like, when you're in hyper vigilance mode, you can't be grateful. There's no positive, there's no happy. So I felt like this intense pressure on me to be grateful for the fact that my body does work. And I felt scared. Like God's watching me stress out and deal with so much shit and I'm not being grateful for my body. He could take it. And I was starting to look at God like that. I'm like, it freaked me out. It really freaked me out. And then I started getting frantic that I couldn't find positive thoughts. I couldn't feel good, I couldn't feel happy, I couldn't feel appreciative for it was just like a mental hell, literally. I really do appreciate my mom for pushing me to go to that. Even though telling me the story about me when I was little scared the shit out of me. She's been there for me through so much of this, and I couldn't have done this without her, truly, like, I couldn't have stayed sane as long as I did. And then she came and helped me with the warehouse. It's nuts. And then I reconnected with my sister. Kind of like me and my sister had to grow apart for a second and do our own thing. And we've reconnected through all of this. Like, she's come and helped me with the warehouse, and she's continued to help me through a lot of stuff behind the scenes. But it's like our personal hanging out day to day stopped for a minute because it was like we just were button heads on certain things and we have to go experience. So it's like it was a loving, like, let's take our space for a second. But through all this, we've reconnected and we've been hanging out more, and she's come in and been here for me at a time where I really needed it. And I've had a lot of betrayals that I haven't talked about on the Internet that I haven't talked about really. And it's like, just personal things, friends, some business stuff, and people trying to get in certain doors with me and take advantage of me in a lot of different ways. Certain people that I thought God was putting in my life were more lessons and more betrayals. So I'm looking at it like, okay, I can't trust what the fuck is going on. I don't trust anything. And I'm in a position where I can't do all of this alone. So I'm having to trust people. And I kept it very tight to my friends that are like family and my actual family. Everybody else has gotten booted the fuck out. Even with my family. It's like, It's a hard thing when you're going through betrayal like this. It makes you have your guard up with everybody. So I've been kind of like distanced from everyone. And it's like I'm having to trust people, be around me and be involved in all of this. But I'm. I was doing it with my teeth like this, like, scared shitless. Like, I'm. I just got burned by all these different facets of life and I'm having to trust people. I'm being. I felt like God was another thing. I'm just like, you just stomping my neck in right now. You making me have to be in a position where I have to trust people after what has just happened to me. But I was like, okay, this time I'm just keeping it to family. But I keep getting on this topic of, like, I felt so hopeless, because that's truly how I felt. I would vacillate between triggered, activated, fight or flight mode, anger, face a threat, be operating in that or absolute hopelessness. There was no in between. The other thing was with the tank tops, I got my sample right. I only had one in my possession, but I couldn't use the manufacturer who made it. So I'm like, okay, I have at least one of my tank tops that's perfect. I can take it to any new manufacturer that I find, give it to them and say, make this Exactly. But I was not ready to face all that. I just saw a longer road of more headache and bullshit. And there's so many hurdles I had to go through to even get to a point where I could even entertain the thought of doing that. It's like dating somebody who's fucked you up royally and then being like, yeah, but, yeah, go date somebody new right after. No, no, I don't want fuck to do with a relationship after that. That's how I felt with. Thank God. Oh, yeah. After all this. Yeah, keep going and going to make that. No, I was like, I got to get my warehouse set up first. But after getting the warehouse kind of, like, stabilized, it's like, okay, I mentally know all of my inventory is out of their hands. Our partnership has ended. Now that I've kind of got my life on the ground, it feels like I've got my inventory in my hands. The warehouse is set up. I have a couple of steps left before I launch. I felt a little bit of stability with my physical life. Mentally, I did not have any, but. But it's like, once my physical reality, I got it situated where it felt, like, sturdy. This is when my emotional system collapsed. This is when my nervous system collapsed. When I say it broke me, this is when it broke me because my weed pen ran out too. So I was like, you know what? I'm gonna get off the weed now. I've got everything situated. Okay, I'm gonna try and calm down. So I started contacting attorneys, and I sent them the contracts the I had signed. And basically the attorneys that I talked to said, the way that their contracts are written, they're written to you over like this. What they did was not illegal because of the contracts. They were so aloof. And there were certain clauses put in their contracts where they could get away with all this, and all you could really fight on is unethical business practices. And I'm like, okay, great. So after hearing that and kind of accepting that, like, okay, this is just