Unknown Speaker 2 (4:13)

Pool.

Tommy Gallen (4:14)

And I've got the confidence that it's going to save the day. I'm going to be here. I climb up onto the side of the pool and I crawl over and I reach out and the basketball is right at my fingertips. And I fall directly into the pool with my suit on, the white shirt. And I feel the cold and the darkness. And it's extremely dark because it's just the end of the season. And the pool cover was still. And it engulfs me. And I go deeper into the pool, and it's black and it tastes like green because there's still algae. And I hear a splash and I feel this. And it's a hand grabbing me. And I'm being pulled out. And it's my mom. And she walks me back inside through the party, through this walk of shame of my aunts and my uncles and my grandparents. The first time I make this promise and the first time I get drunk is also the first time I black out. And it's reiterated to me the next day that I vomited so much that specks of vomit actually hit the ceiling in my room. And through the vomit, I promised my mom I am never going to drink again. Yeah. And I don't. I don't drink again that much. You know, a little experimenting in high school, but I don't really get drunk again until college. College. First time I get drunk in college is on tequila. Long, long, long story short, I do remember throwing up that night and having my.

Unknown Speaker 2 (5:43)

My.

Tommy Gallen (5:44)

My roommate holding my hair over the garbage. But the promise this time was a little different. This time the promise was, this is great. I promise to get better at this. Like a bodybuilder who can bench £400 and feels great because next time it's going to be 4:05. Every drink that brings me closer to getting drunk and throwing up means next time that won't be so bad. But we all have our limits. And later, in college, I found myself. I can't tell you what happened that night, but the next morning, I remember waking up to the sun rising over the dashboard of a car. I'm in the passenger seat and the sun opens up my dehydrated eyes and I realize, this isn't my car. I don't own a car. And I look next to me and there's a guy sleeping in the driver's seat. And I don't know him either. There's a dollar bill on his lap. So I take that dollar bill and I put it in my pocket. Then I wake. Then I wake him up and I say, hey, man, do you know how I got here? He goes, who the fuck are you? Like, look, I don't know how I got here. I don't know what's going on. Do you know anything about how this happened? He's like, no. I was like, can you give me a ride back to campus? Get the fuck out of my car. So I get out of his car and it's freezing. And I think to myself, this is fantastic. I can't wait to tell people this story. It's just great. And if this is what alcohol is going to bring me, I promise to never make a promise again. And I don't. For years, many, many drunken tales come in and out of my life until we flash forward to June. It's Friday the 13th, 2008. Coming back from the Cherry Lane Theater where my comedy troupe Fucked Fuct. We have just done a show at the Cherry Lane Theater, and I'm heading home. And I shouldn't have been driving this time. It was my car. I'm on 6th Avenue in Manhattan, driving south, and there's incredible traffic. The lights are all green. So I figure there must be an accident. And sure enough, the next thing I see are police lights. But it's not an accident. The traffic's narrowing. It's a DWI stop. And I get up to the stop and the cop leans right into the window, past the steering wheel, into my face and says, you been drinking tonight, son? And I lie. I tilt my head to the side to not breathe in his face. No, Officer. Where are you coming from, sir? Son. Cherry Lane Theater. What show did you see? Fucked. License and registration. Take my wallet out. I start pulling my driver's License out. All right, son, put it away. Have a nice evening. Get away with it.

Unknown Speaker 2 (9:05)

Totally.

Tommy Gallen (9:06)

