The HoneyDew with Ryan Sickler - Jessa Reed

Episode Date: March 6, 2019

My HoneyDew this week is Jessa Reed. Jessa’s story is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. By the age of 16 she had already lived a life that most people will never experience - bong hits at age six, addiction, abuse, being a teenage mom, death threats and severe meth addiction. Did I mention she died? Oh yeah, SHE DIED! It’s one hell of an episode! https://TheHoneyDewPodcast.com

You're listening to The Honeydew with Ryan Sickler. Welcome back to The Honeydew, y'all. It's Wednesday. You're doing it over here at your mom's house. I'm Ryan Sickler. You can find me on all social media, Ryan Sickler. My website is ryansickler.com. As I tell you every week about my album,

get a hold of yourself. It is still available. You know, once it's available, shit's available. And it is still available. You can get it on iTunes, everywhere. Spotify, make those channels, stream it, play it, buy it,

whatever you want. I appreciate the love. For any in-town dates, go to ryanciclo.com. Phoenix, I'll be out there at the House of Comedy. I'm looking forward to coming out April 4th through the 6th. I will be at the Vegas Festival April 26th and 27th. And then with our boy T-Nuts, doing some June shows in Richmond, Maryland, and Atlantic City. And Waze Off, House of Comedy in Minnesota.

And I'm just, I can't thank you guys enough. I'm, so many emails, so many messages. I really appreciate it. It's, you know, tell everybody. Get everybody, if you haven't subscribed yet, if you're just listening, subscribe, man. Get over there. Tell everybody who'll listen to check out the honeydew y'all uh the website the honeydewpodcast.com and you can email me

honeydewpodcast at gmail.com and get over there and follow the show on social media facebook is the honeydew podcast twitter at honeydew pod you'll be getting a lot more uh content here very soon and if you're new to the show i mean hey we're just trying to have a little fun over here with the not so fun times in life and uh my guest today uh it was a recommendation from our good friend eric abrams off of this is not happening and i'm so glad for that and you have to watch her this is not happening ladies and gentlemen please welcome to the honeydew jessa reed hello hello thank you for being here thank you for having me i'm so strict yeah thank you eric abrams um yeah eric's a good friend and he listens to the show and he said ryan you have to have jessa go start by watching her this is not

happening and i watch it is fantastic i mean he's got two million fucking views on a 15 minute story is impressed that's impressive thank you thank you i think it is um so before we get into your story because if you watch that or you have seen that we're going to get into a little bit of that tonight and um plug whatever you'd like please uh i have a podcast called mormon and the meth head it is which one are you uh the meth head okay yeah i couldn't pass for the mormon i try sometimes uh it's myself and an ex-mormon uh mostly talking about our childhood trauma i uh jessareed comedy at instagram and Twitter and just Jessa Reed on Facebook where

I do my best work and jessareed.com has got all my tour dates. All right. There it is. Um, so I had noticed that, that, um, I asked Eric, you know, where you were from and, um, I started seeing your story and I'm like, holy shit. And it blows me away too that, that, you know, away too that, you know, that's 2 million views. How does that not even, there's so much shit out there today that you had said you hit me up for Crab Feast, like Tim Dillon.

We wanted to get you guys on, so I'm glad to have you on here now. And I would love for you just to start from wherever you like because you got a beginning that's for damn sure um I guess we should just start at the uh the childhood my parents were addicts they uh lived in Delaware they met in California lived in Delaware and then when they split up I used to joke because if you look at map, the furthest my mom could get away from Delaware without leaving the country was Portland, Oregon. Is that legit, the mileage? Yeah, it is like straight across on a map. Wait, can I ask, they were addicts. What were they addicted to? They were kind of dumpsters, I guess, in the 70s. So it was just,

which is a term for people that'll do anything you put on the table yeah pills whatever my mom was a speed freak my mom was a meth addict it wasn't meth back then it was crank but that was her primary drug of choice really yeah my dad was a and how how do you come to i'm sorry go ahead go ahead i just have a million um my dad was like a fully functioning alcoholic addict. He could do stuff but hold down a job and everything else. He got sober. I guess he got sober, I keep wanting to say 15 years,

but I guess he's been sober for 20. I'm 42, so 20 years now. He is. He got addicted to crack at the end. and so he's just like a suburban dad um with little kids in the house and um he's downstairs smoking crack behind uh the washing machine and i guess that was like his bottom yeah how many kids so he has myself but i'm like uh nine and ten years older than my little sisters. And then he and my stepmom have two kids.

Okay. By this point, I think I'm off the rails somewhere when he got sober. So my mom was a non-functioning, just straight up tweaker. And does that just mean home on the couch all day? Or what does that mean? Running around? Just full-blown shooting up meth. She actually was, as far as the tweakers go,

functioning in that we were never homeless. You know, CPS wasn't knocking on our door. She wasn't in and out of jail. But she was a drug addict. Like, she was a legit drug addict. I knew she was a drug addict, you know. And did you saw it? You witnessed it?

I smoked my first bong hit when I was six. Six? Six, but it was like a joke. You know what I mean? Like they didn't hold down the carb, which for kids these days, the carb, there used to be a hole on the back of the bong. I realized when talking to a millennial recently. It's fine.

No, I'm not going to hold the carb. It's fine. It's a three foot hit. I'm not holding the carb. It's fine. No, I'm not going to hold the car. It's fine. It's a three-foot inn. I'm not holding the car. It's fine. She's six, for Christ's sake. Who's being a pussy? And then she was selling Coke, and we had like a Jack and Jill bathroom.

And I remember I thought it was hilarious. I was like seven. And she was. You had this innocent Jack and Jill bathroom, like all decked out. So I could see straight into that. Like we both had a door. And so I went to the bathroom and then her door was open. And then I went and just like pretended to do a line.

And the dude that she was selling Coke to lost his mind and left. Because you're six. Yeah. I might be seven by this point. You know, so I'm like the ripe age of third grade. We need a gateway to Coke by seven. And he was offended because he's a pussy.

She was mad. Mom doesn't like it when you cost her customers. So it freaked him out a little bit and he bounced. I remember that interaction. I remember stealing bracelets at one because I didn't think my mom liked me we were just having this conversation again today because

you and your mom okay who's now been sober for a million years lives with me takes care of my kids when I'm on the road awesome um but I didn't feel wanted um I think I thought, because she was gone for a few years. She bounced when I was like two and to get her life together. And then I didn't see her again until I was like five. Do you know where that was? Like, was it hospital or was it? No, she moved to the West Coast. And then I was just raised by my dad and four other dudes in the 70s.

This is like 70s, early 80s. My dad had custody of me. And I just lived with these dudes who were great dudes, but they were like dudes in their 20s. And I haven't, I just picked up a lot of dude habits, I guess. Just thinking that this is like, I go in the bathroom. I just stay in a lot of dude habits, I guess. Just thinking that this is like I go in the bathroom. I just stay in the bathroom forever. I just linger in my bathroom all the time because like they would go in there and read the paper or whatever. And to this day, like if you can't find me in my house, I'm just kicking it in the bathroom for no reason.

You get peace and quiet. Well, now, yeah, I'm hiding from my children. children so um so she leaves and then at some point i'm being dramatic and say that i'm mad that my dad never got me a mom because the other kids at school had moms and i just didn't remember her i don't think and so he brings me this like very sheltered i was very sheltered had a nice life with all these dudes and then then he brings me to live with mom. Full house over here. Yeah, it was. It was. Cousin Jesse was very nice.

They were great dudes. And he brings me to my mom. And my mom lives in a trailer park. And she's pretending to be sober for the benefit of this interaction. You know, she wants me back. So he flies you out. He brings me out.

He leaves me with her. Oh, he leaves you. And it like played into this like fear that he had that one day I wouldn't want to be with him anymore. So he felt like he was doing this if you love them, set them free thing. But he set me free into a trailer park. And I'm there. exactly it's like here

uh and then i earned my white trash wings um i was born for this life how old are you at this point now nine this is i'm five five this is one this is five that's young to be saying hey so he's like here's your daughter asking for you yeah she's been gone a couple years at this point right yeah and now you're five in a trailer park what kind of trailer park is it a gross trailer gross trailer park i'm there for one day i think and i meet the local kids we go down to something we called the pits which is just this gross construction pit i smoked my first cigarette i learned what sets five at five you smoked a fucking cigarette i smoked i'm sure i didn't inhale still yeah i was obsessed with cigarettes and who's is that an older kid or brothers off the ground outside of one of our mom's trailers yeah just gross stick Lipstick on it and shit.

That red lipstick used to be on. Yeah, just smelled like bad perfume. Learned what sex was. At five? Five, it was called humping. I mean, that's more advanced than any other five-year-old would know. And the kids were just gross and they were missing teeth, but not for the reason you're supposed to be missing teeth as kids.

And they were all obsessed. There weren't new ones on the way. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They had mature. You got no adult teeth is what you got going on there. Yeah, they're all in. No, they're in.

They're not there yet. So gross. They all had gross names and like they were dirty and um but i like adjusted to this life immediately i um how i just i like i was born to be white trash were you happy to be with your mom were you had do you remember that whether you like okay here she is he i felt because we were trying to figure out when I got so fucked up. And we were just talking about this today. I remember sitting in this trailer.

I remember there being ants in my cereal. I remember pouring milk into the cereal and letting the ants float up to the top and then scraping them out. And this was so different than how I had already lived. Yeah. But I feel like... That ain't happening down over with Uncle Jesse. All right, Uncle Jesse ain't got to answer the sir. We were in a house with walls and shit, a foundation underneath it.