gonna have to be what it's gonna be, I had no hope. There is a manufacturer that I found on my own for my tank tops. I have a new avenue of a new manufacturer. I can go down. That is nothing to do with any of these rat pieces of. And I'm like, okay, I have no hope to even go restart. I'm like, I don't. I don't have it in me to go try this shit again. With my warehouse being set up to relaunch my current inventory and put it back for sale, I didn't even have it in me to do the last few steps to get it up and running. Everything's ready and waiting for me to just do a couple more things, and I'm ready to relaunch it. But I finally got to this point where, like, it all came crashing down on me mentally. This is something I've never experienced before, and it truly scared the fuck out of me. When my nervous system collapsed. It started with this insatiable feeling of discomfort. Like I was itching inside of myself. Like, I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I didn't want to stand up. I didn't want to sit down. I didn't want to lay down. I didn't want to do anything. I didn't want to put on music. I didn't want to hear anything. I didn't want to watch a video. I didn't want to watch a movie. I wanted no stimulation, but I wanted stimulation at the same time. I was starting to go, like, erratic, like fucking nuts because I didn't know what to do with myself. It was, like, insatiable. I was like, I'm about to call my sister and tell her to come over here and sit with me. I started to get thoughts of destroying my house. Like, I wanted to start smashing. I wanted to fucking break my tv. I wanted to just start destroying my house. I've never been like that. I've never experienced that. Once that started coming up, I was like. I went and put myself in my bed, wrapped myself in my comforter, and said, you ain't leaving. And I made myself sit down because I was, like, mentally, I was, like, losing my grip on, like, what the fuck is even happening? You know what I mean? I was like, maybe I'm having, like, a mental breakdown. I was like, let me just get into bed. The hardest thing was I couldn't talk myself to. I couldn't talk to myself in any way. I Couldn't get myself to find a thought that felt better or brought me any kind of relief. The thoughts of revenge come up. Duh. But I've had a whole new awareness around revenge. Hit so many times, and typically in the past when someone did me wrong, I would just hope that they fucking died and I would feel better. But wishing and thinking about these people dying, not intentionally doing it myself, but just like the thought of these people dying didn't make me feel better. The thought of getting money from them, someone handing me $100 million would not have made me feel better. Nothing about this situation would have made me feel better. And that's what made it worse. That's when the spiral got really, really bad. And I couldn't find any thought to soothe myself or comfort myself or like there was nothing about how I was feeling that I could find to feel better. There was no thought I could think that felt positive. There is nothing that would make me, like, feel any kind of resolution or like, okayness. Once I got in my bed, wrapped myself up, set my alarm for my house where it's locked down, I locked all the doors, locked my shit down, and got in my bed. It was the first moment that I felt safe enough for my system to collapse. And I fucking sobbed. Like, I sobbed my eyes out for two hours of. It's like. It's all was just like filtering out of me and finally coming out. And I realized when I started wanting to smash shit and break shit. I've always been like this since I'm younger. If I know there's a threat or a problem, I want to just get it over with. I don't like how my body feels in fight or flight mode. It's like when I would be having an altercation with someone in high school. If we're just. If you're sitting here screaming, talking shit. I don't like how my body feels when it prepares for a threat. I don't like being anxious. I don't like being ready, waiting. I would always swing first. Let's get it over with. Let's get it popping. I don't like being in fight or flight mode, so I'm always quick to just like, let's just get it over. Let's. If we're gonna fight, let's. I just swing. I. That's just my thing and me with destroying my house. I see it now. Like, I've never had thoughts like that before. I'm like, what the. Are you going crazy? That was that reaction of myself. It's like I don't like feeling prepared for a threat. And when I was sitting here, there was no threat. Like, there was no physical threat. And I'm like, I just. Something needs to kick off. Something needs to happen. Like, some kind of destruction needs to start happening. Like, there's nobody to fight what is happening. Like, that's how I felt mentally. I'm like, let's just get it popping. Let's just start breaking. Like, I couldn't spot the threat that my body was perceiving, so I was just like, let's break everything. Glad I didn't. I have enough self control where, like, that's the craziest spot I've ever kind of, like, been pushed to emotionally and physically, like, feeling that. But I still have the restraint. I still have the awareness to, like, pull put myself into bed. And that's what I needed, was to comfort myself for a second. So I put myself into bed and I cried, like I said. But when I got done crying, I was on my breaking point. I sat in my bed and stared just off in space for like an hour. After crying for two hours, I'd like. I