I get home at about 3 in the morning. At 7am my wife's water breaks. Had I been arrested that night, I would have spent the entire weekend in jail and missed my son's birth. So I made a new promise. I decided I was gonna quit drinking for a little bit just to see what that was like. It had been a good 20 year run at that point since I started at 11. And so I decided at the end of the year, when January comes around, I'll give myself a few more months. When January comes around, I'm going to do a full year of no drinking. And I did it. And not only did I do it, when I got to the end of the year, I felt great. So I just hung tight for like another four months. We went on a vacation, my wife and I and my son. And on that vacation I decided, I've got this. I mean, I've been sober for 14 months. It really hasn't been that big of a deal. No shakes, no withdrawal, no issues. So why can't I just go back to drinking a little bit? And sure enough, I did for about a year. It's the night before our big trip to Texas, which we always fly down with the family, my wife and my son. And my wife tells me before I leave for work that day, listen, when you get done with work, don't drink too much because we've got to pack. We've got this trip tomorrow. And so I have to go to the People's Improv Theater to work. I have to take a stop and pick up a MacBook Air for my wife. Then I gotta shoot up to Fordham University at Lincoln center to do a friend stage reading. Then after that, it's back down to the Cherry Lane for rehearsal and then back home to pack after work. I'm sitting at the bar at the Pit and I'm having a few drinks and my brother walks in and he makes some comment to the bartender. I don't even remember what the comment was, but I remember how it made me feel. It was something totally benign like, oh, Tommy's having another drink, huh? Showing him how much you could put down. So something really silly like that. But something inside of me turned like, dark. And I felt, you know what? I don't want my college Persona to be my current Persona. And I got pissed off. And instead of sharing that with him and getting it off my chest, I decided, I'm gonna show you how much I Can drink. And I drank about five beers there before we headed up to the staged reading. And when I got to the staged reading, my buddy who was doing it handed me a bottle of wine for the row. I didn't share it with the row. In about an hour, I drank that bottle of wine. And then to really show my brother, I ditched him. And I took a cab down to the Cherry Lane Theater by myself, and I proceeded to pour myself a glass of scotch in a pint glass, and I drank that. And then I stole a cigarette. And I hadn't had a cigarette in five years. And I left, and I started smoking the cigarette. And I got halfway through, and I realized I don't have my wife's computer that I brought earlier today. So I backtracked and I followed my steps, and it was back at the theater. Thank God I found it. I got home, but now it's about midnight, and I'm drunk, super duper drunk. And my wife is unhappy, super fucking unhappy. And she's. She's just talking about packing and airplanes, and I'm like, just relax. I've got this. Take a shower. I'll pack. So she takes a shower, I pack. I put the luggage right by the door to leave. She comes out of the shower, same unhappy face. She sees the bags at the door and says, I want to see how you packed. This infuriates me. Why do you need to see how I packed? You gotta point out how I did something else wrong, that I didn't put the underwear next to the sock. What could I have possibly done wrong to pack now? To tell you the truth, I couldn't tell you. I could have packed the dog for all I knew. I had no idea what I packed, how I packed. So we open up the bag, and as it turns out, my strategy for packing was to take my dresser drawer out and turn it upside down into the luggage. So I had one bag filled with underwear and socks and three T shirts, because T shirts were in the second drawer. I had no pants. I packed nothing of my wife or son's clothes. And so what's happening? The most fitting was to go out on the front porch and cry. I don't know if I was crying because I felt bad or because I felt like if I cried, I would manipulate her from anger to feeling pity. But I cried. And it was a real cry. It felt like it was really, really hanging on me. That blackness, that darkness that I felt earlier in the day when I had started drinking, it had expanded. And she sent my brother out to talk to me, and I explained to him the comment and blah, blah, blah. And I could see it in his face that he really felt bad, but it wasn't his fault. This was totally on me. I went back in and I apologized. And at this point, I had about three hours to sleep this off, which was impossible. The next morning, I wake up, force as much water as I can into me, as much Advil, just to stumble to the airport. I've heard that they don't let drunk people on airplanes, and I think that's not 100% true. So I'm sitting on the airplane and I've got this puke bag in my hand, and I have to do something with it now. So I walk to the front of the plane and I just hand it to a flight attendant. I say, here, I figured she's seen these before and knows what to do with them. And at that second, I realize the airplane door hasn't shut yet and this is going to be a really long flight. So I promised myself I wouldn't drink that much anymore. And about a week later, it's my birthday and I'm at the Pit in Manhattan. My brother and I have birthdays very close, so we did a joint birthday party there. The owner of the Pit, Ali, we get into a conversation and we just start talking about drinking. And I could already feel myself drinking too much that night. And he just tells me something. I tell him this whole story, and he tells me, look, whatever you're going to do, if you're going to cut down your drinking, just commit to it. If you're going to quit drinking, just commit to it. And being an improviser, the idea of commitment and committing to something really, really resonated with me. And so I decided to just commit. And I didn't have another drink. And it's been about two and a half years now. And the thing is, every time I go to a party or anytime I go someplace where there's alcohol and I'm offered a drink, people say to me, why don't you drink? And most recently, somebody said to me, you want a drink? And I said, no. He goes, are you an alcoholic? And I said, no, of course not. And then I kind of half explained this story. But that's the thing, the thing that I hate to say is that word alcoholic. And I don't know, maybe I'm in denial. Maybe I'm just somebody who had a bunch of crazy years behind me, and now it's kind of all done because I've got kids and a wife and a life. But the thing that I do know is that when I compare my life and those experiments of time that I didn't drink compared to the experiments of time where I did, I've just got a much happier outlook and a much happier family. And at least for now, I think I'm gonna stick with that. Thank you. We'll be right back.