I think I felt out of place and wanted to go home to my dad's, but didn't feel like I was allowed to ask because he tracked down a mom. And at this point, I still think that he just found me a mom. And I'm just like, you couldn't have found one with a television. She had a TV,

but it was this tiny box that didn't have a knob. So you had to be able to maneuver needle nose pliers in order to watch the TV. so i think i hated it but i think i'm someone who is a survivor and has never spent a ton of time thinking about uh things i don't like yeah so you are a survivor that's for damn sure i mean we're only here what we haven't been past nine in any part of this story right now we're still circling 6 we were only in trailer park for less than a year so in less than a year

I have she doesn't have a doorknob and I'm charging kids candy to watch her fuck sorry hump hey listen I don't know what fuck it is Whoever is in her bed. Sorry, hump. Hey, listen, I don't know what fuck it is, but if you want to see my mom hump somebody,

it's going to be $6. You got to be kidding me. You got an entrepreneur over here. I would get those candies that my mom would never get me where you lick that stick and then you dip it into the powder. Fun dip. Fuck yeah. My mom wouldn't buy that. So she did buy it by me.

We didn't have porn. Holy shit. So can I, I mean, can I ask you a question? Yeah. So is your mom dating steady or is she just, you know,

several guys? I mean, how, how's that going? I remember one boyfriend and I think it was probably several guys, but maybe one boyfriend. It couldn't have been long before her and my stepdad got together. So I couldn't have been there for more than a year

because we were six by the time we moved into the house. So my stepdad comes along, we get into a real house. How do you even think to fucking do that? Like my mom's in there doing this and they're all watching. So they're all learning. I think we're like playing in the living room. My mom is very loud having sex. We go look through the doorknob

and then I see how excited the little boys are to watch this. And I realize I am missing an opportunity to put some fun dip in my pocket. So man, uh, she had a lot of day sex. Maybe she worked nights. I don't,

um, I don't know. Also get a doorknob for real. Yeah. It was a sliding, you know, cause trailers don't have real doors. They have just that sliding door.

And I don't know where her little metal plate went. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know what you're talking about. Cha-ching. Wow. So you're in the trailer park for a year and then your stepdad comes along.

Stepdad comes along. We get a house with him. Where? In southeast Portland. And now we're living more of like a legit suburban life. The kids in the neighborhood were very nice. and now we're living more of like a legit suburban life. The, uh, kids in the neighborhood were very nice.

Um, does he have kids? He doesn't have kids. They end up having a kid when I'm eight. Okay. Um, I ended up getting molested by my best friend's dad. Her name was crystal,

which feels like foreshadowing. Oh, I'm so sorry. soul which feels like foreshadowing oh man here's what's crazy so i start getting molested by this dude and then i start um he like as soon as we move in there, he starts molesting me. And I don't know that I'm being molested. He's very smart. That's the way that they get you to keep the secret is very smart. I don't know because I haven't been and I have a daughter who's four.

So I want to know this. If you're comfortable, whatever you're comfortable with, whatever you're not, you're don't. Number one, I was the child of an addict. I was a child of an addict who I didn't feel close to and clearly didn't

communicate with. So I'm the primary or the, the perfect victim in this. And I think that these kind of people know who they can and cannot find. I read that all the time. So you would be screwed if you tried to molest one of my children because my children would be like, that's my vagina and you're not supposed to touch it.

I'm going to go home and tell my mom. I'm already on that shit. And I didn't have any of that. It's the 80s, man. We didn't. We just, we, we, society just, just, what's that word? I can't think of the word right now, but society set us up to get molested. We just, we made it the perfect breeding ground.

We didn't know what our genitals were called. We already had all of this shame and everything else we weren't believed over adults and this dude was like high up in some church so now you got you got some baptist pastor say i watched the keepers and they that's what they talk about they know the the kids to go yep boys and girls yep And then, so you have a drug addict's daughter versus this guy who's high up in the church. And then I didn't know what was happening for a while. His wife, every day when we would,

like the bus stop was by their house. And so every day I would have to sit on his lap while he's like grinding into me. And then even his wife would be like, come on, Jessica, you know, it's time to sit on his lap are you serious yeah and so as a kid you're just like because also once again uh we used to make kids kiss adults on the mouth that didn't want it like we we didn't respect children's uh body autonomy at all so i was just like oh this is what we do um the other stuff that he like this

was daily and the other stuff he did um they got yeah this was five days a week every time i went to his house this is what i had to do in the morning before i could get on a bus sit on his lap while now i know he's grinding his dick into me but he was like pressing his hands between my legs in front of everyone like everyone's in the living room. That's what I'm saying. They're there. And so he's probably doing this to his kids. Oh, he was raping his children. Oh my God. I walked into the house. He beat his wife.

It was very violent and dark. And also just not crazy. So like at one point his wife had run down to the, we lived like four houses down. His wife had run down in front of our house with like down his wife had run down uh in front of our house with like a bloody lip and everything else this is the 80s it was just like uh like if i saw that my kid would never go in that house ever ever but in the 80s it was just like oh they're fighting yeah the casserole go down there and have fun with the kids and my mom did hate him like my mom hated him and didn't want me around them uh she did say that the hair on the back of her neck stood up

but uh that just made me not tell her what he was doing which is a weird um that's yeah yeah so like if i have a creepy feeling about my kid i wouldn't let them near the person because I would trust my intuition that this person's bad. 100%. So then we're at school in fourth grade and they show one of those programs. Grooming children is the word I was looking for earlier. A society groomed children to be molested. We're watching one of these programs because this is when he's starting to come out. The kids are getting molested like crazy.

And so there's this, this is inappropriate touch. This is how people are not supposed to touch you. I remember, uh, your bathing suit areas. Yeah. They would tell you all that stuff. And in that moment I'm like, Oh my God, I'm getting molested. That's when you thought, and how old are you then? I'm eight.

And this has been going on for two years? Mm-hmm. This is like about a year and a half in. Uh, oh, it's been two years. So I go to Ms. Romans, my, uh, fourth grade half in. Oh, it's been two years. So I go to Miss Romans, my fourth grade teacher, and I tell her that's happening to me. So-and-so's dad is doing that to me. That's brave. Yeah. She takes notes and then takes notes the next week and the next week. And then just develops this strange relationship with me where she is getting a weekly digest of my sexual abuse and never does anything. What?

Yeah. And I was just documenting it, like writing it down, journaling it. Gave it almost. I don't remember her physically writing anything. I remember like I could draw a picture of her. I felt very cared for by her and like she was actually concerned. Like a safe person to tell it to, but she didn't do anything about it. But she never did anything.

And at one point, I was very self-aware and old for how young i was and at one point i realized um because i was uh nuts i i was um unhinged as a as a but shortly after he started molesting me but i realized i had no credibility and so and as you're telling her who this guy is and he's the person in the church and all that so yeah and she knows she knows uh my friend and so he's also molesting a girl that lives across the street oh my god how do you all find this out you you compare notes like me and the girl across the street talked about because she would have to do the lap thing every morning also so at some point i'm like her and i are in the same class and i'm like that he does

that to us and i remember thinking she has more credibility so i just have to get her in on this i'm eight and i'm thinking about credibility and so uh she gets in and she's talking about it and then miss romans is just taking notes from us but she kind of like doesn't the the darker things that he was doing to me he wasn't doing those to her she was just getting that weird uh jerking jerking himself off with our bodies in the morning his thing though when uh when i would try to like get away from it would be to like god you're so gross like you're gross why doesn't your mom give you a back you know like just like thank you yeah I learned about that and man that became a permanent part of my uh like that's something I'm that's programming I'm still trying to remove from uh my um my mind anyway she never does anything fifth grade comes and I'm just I end up telling someone else you still at this point I've not

told your mom I still have not told my mom. Or your dad? Uncle Jesse don't know? No. They're in Delaware and dad becomes, dad's on like a pedestal. I go there in the summer. I'm getting progressively weirder. I went out there for Christmas at like seven, six or seven, shortly after getting started

getting molested and wouldn't speak like a person the entire time I was there. i crawled around on all fours and only barked and would only act like a dog opened my like insisted on eating on the floor and is very frustrating for him and very you know i mean he sent you away and that you come back to that and i'm obviously what's going on you're fucking just they just didn't know this shit back then. Like, now people would be like, whoa. You know, but we were just not self-aware back then. It was all about don't spoil your kids. And kids and everything was a disciplinary thing. You got don't talk to strangers.

You got don't do drugs. Say no to drugs is what it was. Don't drink and drive. Everything was so black and white. Yes, it was very black and white. And, you know know i remember when um that adam shit happened uh that boy that was kidnapped and decapitated and all that shit and that was when they were like have a password if a stranger comes over you and says oh your parents

came to what's what's the password yeah and if they don't say you know whatever the fucking password is you don't you just don't go. Yep. But I don't. And then just say no to strangers. Don't let anybody touch you. That was it. It was. Yeah, it was the basic. We spent a lot of time talking about like strangers kidnapping you.

But the fact of the matter is, is that the vast majority of sexual abuse is suffered at the hands of someone that the parents trusted. And no. Yeah. Yep. One hundred percent. I read that all the time. So you go. All right. So you go to see your dad. Well, I tell someone else.

You tell someone else. Miss Romans, it's mad at me. And is like... For telling someone else? Yeah. Because you told her. Like I fucked up her investigation or something like that. I only had 18 months to work on this.