got to that point, like, you know how when you, like, sobbing, crying, have you ever been crying so hard that everything just switches off, like, immediately? It's like you flip a switch and everything just like. Like, it's like the emotional process is done. You've been overloaded. You've cried so fucking hard, it just turns off. That's what happened. And then I just stared at the wall for an hour, and I was just kind of, like, thinking to myself, I'm like, I fully got my brain back. Like, it's like everything logically was kicking back in. I was like, hey, okay. So I got objective. It's like this objective voice, like, was my own voice in my head. It's like I was talking to myself, and I was like, okay, you got fucked over. You don't know what you're gonna do. You're gonna restart the warehouse, but you're gonna take a break for a second. Taking a break about kicked me back into fight or flight mode. The thought of taking a break, because I'm at this point where I kept pushing the goalpost of when I could stop and take a break. And I was like, once I get this launched and then sales are going and money's coming in, I can breathe. I'm not living like that. Thinking of stopping right now and taking a break right before I launch everything again in my own hands, in my own way felt like death. Like paranoia, scared shitless. Like, it kicked me back into fight or flight mode. And I was like, okay, no, I'm not doing that. Like, I'm at my breaking point. I just broke. So instead of trying to think about tomorrow, tonight, I had to think minute by minute of like, what I was gonna do. And I took a break. I took a couple days and I was like, you know what? If it all crashes and burns, fuck it. Because I just crashed. I was like, I'm gonna take a break. I'm gonna allow myself to heal and chill for a second before I go back into all that. And I was like, tomorrow I'm not going to the warehouse. I'm not thinking of any of this shit. I'm just gonna let myself sit still and rest. Like, I was emotionally taxed, nervous system broke. So I was like, okay, I'm listening to my body. Finally, I'm listening to myself. I knew I needed to take a break. I didn't. I didn't understand what was going on in my mind. I just felt like I was losing my mind. I felt like I was losing my ability to be rational. Because in all of this, this whole identity got created of being in fight or flight mode. And when you're. You're perceiving threats all the time, everything becomes a threat. And the longer you're in fight or flight mode, the more irrational you get. So I lost the ability to discern between what was normal friction in life. Like normal shit happening, traffic delays, errors, stupid little human mistakes, little interactions in life. Like rain. When it rains outside, there's normal friction in life. Being caught in fight or flight mode for so long, I lost my ability to tell what was normal friction. Everything became an attack. People just walking by my house, I had to keep my blinds closed. People just walking by the house would put me on fight or flight mode of like, oh, that is how like really over taxed I got with realizing I was seeing everything happening in life as an attack on me. I was like, God's against me. God's me up. There's no good, there's no happy, there's no nothing. When you're in fight or flight mode, you can't think positive. You're not thinking best case scenario. You think worst case scenario. So that's what I was stuck in was every single thing was worst case scenario. Thinking about going and restarting just to start on my tank tops. I was playing the tape forward. I had an identity built around being in survival mode. And that included not having hope and not seeing A good case scenario. So when I had the thought of a tank top and going with this new manufacturer, I found I immediately was hit with being drained and tired and just like, nope, I have no hope. And then I looked at it and I'm like, okay. I started writing it out. I was like, what the fuck is that? My brain immediately over any desire or thought that I had, would run a few steps ahead before I could consciously catch it of worst case scenario. When I thought of the tank top, all I saw was delays, errors, getting fucked over, losing more money and more time wasted. That was all overlaid in it. But all I thought was okay, I could start on the new tank top. And I was hit with the feeling of depletion. Tired, fuck it, hopeless. It's like that identity I had of being in survival mode, that's the only way it had to keep me safe with anything was to stop stimulation. It had to stop me. And that's what my mind did. And I had this whole identity created around it. But that's what happens when you're in fight or flight mode for so long. You're plotting, you're seeing things and issues. And then when I talked about that cycle, remember the cycle I talked about with where you start the loop and when you don't complete the loop of survival mode, you get stuck in it. There's stored activation energy in there. Typically what it would take to trigger you is like a hair once you're stuck in that loop. So that's like stored activation energy of everything you're currently in. It's like you can be in fight or flight mode and be at not peace, but a level of neutrality for a second. You're not happy, you're not sad. It's like you get neutral for a second where you can think not logically, but you just like think of the next steps. Every time I would think of more shit about how bad I got fucked over, it would re trigger me full fight