Unknown Speaker 2 (17:03)

We're back. It's a real honor to be sharing a story for Risk, because Risk has really made a huge impact in my life. To understand why Risk has made such an impact, I need to take you back a few years ago to the spring of 2011. I was living in Buffalo, New York, working in customer service at a biotechnology manufacturing firm. And I was absolutely miserable. I would come into work every day, working in office setting with people I hated. I just knew this was not what I wanted to be doing with my life. And the only thing that would give me an escape from that life was listening to podcasts. Risk, specifically Risk, was telling stories about people who were doing things with their life, having real life experiences that were challenging themselves to grow. And I felt like that was severely missing from my life. A couple years previous to when I was living in Buffalo, I was living in Brooklyn, and I was living the New York lifestyle that I kind of imagined, which was going to loft parties, dancing in my underwear, having strange encounters with women, ingesting all kinds of toxic substances on a regular basis. It was really like the party lifestyle that I dreamed about before I ever moved to New York. When I was in college, I thought to myself, this is the person I want to be. But all that ended when I lost my job in New York and I had to move back to Buffalo because I was broke and had really no other option. And then my dad got me this job at this biotech manufacturing firm, and I was just kind of stuck there. My only escape was listening to podcasts. Every day, I would escape my life and go off to someplace else. And it was the only thing that kept me going during that time. That was all going fine until one day when my boss called me into his office. This guy Tim, who is the quintessential sales corporate guy, who was this VP of sales and marketing. And somehow I ended up reporting to him. And he sits me down and he says, mark, we can't have you listening to music at your desk anymore. The CEO sees you with your headphones in. He thinks you're just dicking around or something. No more music at your desk. I was absolutely Devastated when he told me that I couldn't imagine that job without podcasts. It was just kind of facing the reality of where I was and being in the present moment, in that present moment was just not an option for me at the time. So I said, no, you have to let me listen to podcasts if you want me to work here. This is. It's either me with podcasts or I'm gone. And he looked at me and thought I was crazy, but he relented and he said, yes, you can keep listening to podcasts if it's that important to you. And when he looked at me like that, it kind of made something go off in my head to think, if not being able to listen to a podcast was going to have this much of an impact on me, something bigger than just podcasts was going on. So the following weekend, I went to an African dance class to try and change things up. And it was there that I met Christy. Christy was a beautiful blonde haired girl with tattoos. She just had this charm about her that was just really something magical. We locked eyes from across the room and just kind of had this instant connection. So I started trying to kind of impress her with my dance moves. And one thing led to another and we started talking after class. And she told me that she was just in town in Buffalo for the summertime. She was visiting her family in between her trips between Thailand and Peru, where she was going in the fall. And I thought to myself, wow, you are living the kind of life that I want to be living. Christy and I start hanging out, we start dating. And she says to me, is this what you want to be doing with your life? Are you looking for something more? And I said, absolutely, I'm looking for something more. And she said, well, if you're interested, we're looking for somebody to run the business at at the yoga school where I work next season. Maybe you can take over the business side of things and I can just teach yoga. And I thought to myself, okay, when's the next time a beautiful girl is going to offer me a job in Southern Thailand? I might as well go for it. Then came the challenging part, which is breaking the news to my parents. I'm the youngest of three boys. I was the only one that was living in Buffalo. My two older brothers lived in New York. My parents got really used to having me live so close to home. I could come over their house every Sunday night for dinner. I could be in their safe environment. I was on this boring but very stable trajectory in life. And they Were really happy about that. So when I sat them down on that Sunday dinner and I said, I'm moving to Thailand, they basically flipped out. My dad especially was really, really unhappy about it. And not that that's really surprising to me. My dad is a lawyer. He's a pretty straight laced guy. He's lived in Buffalo basically his entire life. I didn't expect him to be open to this idea. My mom, on the other hand, is a little more worldly and is a little more balanced when it comes to giving me advice. She only kind of wants my has my best interest in mind. And so when she was really against the idea, that hurt. That was really, really difficult. She told this story to me about when I was maybe three or four years old and I was about to leave the house and I didn't want to put shoes on. And she said, mark, you can go, that's fine, but just put some shoes on. And I said, no, mom, I can't do it. I got no time for shoes. Gotta see the world. I'll see you later. And I walked out of the house without shoes on. Lo and behold, a few minutes later, I came back, I stepped on a rock and I cut my foot. I was bleeding all over the place. I was really apologetic and I was crying and I said, mom, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have listened to you. And she said, mark, I don't want to be right again. I don't want you to come back and apologize to me again now that you