God damn it. I guess it's going to be a mystery now. God damn it. I'm going to luck to leave this chapter out here uh i'm forced to tell my mom because miss romans is mad at me and i think it's gonna get back to my mom anyway the whole the whole neighborhood's freaking out and um and my mom is like well uh we have to move and i was nine and i understood that i that my mom's a drug addict and that uh this dude's like a church guy and that I, that my mom's a drug addict and that, uh, this

dude's like a church guy and that we will get, no one's going to believe me and that we should just move. Like I remember being like, yeah, that's the right move. I understood. Cause they're not going to do anything to this fucking guy. Nobody's going to do anything. Just like they haven't done anything to any of them. Nope.

And, um, I'm so glad that that's the, the way we went because it would have probably caused a lot more damage. He's dead, so who cares? Good. So now we're in a new neighborhood and I'm extra weird. And mom's addiction gets bad and tweakers are living living in our house where's your stepdad is he also an addict so he at this point is uh maybe smoking crack but also another like functioning he worked in he was a tax accountant but it was a drunk like a drunk and so he was drunk all the time and it's me and my little sister and some tweakers living in the house that are awful to me.

And I end up leaving when I'm like 12 and going to Delaware. So you're back in Delaware. Yeah. So this is the first time. And before that, I was with my mom during the school year and then out at dad's in the summer. And now I am out at dad's house he's got two small kids and uh remarried okay and uh very close with both my step parents uh considered them parents that part was pretty great I had three sisters so my mom had one when I was eight and then my dad and stepmom had nine even with the addiction and everything they had another kid yeah yeah my mom was a weird anomaly of for as hardcore she was doing how do you

even take she was still like we had it better than any other kids of drug addicts at her level like our house was always very clean there was always hot food like you know not a lot of uh warmth and affection and stuff like that but you need yeah and she'll tell you because my mom's childhood was crazy and so she'll tell you that like she thought that's what uh she was like doing an impression of a mom. And I carried that into, like, I had to read books. Uh, I was an awful mom to my oldest and then had to like read books on attachment to try to, uh, be, um, affectionate to my younger kids. It's not something that comes naturally to me at all.

So I moved to dad's house and then just ruined their life. Like they just have little kids and I am a fucking nightmare. So all the dudes are gone at this point, right? The dudes are gone. He's remarried. He's two kids. Two small kids. How small?

I'm 12, so they're like three and four. Ooh, yeah. And the- Two little toddlers plus your brand new- The youngest was a fucking nightmare. She was like, high need is what we would know as high need now.

So it was the kind of kid that needs to sleep with you at night. Needs to be held at all times. They didn't know what that meant back then. And so she would just scream all night. So no one's sleeping. And then I am a nightmare. And I am...

And at this point, are you still smoking weed? Are you still doing any drugs, drinking? Are you doing any of and at this point are you still smoking weed are you still doing any drugs drinking I haven't started doing any of that you just tried that stuff yeah like the adults let me take a bong hit when I was six but I like it I didn't it didn't take people in charge at 12 uh as soon as I got out to uh Delaware I'm in like seventh grade and I did definitely like want to start getting fucked up. Like that was, I wanted, it never resonated to me that anybody should be in charge of me.

I felt like an autonomous being and an adult from the time I was like 10. So I didn't like school. Well, you'd been through more by 10 than a lot of your friends parents had so it just didn't make sense to me so it just didn't like Shirley's just over there checking at the grocery you know you're over here ball ripping at 6 girl

checking in with my PO Shirley's like I've never even tried marijuana I was a, I've never even tried marijuana. I was a liar, a bad liar. The impression my dad does of me and my sisters is he was like, when they were teenagers, they all did the same thing. But Sam would get caught and then just take her lumps and be like, yeah, I snuck out. Yeah.

And then Allie would get caught and then fight the punishment and be like, yeah i snuck out yeah and then ally would get caught and then fight the punishment and be like that's not fair i only did this and then i would be like i don't know what you're talking about so uh i got i snuck out and then come home and they have put the screen back in the window and locked me out you know and then i have to like break into a different part of the house and in the morning they're like where were you last night and i was like i don't know what you're talking about and they're like uh we sat here and i was like you must have been sitting on me you must not have seen me like i just would not i could not tell the truth no um i was also super full of shit like super full of shit um i now know that

probably uh not feeling heard on the bad things that did happen made me uh feel like i needed to constantly like generate things to try to get that attention i was obsessed with attention i um i uh did a lot of time in mental institutions in my teen years when did you you so what led to that? I lost my virginity and within 24 hours was locked up in a mental institution. I had been in therapy for two years. The guidance

counselor had called my parents in junior high and been like, I think she could benefit. She acts pretty provocatively and I think I just watched too many Sharon Stone movies. So I was like, oh, he's trying to fuck my teachers and stuff. Just for like a story. I don't think I was even attracted to them.

But it's just like. Jess, stop crossing your legs, girl. It's math class. Jesus Christ. I'll see your rings in Cavaricci. Get up here and clean the boards, Evergrande. Would you dress that way no no i just i had a body dysmorphia so how old were you when you lost your virginity 14 so literally virginity jail 14 i mean mental ones yeah i'm sorry date

like within 24 was it like a hold where were you where did they or they took you to a hospital they took me to a hospital why They took me to a hospital. Why? What happened? So I lose my virginity to a guy I don't even like. How old is he? He was one of those 17-year-old 8th graders. Driving her by an 8th grade graduation. Cystic acne. It was a mess.

I did not like him. We fought all the time. But I was just like, I don't want to be a virgin anymore. My parents are going out of town. I'm supposed to be staying at Kristen's house. I'm going to come to your house. You're going to have sex with me. And he's like, all right.

And then we have sex. You told him this? Mm-hmm. Okay. We have sex and it's awful. I mean, the sex was whatever. It's never going to be good your first time. No. Awful. I mean, the sex was whatever. It's never going to be good your first time. But I was, like, I felt awful.

And I still have this. I felt shame and guilt and, like, the walls were closing in on me. And it just got progressively worse. And then I started, like, fake hallucinating. I was just up in my room screaming at the top of my lungs. You'd gone back home? Mm-hmm. Just like the next day.

So the next day you're by yourself at home because your parents are gone? They're downstairs. My stepmom's downstairs. And I'm just screaming upstairs in my bedroom and just throwing things and pretending to hallucinate, which is odd. But you knew you were pretending to hallucinate. Mm-hmm. But I had a very... I had the ability to...

I can tell you now that I knew I wasn't actually hallucinating. I can tell you now that I knew I wasn't actually hallucinating. But the flimsy grip I had on reality back then was there was no thoughts in my conscious mind about the fact that this wasn't really happening. It wasn't a possible eight-year-old acid flashback. Yeah, right. So it was like the things that weren't real felt very real back then. Like, disassociating, I guess, is that what that is? So, they call my therapist, and then I'm like, I didn't get molested by that guy.

I got raped by him. You're going back to the neighbor. Yeah, I'm talking about that. But he didn't. This is not true, right? Got you. And so, they tell my therapist, we don't think this is true. And she said, this is way worse if it's not true. Oh, to actually say that.

Yeah. These symptoms with it not being true, you have a bigger problem on your hand than if she is actually having repressed memory syndrome or whatever. Which is just something that was getting talked about on Oprah. And I didn't get honest about this for a long time. So I didn't think much of it. Now I look back and I'm like, oh, nobody reacted when I got molested and when he did do heinous things to me. And so it's just blows me away. No one.

And there's a chain of people there too not one of them and we just didn't talk about it like nobody asked for details um and it just sent the message to me that i deserved it and um i uh now we talk and my parents feel awful sure and they're like we just didn't know if it was true back then the real things didn't know if it was true because you were kind of off and it's like yeah when did i get off like when did i start acting weird who was i before i was six yeah right and um just it was just was a different time you know so uh but all of that was just boiling underneath the surface and the second i lost my virginity i just get triggered back into this i'm usually much funnier than this this is what are you talking about um so i uh you lose

your virginity and it just triggers everything it triggers six again yep and now i'm in a mental institution and what i have found there's a youth in Delaware, there was a youth mental institution. Really? With multiple units and a shit ton of teenagers in it because this would be what, like 92? Shit ton. How many are we talking, you think? 100?

Probably. Wow, that's a lot. It was, yeah, I had like 20 on my unit, maybe 60. Because this is the early 90s. So you got all this kind of shit happening where they think that every kid listening to heavy metal is worshiping Satan. You know, this was a weird, weird era. And I now have an audience. I have a captive audience.

I have a place where I can act out and everyone will stop what they're doing and pay attention to me. I can get strapped down in a quiet room. There's just like a room with a leathery mattress, like a, you know, like plastic mattress and leather restraints. And you welcomed that. I loved it. You did. I loved it. it didn't make you feel uh i loved it restricted or i've been to adult mental institution and the kid one's much nicer um i have to say that as an adult i was like this is not how i remember where's the popcorn in the movie night this is fucking awful oh my god i only went back once as an adult i was like god this is like visiting disneyland isn't it fuck this um i loved it i didn't want to leave i didn't it was uh what did

you what was that what you loved the attention the attention was huge the kids uh i wasn't this ostracized like i wasn't this outcast because we were all the same. Yeah, you felt part of something. We were all a mess. All day was talking about trauma. And I felt heard for the first time in my life. And then it was all this occupational therapy where you're just making leather belts and shit. But everything's just about your feelings. And I was just processing trauma is what I was doing. But I didn't.

I was also just hurt. And i did not want to leave and so when i get out i'm now doing crazy things to get put back in i think my parents insurance ran out after 30 days so i was cured because this shit was like 750 bucks a day or something bananas back then too yeah so then i have to get put back in. And so I think the next time I threw a chair. But you're intentionally trying to go back. Okay. Yeah. Now I'm institutionalized.