or flight mode again. Every time some, a certain person would text me or anything like social media, watching a certain video would trigger the fucking shit out of me. Like full body reaction, gut punch. That feeling was hitting with so many different things, but that stored activation energy is there. When you're in fight or flight mode. It takes nothing to trip you to be activated again. It's like you're reactivated non stop. You're in the ring, it's like you're in a boxing ring and you're fighting and it's like you knock your opponent out and you get that two seconds of rest while they're on the ground. It's like, are they gonna get back up or not? And it's like, they get back up. Okay, you had three seconds of rest. The fight didn't stop. But now we gotta go again. That's how it feels. But that's how it felt with everything in my life. Like, a text would trigger that. Like, okay, the opponent's back up, we're fighting again. New threat. All I saw was threats. All I saw was shit wrong how things were going to go bad. And like I said with the tank top thing, that's how I got that awareness with, why did I just think about that thing and then get hit with dread and hopelessness and, like, frustration and like. No, it's all of that. It's like, that's how I saw that I had this whole identity created around being in survival mode. And there's this identification with emotions when they hit and identification with certain outcomes that happened. And I want to talk more about that with letting certain scenarios and certain thoughts enter you and feeling states, like, consume you instead of just observing them. So I lost sight of being someone that is blessed and being someone that things can go good for. You lose the ability to think that things could work out good for you after you've been in a period of being stuck in survival mode. That's your brain's way of keeping you safe, is like, stop trying. More like, stop. It's all gonna end the same way. So it took me getting to the point where I forced myself to take a break. My body forced me to. And then I was like, okay, I guess I can agree. Taking that break helped me see and make sense of a lot of this. And I've been having to rehab myself. And when I'm getting triggered and irritated, it's like having to reassure myself I'm safe and go through all that. Like I said, I want to make a different podcast episode about that. Like, escaping the identity that's created, that everything will go wrong for you and be bad. I'm okay now, for the most part. There's a lot of still going on, but I've been going back to the gym and feeling a lot better mentally. Like, I'm able to get back to being Leo with the soul that I have and the trust and in my soul and the trust in God and seeing that things can go positive and work out positively. I'm not forcing myself back into shit, but tank tops are moving. That's one thing. So I'll keep You posted on that this week, I'm getting everything ready to drop. So on Friday, I'm putting this out on Sunday. On Friday, May 29, everything on my website will be restocked. There's going to be a lot of inventory of old stuff that's been sold out. So if you didn't get it, I have it. I counted it. I found it. So everything that I got left I'll put on the site. But May 29, I'm gonna drop everything this week. I'm gonna get back up at the warehouse. There's not a crazy amount to do. I'm gonna take it easy and get everything set up from a positive mind frame and not in survival mode. Like, I have to get this done. Ah, urgency freak out? No, I'm taking it easy. I've delayed this a week and a half. Almost two weeks longer than I wanted to for myself. So, yeah, that's where I'm at now. That's how I feel. I feel like I'm coming back to myself. It's just taking a minute, and it's a lot that I've just experienced. So, yeah, leave me a comment. Let me know what you thought that you made it to the end of this episode. We could do a little emoji. What do we want to comment? Comment. A heart emoji. We don't have to get creative this week. Just comment. A heart. So I know that you made it this far, but let me know what you thought of this episode, too. And more stuff is coming to me every single day about all this. So I'll be making more podcasts. I'm gonna try and get back on track with it every Sunday because I've been gone for, like, six weeks. I've been busy. I've been fighting and fighting. I'm happy I was able to talk to you again and get back in front of this camera, because when I'm not in front of it, something's real wrong. But I'm glad I'm back. Happy to be back, Mr. Roban. That's all I got for this week, everybody. Be safe, take care of yourself, and I'll talk to you, most likely next Sunday.
- [67:46]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [67:55]
Liberty Mutual Friend
Hey, everyone. Check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [67:59]
Leo
Oh, no.
- [68:00]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
We help people customize and save them car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human him to a bird.
- [68:06]
Liberty Mutual Friend
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [68:07]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a've@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [68:11]
Liberty Mutual Friend
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.
- [68:15]
Leo
Aprobecha los ahoros de Memorial Day in Los y compra los vasicos pare logar pormenos ahoro centadolares en la parria gas de cuatro que madores char Royal Performance Series.