want to go to Thailand, because I just don't want to be right. I have a bad feeling about this and I don't want to be right. And I don't want you to come back and say I'm sorry again. And so I went to Thailand and it was amazing. It was the most amazing experience I've ever had in my life. I was living on this island, meeting people from all over the world, practicing yoga and meditation every day. I quit drinking, I quit smoking weed. I was becoming this different person. I was so excited to come home and tell my dad how wrong he was to be against this idea because it was going to be so much more focused and employable. When I got home, everything was going great. I was just in this beautiful place. There was this one moment specifically, I think it was the first or second day I was there. I was on the back of Christy's motorcycle when she picked me up from the pier. We were driving around and the wind was flowing through my hair and I was taking in the scenery and just this amazing experience, the rock formations and the water. If you've ever spent some other time seeing pictures, it's incredible. This is what I'm here for. Fuck buffalo. This is the best decision I've ever made in my life coming over here. One of the things that happened while I was gone, that really spurred on this transformation while I was in Thailand was that I participated in a retreat that Christy put together around Christmas time where she invited a shaman from Peru to come to Thailand to lead a ceremony where we would all drink ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, if you're not familiar, is a vine that grows in the Amazon rainforest that evolves in a shamanic tradition where people would take the vine and turn it into this, like, drink, which is one of the most foul tasting things you will ever drink in your entire life, but it will make you triple so hard. And so we were in this ceremony where there was a whole group of us. And this shaman named Herman, who was from Peru, came with this guitar and he sat us down in this room lit by candles, and he gave us the instructions of how to drink the medicine and what it was going to do to us and what to do if we get sick, what to do if we get scared. And it was very quiet. And one by one he called us up to this little altar where he poured us a little dose of the ayahuasca. And it was just disgusting. I felt like I was gonna throw it up right when I drank it. But then I kept it down and I went and sat back down. Herman blew out the candles and we sat in darkness for about half an hour. Herman started playing this Spanish guitar and it's very quiet, very easygoing at first. And then he plays another song and it's a little more upbeat, it's a little more intense. And then he plays a third song. By the time about the third or fourth song starts, I'll never forget the story strum of the guitar. It was like. And all of a sudden something just awoke inside of me. I started to have these visions. I started to see this grandmother spirit. People refer to the ayahuasca as the grandmother plant of the rainforest. And I saw this dark and mysterious Latina woman who was kind of floating in the air. She had this dark and silvery hair, she had this purple poncho on. And she was in complete control of everything that was going on. And if I resisted just even for a little bit, she kind of turned her head and I saw this really evil side of her. And I thought, okay, I don't want to see any more of that. So I just didn't resist at all for the rest of the time. And I would ask her these questions. I would say, I stopped drinking recently. Is that a good idea? Should I continue to abstain from alcohol? And she said, yes, Mark, anything that contracts your consciousness, yoga and meditation will take you in one direction, and alcohol and marijuana will take you in another. And anything that contracts your consciousness you should have nothing to do with. And I said, okay, I won't drink anymore. And I thought to myself, okay, well, what should I do with my life? I'm here in Thailand, I'm studying yoga. Should I be a yoga teacher? And she said, well, Mark, teaching yoga is one thing that you can do with your life, but really your life goal, what you're here to do, is to share the light that's inside of you. You have a beautiful light inside of you, and you are to share that light with the world. Teaching yoga is one way to do that. But in anything that you do and walking down the street and in your work and whatever it is that you do, your goal is to. To share your light with the world. And I thought, wow, now I get it. Now I know what there is for me to be doing with my life. Now I have this clear path to walk down that I never would have gotten if it wasn't for this experience. So the ceremony went on for another few hours and it ended. And we all shared the experiences that we had with each other. And my trip went on for the next couple months and I continued to have this vision of that. That message really resonated with me and stuck with me for the whole time I was in Thailand, in my yoga practice, in my meditation. It all stuck with me to share my light with the world. Another thing that really helped me transform and grow while I was there was I got into rock climbing. Climbing. If you've ever done it, you know what an amazing experience it is to climb and to experience new challenges and to overcome those challenges. It's really quite incredible. Southern Thailand is a mecca for rock climbing. People come from all over the world to climb there and to experience what is there. The second day I was there, I went up about 10ft off the ground on one of the rock routes, and I freaked out and started crying and had to come back down. As I got more comfortable with it, as I got progressively more brave and strong, I started to take on some more challenging routes. And about five months into the trip, I Was starting to get pretty confident in myself. Now I'm out climbing with a group of friends one day. It's towards the end of