I just want to be in the institution. I throw a chair at my stepmom at some point. I am in and out of that hospital throughout eighth grade. I don't think I passed. I think I just got bounced out of eighth grade. Ninth grade. Are you doing, are you required to do any schoolwork while you're in there at all? You did do schoolwork during the day.

They would just like the, your school would send your books and assignments and you would do them there. And I did well in school while in an institution. In actual school, I failed every grade. You did? Yeah. Terrible student. So in ninth grade, they put me into a day hospital where I get picked up by a small

bus and taken to the hospital, just like a regular hospital and on the mental health ward or whatever and go to school there. At a hospital? Uh-huh. Yeah, they just called it a day hospital. And then I would do therapy and stuff there and then come back home. I was principals-

Home to the other hospital. To my real house. Oh, to your real house. Yeah. Okay. So there is no more mental hospital in the financial whatever. So this was their solution. and i was there for one semester

and in one semester i was principal's list uh on a roll back at the high school that i was supposed to be in well congrats on that and was another semester ahead because if you just handed me my books and papers i would just be great right but if you put me in a classroom with try to fucking teach yeah exactly exactly fuck you know me little preoccupied with being provocative I get picked up by this bus uh and I um it's a Monday to Friday same type deal. And I was so full of shit. I was so full of shit all the time. I had to be talking at all times. And then I had to be...

I didn't realize that my life was already very interesting. I was into my 20s before I was like, Oh, my life is already fascinating. I don't need to keep making things up. But I just wanted to be every statistic. And so I convinced... You wanted to keep making things up. But I just wanted to be every statistic. And so I convinced... You wanted to check all the boxes. And I did become all of these things.

But at some point, I convinced the bus driver that I'm a teenage mom. And I have been showing her pictures of my little sister and saying it's my daughter. And then every day when I would get on the bus, I was like, man, long night last night. And you carried that shit out slow play this fucking girl's teething up a guy look at this i mean i love her to death but man a little whiskey on the go you know um but it's delaware you know i'm used to lying in portland where you have some fucking anonymity uh delaware everyone knows each other. There's 10 people there. So that bus driver goes to the bar where my stepmom is the

bartender. And she's like, yeah, man, I drive Jessica. Man, that kid is amazing. I can't believe she takes care of her baby all night and then goes to school and my son was like what

and she was like yeah her daughter and she's describing her and my son's like that's my daughter's baby pictures What are you doing with a picture of my daughter? They were so mad. Oh, my God. It was fucking great. I loved that it came back. That one came back on you. And I would just every single morning just get on there and just talk. What happened after she found out that wasn't true? I think I just, like, tried not to go to school.

But that all falls in the line with the attention. Yeah. Full of shit. Obsessed. But that's how you got the attention. Yeah. I just wanted, I needed an audience. And I didn't realize.

It didn't matter about truth. Yeah. Yeah, who'd give a fuck about that? You already live in your truth. Yeah. Yeah. I was a good, this is how I learned how to tell stories. Yeah.

Making them up. I did become a teenage mom later. I just needed to wait until the ripe age of 16 oh my god um at one point my parents i knew i knew i would be a star when i was a kid i was like i'm going to be a star i would sign people's autographs from the time i was very young and at one point my dad was like maybe the solution is to give her a creative outlet i'm going to get her involved in a local theater so he told me to uh find a song to sing and i was uh auditioning for a child's christmas in wales which is just this fucking christmas play right i pick a song called oh father by madonna that's just about getting molested by your dad. Oh my God, no.

My dad does not vet the song. He takes me, he buys me the music for it. Oh my God. He takes me to this audition, the lady's playing it, and it's like, it's funny that way you can get used to the hurt and the pain. What a child will believe. You never loved me and also i can't sing so i'm belting these awful words oh my dad was like i started to tune into the song

and then realize like oh my god what does she like and the uh the vibe gets very strange i'm sure i gotta think it would get a little A little strange in there And then they're like We want like a Christmas song Do you know any Christmas songs? And I was like You never loved me Oh my god

The chorus is like You can't hurt me now I got away from you I never thought I would I could do that in the tune of Rudolph But we're not changing these I could do that in the tune of Rudolph. But we're not changing these lyrics, alright? I'll change the tune. I didn't get the part.

You're too much. At 15, I get drunk at a... We're going year by year. Please, consider it. My poor dad and stepmom. So hold on. We're going to come back to 15 in a second. During all this,

what's going on with mom? Are you seeing her? Does she come to visit at all? Have you checked in at all? At 12, I leave Portland and I'm so mad at her that I refuse to ever go back. I write a poem called Mommy Dearest that is heart-wrenching, and then I get it published. It's very good.

Really? Mm-hmm. Where? And just as fucking, back then you could send poems in to get published in whatever books. I think it's just a scam to sell the books, but it gets published. I frame it and mail it to her. And this is signature Jessa, which is if you hurt me and I love you,

I will cut my leg to get out of the trap and get away from you and then make you pay. And so this was, yeah, I didn't. She came out when I was in the mental hospital because at that point they're like we need to sort reality out and we need her here because uh jessa saying all these things also my name at this point i changed my name to jessa i refuse to acknowledge uh jessica was my real name okay birth is jessica and you actually officially changed. I officially changed it. Or you just said to everyone, call me.

At first, I was like, my name is Jessa now. And I remember thinking all these things like, Jessica is weak. Jessica, let all these things happen. Jessica must die. Like, I had all these very... The hell did I see? Yeah. That's no more ick for me.

No more. And people would try to call me Jessica, and I just would ignore them and force everybody into this. So alter ego has taken over. Mom comes out while I'm in the mental institution and is just defensive, which is, you know, understandable. She's a drug addict and her kid's a mess and everyone's mad and they kind of fought and whatever. So then I don't go back out there until I'm almost 15, I guess. So drugs and alcohol start at 15. The first time I get drunk,

I steal my sister's silver dollar collection that my stepmom, the bartender, had collected for them, and I pay a bum. Like in that little thing in the circles? Yeah. I'm just like shimmying them out and switching them out with quarters. No, she kept them in like a jar or something.

This fucking hole is terrible, man. These are all loose in here. These silver dots everywhere. They are eroding. I gave them to a hobo who then went in and bought me Cisco, which is like- Liquid crack. Mad dog, right? I know Cisco very well well unfortunately but wait you

did this by yourself at 15 no me and my cousin who was my best friend and then we take the cisco we put it into sports bottles these things like straws and we put them inside of our starter jackets this one's starter jackets for hot ship and then we go to the christiana skating rink which is where we used to go every saturday and i would sneak out and get fingered or whatever but like uh uh this time i'll be out right after speed skate girl all right i'll be out here drinking my cisco it seemed like a great place to get drunk in retrospect it's not a good place to drink. I was so hammered that at some point I lost my skates. And I'm just scooching around the skating rink in my socks and sloshing Cisco everywhere. And I get pulled off of the rink. You're out on the wood, the rink.

Yeah. I have no idea where the skates went. I don't remember losing them. Cisco, fuck you up. Fuck you up. You got out of the roller rink and lost have no idea where the skates went i don't remember losing them fuck you lost my skates very first time i ever drank and i have a 40 ounce fucking sports bottle and i'm just chugging on it i am wasted they pull me off the skating rink and they're like you're drunk and i said uh i'm not and they uh i'm like well can't you give me like a test to prove that i'm sober and they were like fine walk in a line and i was like can i take my skates off first skates have been long gone right so they're like if you can't

tell your neck and shit whether or not you are wearing footwear you know that's your sobriety test so i get into the come back on a couple skates carry me um they did they call your parents they wanted to call my parents but i told them that it was the 80s that my mom was dead and that uh my dad had given me up for adoption and my adopted parents were in Hawaii for the weekend. Why? Oh, my God. Until I started vomiting. And then once I started vomiting, I was like, 302. 323.

His name's Tom. By the time Tom got there, I had convinced them that i was a late stage alcoholic yeah i would say so but hey killed it at the limbo though i don't know how the fuck she did it but she won the limbo while we were waiting on it uh that i'd had a drinking problem since i was 10 10 and uh this is the first time i ever, but I have convinced this room of people so that by the time my dad gets there, these people, because we did read a book about a teenage alcoholic in a class or something. So I'm just like.

He's just walking into people looking at this motherfucker like this piece of shit. My poor fucking dad. This is right after I just accused him of molesting me at an audition. Oh God. So my dad walks in and i am crying and everyone is coddling me and i look up and i'm like dad i have a problem and they're like you're being so brave my dad's like you have several problems get in the fucking car and they were like no listen tom i know, she wants to come clean.

They're telling them. They got your back, man. How fucking exhausting. Somebody get me a fucking piece of pizza, and we're getting the fuck out of here, goddamn. Where are your fucking skates? Holy shit, he's walking into that mess. God, my poor dad.

I puked down the side of his Astro minivan. He's driving a minivan. You know what I mean? He's already there. Fuck. He gets home. My dad did not fuck around. My dad got me up at 7 o'clock in the morning and was like, today you're cleaning bathrooms. My dad did not fuck around.

The first time i smoked pot i uh guess it was laced with pcp guess yeah my brother and uh a friend of mine did that to a girl i was seeing one time and i was like you didn't tell her that i go why would you not because she was like that tastes weird i'm like well we thought she knew. I'm like, who the fuck just assumes a joint's laced with PCP? This is PCP, right? No, that's just regular weed. Oh, that ain't for me then. I thought that was laced up. We thought you assumed.