the day, and it's time to what they call clean the route, which is take down the equipment that we had been put up to climb the route. So I volunteered to do that. So I climbed to the top of the route and was taking the equipment down as I went. And I get to the top, and I start descending back down. And I'm pretty sure that I've managed to take the equipment down in the right way, Something that I've never really quite done before. But I'm feeling more confident. I'm feeling like I did it right. I get to about 10ft off the ground, and one of the German women that I was climbing with that day said, well done, Mark. Super. And right as she says that, I hear the one sound you don't want to hear when you're descending down a rock face, which is a snap. I fall about 10ft, and I land on my side. Immediately, the wind is knocked out of me. And the guide that I was climbing with, another German woman named Eva, she yells to the boat that took us to the rock face that day, she yells to call an ambulance. She immediately knows something went terribly wrong. And so I'm lying down on the ground, trying to catch my breath, and the first words that I can say once the wind kind of comes back into my lungs is, what the fuck just happened? And I scan my body to see how badly hurt I am, and I immediately feel a sharp pain in my ribs. But I can also feel that I can move my fingers and toes, and I realize that I'm not paralyzed. But I also realized that I badly sprained my ankle and that I have a really sharp pain in my neck. The guide that I'm with starts to kind of try and stabilize me. She wraps a raincoat around my neck, and with the help of two or three people, they get me down onto the boat that took us to the rock face that day. This is the first ambulance ride I've ever taken in my entire life. They take me onto the small hospital that's on the island that I'm living on, where they take X rays to find out how serious the injury is. And at this point, I'm still thinking to myself, okay, this isn't that bad. Maybe I'll be laid up for a couple weeks until I feel a little more comfortable, until my rib heals. Maybe I can still go on with my trip. I can still Plan to go to Vietnam, to go to Cambodia, to do all these things that I wanted to do before I left Asia. It all depends on what the results of this X ray that they're about to take. So the doctor comes back and tells me that I indeed did feel fracture in my spine. Luckily it wasn't seriously fractured. Otherwise I could have been paralyzed from that all the way down. So I would have had no movement from my shoulders down to my feet. They tell me I need to go to a different hospital on a bigger island, on Phuket, the next island over. And one of my friends from the yoga school comes with me. And when I woke up the next morning, I had to call my parents and I had to tell them what had happened. I had to say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I didn't listen to you. I'm sorry I'm putting you through this. I'm sorry that I broke my neck. I'm sorry that I'm in Thailand and I'm not someplace else where you'd rather I be right now. But I'm sorry my parents said, don't apologize, don't apologize. We're just happy you're okay. So my mom flew from Buffalo to Thailand and a couple weeks later she flew back to Buffalo with me. I was wearing a neck brace. Four days after being back in Buffalo. I went in for surgery and had metal rods implanted in my neck to stabilize the fracture. I had the next several months to walk and live in a neck brace and to sit and think while I sat around my parents house in Buffalo, New York. This protective nest that I'm so thankful was there. The place that I tried to escape so adamantly several months previously. Tried to get as far as away from Buffalo, as far away from my parents as I physically was able to get. And here I was, back in the place where it all started. I couldn't really drive, I couldn't really walk that well. I just had to sit and had to let my bones heal. And I had a lot of time to think about why all this happened. I'm one of those people that believes everything happens for a reason. And I'm not saying that it's like some kind of higher power dictates why everything is happening. I'm not saying God meant to challenge me and that's why this all happened. I think this happened so that I have a message to share. That light that I have to shine on the world. This is part of that experience. This is why this happened, so I can share with the world that life is a gift. Every single day is a gift. Every day I wake up in the morning, I think to myself, wow, I can't believe I'm alive. I am so lucky. I'm so lucky to be alive. You don't have to live through an experience like I did to get to that point. Anybody can feel that way. It just takes knowing that this could happen to you. This could happen to anybody you love. You don't have to be doing something crazy like climbing rocks in southern Thailand to get to this point, to have those types of experiences that challenge your existence and that make you realize how fragile life is. That's why I'm telling this story here today. Life is a gift and you shouldn't waste a single second.

Tommy Gallen (33:16)

Sa.

Mark Amagon (33:47)

Beyond a storyboard and learn Our souls are all we know before we turn to stone let's go to sleep with clearer hands and hearts Too big to fit our beds and maybe we won't feel so alone before we we turn to stone.

Kevin Allison (34:47)

This is risk. This is Ingrid Michelson behind me now. And we just heard from Mark Amagon. Before that, we heard from Tommy Gallon, who you can find on Instagram at Tommy Gallinarts. That is it for the best of self help stories. Number three. If you've got a story about taking care of your own well being in some pivotal way at some point in your life, pitch it to us and maybe you can be on the next episode of this series. Everything you need to know about how to pitch us your story is at risk-show.com submissions folks, today's the day. Take a risk.