Why? Because you're a dick? Yeah, they were being assholes, and that poor girl. What did she act like? She got really paranoid after she, I think the anxiety of like, I just smoked PCP and I didn't want to fucking smoke PCP freaked her out first.

Yeah. And then it carried her into more paranoia and then she just passed out. It's terrible. And she slept. And she was a little girl, slender, slept, slept, slept. And I say that because after she woke she missed the whole fucking lollapalooza uh when she woke up she ate she was she was ate like a fucking

hostage i've never seen it and i told my brother and our friend i go you two did this to her you're buying her whatever the fuck she wants to eat that's your penalty for this and she was eating falafel you know at concert prices you know i mean like she was just sleeping at the concert passed out and i just sat there with her and made sure she was breathing and took care of her just you know and this was this was the lollapalooza when uh kurt cobain well it maybe he didn't kill himself but kurt cobain um shot himself and then smashing pumpkins stepped in and we went and saw it in West Virginia. And they, you know, we all had weed, but they had that one joint.

And she just went over thinking everyone had the same thing. Yeah. They don't tell her. Boom. She has a horrible experience. Who purposefully smokes PCP? It's the worst. So I had never smoked weed before. So I just thought this is weed.

But in retrospect, having after having smoked a lot more weed i'm like oh i was gone gone and we had like prepared for it and bought visine and then went out and i remember them ordering it and asking for they we went to philly and they asked for wet which is laced with pcp but i didn't know that back then yes my first drug deal and then we go back and we're like in this marsh area and we smoke it and everything gets real weird and then i have to go home you're outdoor in a marsh area yeah like uh yeah no it's about these dudes i think we're trying to fuck us but like good luck while my face is melting and shit we get to the house and i'm looking for visine i'm like tweaking through my bag looking for visine for so long because time is weird on pcp that my dad is just standing in the doorway by the time i get out and i don't have any visine so i walk up

and pretend cry and i'm like me and chris broke up and then i run upstairs because that's like my excuse for my eyes i get in his bathroom i'm putting peroxide in my eyes that's pretty quick thinking to be on pcp for your first fucking time yeah my dad feels horrible he's like god she i told you chris why did i let him go he said i didn't even know you had a boyfriend, is what he said. Because I did not. Chris is a fictional character. And then I get upstairs. I'm hiding in my bedroom.

Roll the stick. No, but he might have my visine. Fucking poor dad um he comes upstairs with my stepmom and they want to give me a pep talk about love right and uh i can't focus on what they're saying without the tv's plot getting mixed into what they're saying so my response yeah i'm fucked up they're trying to have a real moment for a change and I can't remember what my response was because I think it was like a cop show I was going to say you got law and order bullshit going on in the background

I won't know until I get back from the station and they were like and I could just see the look on my dad's face this bitch is fucking high god damn it god damn it he's a character on SVU His pitch is fucking high. God damn it. God damn it. Chris, that ain't real.

He's a character on SVU. Fuck. Holy shit. You don't even have a license yet. That's where I know. You don't even have a license. I was never going to get one. You have lived 10 lives. No, I was married before I got a driver's license.

I liked weed. I liked it. I wanted to keep doing it. And so I thought this is... But you license. I liked weed. I liked it. I wanted to keep doing it. And so I thought this is... But you couldn't just smoke weed or you couldn't just drink beer. My dad was strict compared to... No, I don't mean...

I mean later. Yeah. I did. You shouldn't be doing that at 50. I mean, I didn't start until I was 21 and that's late. Wow. And that's what I'm saying.

When I sit and listen to people come on here, I'm like. Yeah, I heard you talking to Tim. Tim was a lot younger than I was. Yeah, a lot younger Tim Dillon we're talking about for sure, yeah. This became the motivation to forgive my mom because I'm like, I bet mom lets me smoke weed. And so I agreed to go out and see mom for Christmas. I haven't seen mom in years. I get out there.

Damn right she lets me smoke weed. And I'm high as fuck with mom and now mom's cool like mom like yeah this is the shit yeah fucking shower a weed over yep so uh so she's letting you do it she knows she's smoking weed with me and it's fine smoking weed at 15 yep all right i go back to dad's house and i'm like i want to live with mom. And so I finish out ninth grade. I fail. And I failed most grades. A lot of times I got passed just because I was so weird. They didn't want to deal with me.

But like sixth grade, I like failed, failed and had to do summer school. And then ninth grade, I like failed. And they, but then I just moved back to Portland. And my mom says, you can smoke weed. We'll have to see what happens during the school year. And so all summer I'm smoking weed. I get hooked up with a crew of wannabe gangsters. Now it's 93.

And what are wannabe gangsters? Guys? You're talking about guys, guys, and girls? Yeah, we were like, I don't know what the other girls my age were idolizing, but I wanted to be Ice Cube. And so we walked around. I dressed like the characters in Boys of the Hood. Your starters.

This is when you had your starters, Jack? Mm-hmm. What Jack did you have? Sagging pants. I had Raiders because I liked the black and white, and I also had a Giants one. But sagging pants. We were breaking into cars. We walked around with dent pullers.

I was obsessed with... I wanted to be in a gang so bad. I kept trying to get beat in the gangs. There were real gangs. It wasn't happening. They're like, we're not going to punch you in the face. Get the fuck out of here.

That is domestic violence and shit too. Assault. These gang members were fantastic And it's domestic violence and shit, too. Yeah. Listen, these gang members were fantastic, by the way. I met a lot of them trying to get into their gangs, and they were just like, we're not going to beat you up, idiot. And then at one point, I was getting assaulted by a group of football player, cheerleader pieces of shit, frat boy kind of people. football player, cheerleader, pieces of shit, frat boy kind of people, and one gang member that I had met while trying to get beat into his gang

walked over and threatened them, and they all stopped. My experience with gangs is they're great people, but they don't want me in their gangs. School starts, and I just don't go, and my mom doesn't know because she's fucked up on drugs and so I just get up at some point in the morning and just leave all day and where do you go I mostly did acid I found somebody who would like front me acid sucker

and I would just trip balls and by yourself or yeah with like I would get like friends they all went to school so I would get them to skip on different days the kid the crew of kids that I was with were all uh boys and um they were like uh the long like Longoria brothers their parents were like real Mexican mafia and they were in C, CSD custody. And, um, yeah. And they were cool.

Cause they were just like, like run away from their foster homes and we would kick it. Um, and then, uh, uh, Ricky Bailey, uh,

was, um, uh, I don't know. He says dad was like Asian mafia or whatever. We were all want to be gangster. So it's hard to tell the Longoria's were legit for sure. I know that.

Another kid named Brian who huffed so much paint that he became brain dead while we were friends. Really? He became someone who needs medical help around the clock. Oh my God. Those were fun. From paint. Yeah.

Like anything. Anything he could touch anything Anything he could Like anything What's that movie William H. Macy played in And he does that the whole time He's just always pouring like Something on a rack

Yeah And he's just sniffing a rack All day long All of it Butane Keyboards All of it All the air dusters and shit

Yeah And just ate his brain He was talking about All the green monsters He could see and stuff And we all did like a lot of drugs but um uh so i get i get in trouble with the law i start running away from home a lot and um i get picked up by the cops a few times and then my mom uh starts covering for me when i get picked up and doesn't tell them that i had run away because they said she's going to jd like juvenile hall or whatever if we catch her again and uh i

get fucked up on cold pills one night and pass out in a mud puddle and almost drowned and the ambulance asked me if i was trying to take my life they say i said yes i don't remember saying yes um but then i get they asked me where i live and i said i'm on the run and they were uh when they contacted my mom she was like no she was home tonight which i hadn't been home in weeks and um uh so they put they like i'm don't have a grip on reality so they put me in another mental institution jesus now i'm here and I don't want to be here. And, uh,

it's not as nice as the kid. It was not a nice one. It was, this is not an adult one, but this was like, I didn't like this one or the adult one. It's a tween right here. Yeah.

I had a caseworker. I named her God. She hated it. Like, uh, I felt that's how it felt to me. It felt like you think you're my authority. You're my fucking caseworker. Like I need a, like a person to be in charge of my life karen uh you know i

mean i don't know let's ask god should we be having this meeting without consulting god i think god what do you think god she hated hated me my mom smuggled cigarettes in for me at some point mom's gang she was nicer my mom was planning my breakout. Like, we were going to, she was trying to procure a fucking blowtorch powerful enough to get through the acrylic windows. Tie your bed sheets to this bumper. Hurry up. My mom was gangster as fuck.

Like, when I got locked up, my mom was like. We're going to bust you out. This, like, ragtag group of wannabe gangsters. And my mom, we're going to like break me out. I get caught smoking a cigarette in my bathroom because I lean up against the nurse call button. And that's a no, no, no smoke. No, no, no, no. And you fucked yourself on that. Fucked myself hard.

Leaned up against a call. I was like, oh, this is so relaxing. Then they all talked to me like I was a felon. Like she was like, oh, you're the one that had the smoke. Or, you know, you're the smoker. And I was like, he was a cigarette, not crack. Yeah, right. That's my dad.

Oh, my God. I somehow get out of there after trying to Sharon Stone a pastor that comes in to see me. And the doctor. Heather, what do you mean? Let me ask you this question. I'm going to ask you a personal question. If they would have gone for it, would you have done it? Or was it more manipulation?

I didn't want to keep getting into dark sexual stuff, but only because I didn't want to keep getting into dark sexual stuff, but only because I didn't want to be a buzzkill on your podcast. But at this point, everyone I've had sex with makes me feel like the guy I've lost my virginity to, unless the sex is wrong. Unless I'm getting the person to do something wrong. So by

15, I've had sex with a lot of grown men. So consensual sex feels terrible. It feels terrible. But the opposite. Something, whatever that is, whether it's grown men so consensual sex feels terrible it feels terrible but the opposite something whatever that is whether it's but if i found if i found a way to make that person feel like they've done something awful yeah so i'm fucking my neighbor who's on babysitting for i'm fucking his friends and you're how old 15 and how old are they 20s 30s what yeah uh his friend too yeah jesus and just wasn't uh wasn't crazy there was like a house i partied at it was like the cool mom or whatever and um she had like a 30 year old

for right there yeah cool mom yep anytime there's the cool parent that means the other parents got to be the fucking asshole because they're the one doing all the shit hopefully hopefully there's one yep the uh the mom that lets you get high at her house yeah the cool mom and uh she had a boyfriend who was late 20s she was in her 40s but she had a boyfriend that was in her late his late 20s um who i'm pretty sure had sex with me what because I think that's how I got banned from the house. But she had a roommate that was in his 30s that I would wake up. I would drink 40s at their house and pass out and then wake up. And this dude was having sex with me. And I didn't realize that that was rape until like a year ago.

What do you mean? I just felt that I like the mentality of that era, I guess. And then also just the way I am with life. I just thought that's what happens when you drink. You thought you were going with it and blacked out and don't remember? Just like if you get drunk around a guy, they have the right to do that. Oh, man. This was... yeah this guy was in his 30s he was 30 and you're 15 i'm 15 good god and it didn't like it didn't occur to me yeah when when

uh this is like the when people shit on millennials and stuff i'm like uh when people started saying rape culture i rejected it at first i was like no like i didn't like the idea of thinking that i was a victim to all of these things you know i like the fact that i like i take responsibility for anything that happens to me because it's uh it feels like weakness to say like oh no you were a victim in this situation so when it happened i was just like well you're a survivor there's a difference yeah yes um but yeah just like a year ago i was like oh my god what a gross you know like um i mean i was an old 15 year old but i definitely but still you're 15 this guy's 30 30 gross that's fucking disgusting um i mean he lived in her basement so um i uh yeah so if it wasn't fucked up like that though if it wasn't some kind of like weird situation like that it felt

it it triggered uh difficult things i think because that gave me an excuse to feel ashamed and so it felt how it felt you know it like lined up on the same frequency yeah so um i uh get in the mental hospital then i get put in cps custody because it's obvious my mom's on drugs they send me to live with my grandmother i'm moving with my grandmother she's a hardcore born-again christian um at this point in my life if i could if i could pinpoint what made me want to get fucked up it was i felt like there was more to life i felt like the the widely accepted version of reality didn't feel right to me i felt like a person who had been dropped off on a planet i felt like an alien with magic powers who had been dropped off on a planet. I felt like an alien with magic powers who had been dropped off on a planet full of people that were like worker bees.

And it seemed I had like a homesickness about me. I was doing acid one day because my grandmother would bring me to this church. And one day I was high on acid. At the church i was like i had left and come back and then i'm like just finishing out my acid trip i've been gone all day and uh because they do church in the morning and at night on sundays it's fucking excessive and uh i get invited back to some and wednesdays uh Some youth group thing, and that night they're all praying for each other

and slaying each other in the spirit. Do you know what I'm talking about where you pray and the people fall down? Oh, yeah. I've seen those videos. So that happens to me. And I think, oh, this is the thing I've been looking for

my entire life. I'm looking for this magic, and I get saved. And I quit doing drugs. The Holy Ghost is in you. Yep. You quit doing it? I quit doing drugs. I quit drinking. I'm looking for this magic and I get saved. And I quit doing drugs. You quit doing it? I quit doing drugs. I quit drinking. I quit having sex. I quit cussing and I become

the most irritating evangelical Christian you've ever met. I play an acoustic guitar next week. Wow, but you stopped it all right there? Yeah. Like that. that night I was like, I'm a Christian now. And, and the kids, the youth group was like one of these very popular hip youth groups. They're like, they have a rap group and a dance group and whatever. And I was a little bit of an outcast in that group. And so I just, can I ask you quickly,

like you found whatever it is, I don't care what it is, especially for someone that's troubled, as long as it's helping them, it's a good thing but where did you find the courage all of a sudden and how like when these men would come and and try to come at you did you stand up for yourself say no i'm a christian now or like how did you ward off the here's some acid here's some weed because it's all around you it's it literally is in your home so at this point, I'm in my grandma's custody. And so it's very easy for me to like. I was having to go way far out of my way to live my old lifestyle at my grandma's house. You weren't seeing mom at all or going over there here and there?

Very little. I remember when I first moved in with my grandmother, we found out that my friend's parents were growing weed. And so we stole like five ounces of weed from them. But it wasn't dry yet. Like they were drying it. We ripped all the buds off. And so I had like just these like five ounces of wet buds that needed to be tried. And I was like just trying to keep them in my grandma's house,

which is just reeked yeah and she was naive and she didn't know but then the weed started to like mold and then I had to take it to my mom's house so that she could help me with it and then she just stole my weed you know of course um is this your mom's mom by the way this is my stepdad's mom which is my wow yeah the only grandparent I was ever close with was my stepdad and that lady stepped up no she was the shit yeah um so but now i'm living with her and it's very easy to have this pure lifestyle and i'm involved in the church and she's so excited and the kids didn't really like me that much singing get any better no through it through any of these iterations that I still not can nope I did become

like I won so many souls I was just everywhere I went excited about it and I got involved in some school where you get your GED and as soon as I turned 16 I got my GED

and then I met one of the pastor's sons and this you get your GED. And as soon as I turned 16, I got my GED. And then I met one of the pastor's sons. And this particular pastor was like a street preacher. And he would like go out and like preach to bums and stuff. And I just thought it was so cool. This is like the kind of person I want to be is like a street preacher.

And I want to help gangs, you know, maybe they'll let me in now. Now I might get punched in the mouth um i meet uh his son and i go home that night he makes fun of me that's all i stand there while he mocks me uh for like an hour and a half and then that night i went home and said i'm gonna marry him uh just being he's just very funny you know so i just being nice yeah just hilariously i love getting roasted and so if you're good at it and so uh that was that was dustin reed and so uh i went home and said i'm gonna marry dustin reed and uh shortly after that he started hanging out and then i had to backslide so i could fuck him and

backslide you can't have both you can't his mom was brokenhearted and this is the beginning yeah the just wrong side of the tracks uh you know yeah yeah and they try to have a conversation with us about you guys need to do this the right way whatever and we're just like what was that for that marriage like not fucking and uh they really just didn't want him to end up with me which they you just need to leave the church yeah just uh jump in front of a train if you would believe by this point because his dad ran like the 12 step group at the thing so my mom is in and out of church by now so my mom's just just like it's a mess and um uh finally one night they come he's at my house they come over and they try to take his car or something and then he ends up being like i love her um and then he moves into my house and i'm pregnant within a couple months

wow okay and uh was he a virgin he he was and i didn't know that and so we had a conversation like uh how many people have you fucked you know and no. And I should have let him answer first. You know what I mean? Yeah. I should have done like a sliding scale or something, but I didn't know. I was just like 15. And that really weighed on him.

Because you knew your number? Yeah. And you were honest about your number? Weren't those the days when I knew the number? You know when I learned not to ask? You said what? It was under 20. Because I'd only been fucking for a year, weren't those the days when i knew the number you know when i learned not to ask i asked you said what it was under 20 because i'd only been fucking for a year but i've you know i'm very i i asked a girl one time and i just saw her go on her fingers like this you know like a little

move and i'm like and i just thought to myself she could be counting by fives yeah you know what i mean like i was like don't ever ask that goddamn question again. Also, who cares? But I mean, seriously, it was a big deal back then. And it was a big deal because I was involved with someone who had, and this is the 90s, man. So this is like so many preconceived notions of what women were supposed to be. And then you add religion to that.

And I just wasn't what he thought his wife was going to be and then you add religion to that and i just was i just wasn't what he thought his wife was going to be right so that becomes a problem once we get married we get married i get a hell of fat but you're pregnant first yeah okay um i am uh 250 or something by the time the baby's born what were you when you started 150 wow you're getting 100 pounds yeah i went balls out i was very sick and so i would just eat constantly and then throw up but it didn't you know i didn't throw up enough uh yeah we get married immediately we have to go to uh the hitching post in courtland idaho i've been there you've been to the hitching post the hitching post is like a weird shack post, but Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

The hitching post is like a weird shack right outside the building where you get your marriage license. Oh, okay. And because Oregon won't let you marry off your child to hide your family's shame. Wait, how old are you at this point? 16. Oh, 16. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

And he's what? He's 19. 19, okay. yeah even what he's 19 19 okay um we have the baby the marriage is a mess and uh i'm not a good mom and i uh am obsessed with how bad of a mom i am i don't feel bonded to my child i uh am constantly watching other people with their kids and wondering why I don't feel that way. I left her for a weekend with friends when she was five weeks old. Jeez. And that didn't seem...

Weird to you. Yeah. And I quietly unravel about this for years. I also have insane postpartum depression, but I don't know what that is. And I have an awful relationship to project that onto. He starts cheating on me.

And number one, he had a 24-hour refractory period, which is a huge pain in the ass. So if he jerked off, the refractory period is how long till you get hard come on 24 hours 19 at 19 it's a lot of it's a lot of pent-up fucking uh religion and yeah right yeah a lot going on yeah so if he jerked off it was ruined for the rest of the night so

like i would wet dream of your whole weekend fucking and he loves to jerk off and we had had great sex, but I remember, like, coming home and, like, just finding, like, he had, like, jerked off into a kitchen towel with, like, a saran wrap and just, like, left it in the kitchen. So you're making prison fucking pussies over there? Yeah, exactly. You have a pussy. There is one on her way home from the goddamn grocery store right now. Who wants it?

The first time he cheated on me, he drops me off. We're involved in the church. We're back in the church now. We're in the ministry. We're living legit. He drops me off at church, and he goes and disappears. He's supposed to play the bass and the praise and worship. He never fucking comes back.

Stand-up bass or electric bass? Stand-up. Electric. Like, you're holding that. Yeah, yeah. Okay. He plays the bass. He's the to play the bass in the praise and worship. He never fucking comes back. Stand up bass or electric bass? Electric. Like you're holding that. Yeah. Okay. He plays the bass. He plays the bass in the youth group thing.

He never comes back. They're like, where's he at? I'm like, I have no idea. He never comes back to pick me and his daughter up. We have to like hitch a ride home. He gets home at one o'clock in the morning. Tells me he was at a jack shack. I believe him him but then he

always fell for that i already know what you did so you might as well tell me so a month later i find out that he got to the uh the like corner store to get gum and he meets a girl named amber amber's wearing a tube dress and boots and a floppy hat she's wearing a floppy hat because she has a bald spot because she had a tumor removed. He's very generous with the details. He takes Amber to the railroad tracks and fucks her for an hour and then drops her off at

her apartment in southeast Portland. Yeah, and she's just like... She probably had head trauma for Christ's sake. She just had a tumor removed. And I lose my mind. I lose, getting cheated on, create, have you ever gotten cheated on? Yes.

That paradigm shift where, yeah, so then every brunette woman in the world was Amber. You got a tumor? Yeah. Let me see that bald spot. All right, that ain't you. All right. You got nice hair.

I wasn't sure if that was like the tumor thing was to throw me off the thing I remember being at Starbucks and the woman giving me my coffee or whatever the coffee places were back then she gives me my coffee and then she had brown hair and I remember being like Amber she was like what and I was like nothing

I went nuts I went crazy hunting Amber I then remember that my mom's meth dealer had a daughter named Amber who had brown hair and would totally have a fucking brain tumor. So I go to this meth lab house that I haven't been to in years. And I asked this Amber chick who I haven't seen in years to come hang out with me. You knew her.

I kind of kidnap her. No, she wasn't her. was just uh amber okay i bring her back to my house and i'm like interrogate like soft interrogating her like yeah we're hanging out isn't this fun uh where were you the you know like and um she's scared she wants to go home uh he finally comes a good you know because i'm like well i want you to meet my husband have you already met my husband you know and he comes home and is like what the and i'm like amber do you remember amber and he's like jesus christ uh a lot of psycho shit like that i catfished him at one point and got him to plan on web tv wait what wait what i got him to like uh fall for some fake person that was just me uh and like make a date to see if he would cheat and he did and he was going he was going to yeah

but then he was like oh i knew it was you i thought it was like the pina colada you know the pina colada song yeah and i was like uh yeah the the peanut colada song didn't say anything about it's hard for me to fuck my fat wife when i think of all the dudes that have been there before me you flirt weird uh oh my god that marriage didn't last how long five years five i one day uh had just been through the cycle of pain so many times. And now you're just legal to drink. Yeah, it was. I was. No, I was 20 when I left the first time I took his kid.

I got a plane ticket and then told him I'm leaving in a couple of weeks and I'm moving to Delaware without you. And then when I got to Delaware, I lost all the weight, cut all my hair off, got an eyebrow rings. It's the 90s. I was alternative now and, was hot shit. And then he came out to visit his kid after three months and then was like, Oh my God, you're beautiful now. Uh,

I miss you. Let's get back together. And I think he was serious and I think he was going to try, but it was just pet cemetery after then. Cause I was done. And so we stay together for another year and it was awful and I hated it. And then, um, and then um and then i found out i could do comedy and he told me i couldn't uh be his wife and do comedy so i said

deal sounds like my perfect arrangement um i started doing comedy because i lied and told people at work there's a lot of accidental uh life experiences i had told people because he was so funny so we were going to open mics to your husband yeah he was so funny yeah and uh we were going to open mics but he never had the balls to go up and And so after a while, I just kept going to open mics. I was just one of these people that goes and watches open mic comedy. And then one day I was being funny at a work dinner and everybody's like, you're so funny. And I was like, I am a standup comedian. I do stand up comedy on Monday nights at Burbati's Pan.

And so the next week they were like, Hey, we're going to see you tonight at Burbati's Pan. We're coming to watch you do comedy. And I was like, fuck. So I got there and I signed up. And when I signed up, the guy Randy was like, I didn't know you did. And I was like, shh, shh, shh. Pretend like you know me. On the mic.

Yeah. On the mic. I crushed. I just did really well. And at the end of that, a guy said, we need a token female for a comedy contest. And so my third time on stage, I did the preliminaries. My sixth time on stage, I did the semifinals. And my ninth time on stage, I did the finals.

Because I was doing two open mics every week. And then I won. Wow. And I won paid work. And then was just a road comic my tenth time on on stage because I was like, had a car and was slutty. So all the guys would take me on the road with them. And so I was a professional stand-up comedian after three weeks and a huge quick paradigm shift. And then he was like, at the end when i won was just like this was cute

but like no right and so i moved out and how do you juggle your daughter and i live uh with my uh in my mom's basement i do stand up while i'm on the road his sister watches her and his sister was someone who i uh constantly compared myself to because she loved being a mom. She had four kids. She homeschooled them. She just like wanted to be around her kids all the time and it was someone that I was like fixated on and in my head I thought

the more time my daughter got to be with her the better off my daughter would be because she was a real mom and I didn't know how to be a mom. I understand that, yeah. Was she a young mom also? You're a kid. You're a kid by the way. Yeah, I am 21 at this point. I? Yeah, you're a kid. You're a kid, by the way.

Yeah, I am 21 at this point. I'm just legally embarrassed. But you were 16 as a new mom. You're a kid. Yeah. She's 30, I think, at this point, because she's like seven years older than me. So she's like, and married, and you know,

she was an adult when she started having kids. She, I get addicted to meth at a gig um in montana you can pinpoint i remember you saying the story but that's the moment yeah i was um i was getting so drunk because you got unlimited drinks on the road back then now they give you like two drink tickets but back then it was like you got to drink all night and i would i've been asked to pay for soda before really yeah i'm like here you go i get club soda and i dump six hour for five hour energies into them which is like um methadone for red bull is what i call it red bull makes me retain water i uh thought i was doing coke at the uh that's what the this is not happening story is about that i thought i was doing coke and i was doing it because i would

get so drunk that i couldn't i was getting pulled over in the morning going to the next gig so and do you are you do you snort it is that how you? That night I snorted it and it was crank and then I was immediately. Did you know right away? Yes. And why? It hurts. It fucking hurts. Because you never did it before though, right?

Right. So Coke just like feels good and kind of gaggy or whatever. This, like my head felt like someone had a blowtorch on it. Oh. And then I, but then the high was like, I felt like I had found the thing I'd been looking for my entire life. I felt like I had found the thing I'd been looking for my entire life. I felt like whatever planet I felt dropped off from simultaneously existed on this planet.

I'm a hoe! Yeah, I am touching all of the dimensions right now. I've read a lot about it. I've mentioned it before. I think Andre Agassi said he did meth, and he didn't win a championship during that time, but he said he had never been more focused in his life. I read about people who just have this crazy...

I know it destroys you, but they say for a while they're just so focused. That's why a lot of college kids like Speed, they stay up late and study and cram and all that shit. I felt like a genius it reminded me of like flowers for algernon i felt like i thought i was an idiot before that because i was bad at school and so i didn't understand myself at all and for me my experience on math was i uh had a great time i learned a lot i lot. I healed all these broken pieces of myself. I learned to love myself.

All from meth. Yeah. Nobody else had this experience. So don't try it. And then as awful as the things that were happening around me, I was having this profoundly spiritual experience that took years off of me processing my childhood. I feel like if I had never become an addict, I never would have understood my mother. And therefore, I never would have accepted myself.

And I feel like the resentment and anger at her would have had a negative impact on my life. I also could never love my daughter until I learned to love myself. That's the truth. And I had to leave society. Or anyone for that matter. Exactly. And I didn't know that. I just thought I was broken, which just fed this loop.

I left my daughter with that family that watched her. My sister-in-law. Kept her. I didn't get custody of her again until she was 14. Wow. And how old was she when you left her? Five. Wow.

Nine years. Yeah. I was clean for a while before I got her back. I lost all my teeth almost immediately. Yeah. Immediately, you said. I already had bad teeth. Let's go. All right. So you snored at that one night. I already had bad teeth. And I... Let's...

All right. So you snored at that one night. I snored at the one night. And then are you like the next night you're on it again? Like how quick does this happen? I am high for like three days. From that night? Mm-hmm.

I get home to Portland. I'm already involved in like an after hours scene, right? There's like a speakeasies and shit. So I already know who has the meth. And then I just become... This dude ends up becoming my best friend for years. But I was just like, I'm going to do meth now.

Like by the time I got home, I knew that this is, this is what I want. And then I end up out of my mom's house within days. Um, I would, I went and asked my sister-in-law to take, uh,

my daughter. And, uh, there's some back and forth. And then of course the whole family's up in arms and I'm not admitting i'm on drugs i'm just like i'm an awful mom i'm an awful mom and she deserves better and fuck off if you don't like it but the cycle's repeating itself now you're your mom to your daughter i felt like i was breaking yeah no exactly but yeah i felt like i was breaking the cycle because she wasn't going to get raised around it. I felt like I was fulfilling my destiny because this is what I know.

Better hands, better situation. And I did to a certain extent. She's not an addict. Yeah, you did. She would have gotten molested and picked up by CPS with me. I do meth for like a year. My teeth went bad are we talking is this a daily thing you're smoking snorting time smoke uh snorting at first and then every day every day and is it but that one bump will get you for a day no i actually end up in like the the after hours club scene for a while. And so it's a lot of like ecstasy, ketamine, GHB, like a lot of drugs.

And then you just go from that party to the after party to the after after party. Next thing you know, it's been like three days. And it was kind of a big group of people leaving society at the same time. I hadn't been exposed to like real old school tweakers until I was years in. And so it was a lot of people that the party got away from and so the first year was a lot like a lot of ecstasy like now that i know more about ecstasy it's crazy how much ecstasy i did like i was doing multiple tabs a day and then you do meth to keep the ecstasy going that'll keep it going yeah um but like now that i know

what i know about mdma it's amazing that my body even produces serotonin uh now they're like you can only do one you know do it once every uh six months or something and i we were just i i was dating uh one of the biggest ecstasy dealers in portland at the time and just had freezer bags they were called called boats of E and I was just like candy. God, so much. I remember we would crack each other's necks because the ecstasy

and the GHB and the ketamine would just be stored in your muscles that if we cracked each other's necks, you would get high. It would give you a high? Yeah. You could just feel lumps in our backs and stuff so much toxic so many drugs i didn't know any of this shit no i don't know how we

just figured it out because our bodies were just plus your addicts you'll figure out yeah yeah especially if it's all stored up in you that's hibernation shit right there. Yeah. So crazy. Tees start falling out. Did I break into the dentist's office before? Tees start falling out how fast? Did I die first? Wait, what? You died? Yeah.

I guess I die before the dentist's office. Holy. So it could have been GHB. It could have been a dude was poisoning me, but I'm not going to tell that story. I'll just leave that there. Fair enough. But somebody had been putting arsenic in my Mountain Dew for a grip.

Like that slow raw? Mm-hmm. I remember thinking, I'll say this much. I remember because I started doing drugs, and I remember looking, I'll say this much. I remember because I started doing drugs and I remember like looking at my fingernails and then being very weird and like weird, like a relief map.

No. And then I remember, I'm 22, 23, and I remember feeling so frail. Like I remember, I was thin for me, which is like a buck 45,

you know, but I am, I was frail my bones felt like they were made like they would just crumble and uh i thought that was just all of the drugs and in retrospect it was the arsenic in my how'd you find that out he ends up telling me you're saying i'll eventually come out and tell the story but i uh for a long time was felt like it sounds like bullshit until I say who the people were that did it and then everyone that's ever partied with Eastern

Europeans is like oh yeah don't piss them off they will put arsenic in your mountain dew anyway gloss over that and so I die I die at a dance club I uh jesse you die i died and i can't give you great uh specifics on this because this was all very strange uh also could have been ghb there

was we're drinking ghb out of water bottles i did so much drugs that i don't think it was drugs but it doesn't um matter so this day i'm at at an after-after-after-hours party. I've never told anybody I've died before. Have you? Really? Have you? Yes. Now it's a big thing of mine. So I've done a couple podcasts with other near-death experience people. And this is almost hack at this point, but this is groundbreaking shit in 2000.

I'm counseling... That's all I would ever thought about. Remember when I died? Y' all remember when i died in 2000 this bitch who had stolen my boyfriend i we were on a break but uh she was supposed to be my best friend and now she was dating my boyfriend and they were fighting and i'm counseling her uh and while he's in the other room uh uh, ignoring her during and after like several after party, I guess it's the middle of the afternoon.

We've all been up for a couple of days. And I am like, listen though, nothing outside of you, good or bad can affect you unless you allow it. And I have no idea where I'm channeling this bullshit from, but while I'm saying it to her, my brain is like, where do you get this shit? And so I start running my own life experience through this new piece of information and i'm like oh my god that is true like i got molested when i was a kid and that is bad but i do get to write the narrative of that like i do get to write that like not nothing is innately anything unless we assign it

and what makes us assign it? Like other people tell us what is good and bad. And so I'm like, I'm having this like epiphany. And I realized this is the secret of happiness. And this is bumper sticker shit in 2019. But this was, nobody talked about this shit in 2000 that I'd ever been exposed to. That night, I was a bully back then. I was very popular for this tiny window of

time and I had never been popular in my life. And I misused that power and I treated people like shit. And so the girl who's supposed to be driving me to the club is like freaking out in the mirror. And I'm like, listen, Stephanie, it's fine. But just know that whatever's happening in the mirror isn't about your hair or your makeup. It's about how you feel about yourself as a person. And if you accept yourself, and then I'm like, where is this shit coming from? We get to the club. I'm hugging people, which is not my thing. I'm telling people I have found the secret to happiness. I'm apologizing to people. People just wanted to be my friend. And I'm like, do you have a tab? Because you're fucking up my high.

Like, I was just a cunt. And this night, I'm like, I am so sorry. You just wanted to be nice. Like, I'm just a completely different person. Everyone's like, what have you done with Jessa? I get a bottle of water from the bar, and I come walking out, and I can see the music coming out of the speakers. And what are you on at this point?

Nothing that I know of. Okay. That doesn't necessarily mean anything. this point nothing that i know of okay uh that doesn't necessarily mean anything like nothing that i remember there was lots of ghb so uh i uh see the music coming out of speakers taking fucking ecstasy like advil yeah so that's what i mean like if i like even if you like roofied me i could drink half a bottle of ghb and still be standing so i don't know but i uh that's the last thing i remember is the music coming out of the speakers. From people that were at the bar, I then foam at the mouth.

I'm on the floor. I'm pissing myself. Are you remembering? No, this is people at the bar told me this. The last thing I remember is the music and the speakers. I get carried out and put into a cab. A cab Which isn't crazy because During this GHB boom

Bars were getting in trouble with the liquor board And so You just didn't want to call Because then you get accused of over serving them So it wasn't crazy that I would just get thrown into a cab And taken to the hospital I participated in stuff like that. So next thing I remember, I am in a blue vibrating ball of light.

I am my own person, but I am a part of this blue vibrating ball of light. I don't have a physical body. I just exist as something in it. blue vibrating ball of light. I don't have a physical body. I just exist as something in it. In this moment, I understand vibration, energy, frequency, consciousness, all of it. I understand all of it. Previous to this, I thought I was a backslidden Christian. I believed in God. I believed that Christ, whatever, and that I was just doing the wrong thing because I wanted to sin. doing the wrong thing because I wanted to sin. In this moment, I realized I am God. I am a part of this. This is God. And the ball of light tells me without words, like my brain translates it to words when I wake up, that you did everything you came to do and you learned everything you came to

learn. You can just stay here now or you can go back. If you want to go back, we have something cool for you to do. The homesickness that I had felt my entire life, this homesickness that just ran in the background where I knew I wasn't from here and I knew this wasn't real and I knew this wasn't the life I was supposed to lead and that it felt like in a dream and I know it's a dream and nobody else knows it's a dream. uh this thing that ran in the background was gone in this blue ball of light i knew this blue ball of light was home and for some reason was still like yeah i'll go back um when i go back i have to live my entire life to get to the present moment in fast forward back in this ball yeah i go from the ball to get to my my current life and i have to be a baby a child a toddler a child like i've lived my entire life like in fast forward yeah i don't even know

how to i guess that's your life flashing before your eyes yeah i've seen like in the videos they'll do the rewind yeah um but it but it felt visceral like it felt like i felt so i'm sucking my thumb when i wake up because I was a baby five seconds ago. And whenever I think of life flashing before your eyes, I think like a linear film strip or something, you know. And this was, I was it. I was living that life to get back to the moment. And then I know a bunch of shit. I just.

What do you know? I know what people of shit. I just, um, I know, uh, what people's motives are. I know, um, uh, it's the most glaring thing you knew coming out of that.

You didn't before you went in reality. Wasn't real that it's a video game that we're playing every day. I swear more and more. I feel like this is a goddamn simulation. Every day, I swear, more and more, I feel like this is a goddamn simulation. I then have alien guides that are with me 24-7 whenever I'm asleep. When you're back now? Okay. Completely different person when I come back.

Do you wake up in a hospital? Yep. And then did you officially flatline? So I wake up in a hospital with the bitchiest doctor. This hospital looks, if it's how I remember it, the room was very dark. And the woman was annoyed with me. And three friends are standing next to me. And I said, she doesn't have my name.

I stole the paperwork and it said Janeane doe foxtrot was the name and uh oh because back then i wore a wedding veil everywhere i went and when people when people asked me why i said because i'm getting divorced i'm getting divorced yeah i thought it was hysterical i dressed very funny this is like this this is actually when the stolen fbi windbreaker and the barbie backpack was it's very eccentric um i said what was the i said was i dead and she said yes and i said what was the cause of death and she goes uh drugs and i said what drugs and she said i don't know your friend said you were on drugs your friend said they didn't test or anything they didn't test i steal the paperwork and it

just says uh patient does not respond to uh, patient does not respond to painful stimuli. Patient does not respond to painful stimuli for like 10 minutes. I don't know. She was poking me with a stick. I don't know. I didn't, uh, there was nothing else on the paper that, uh, said like I had a catheter in and I had a bunch of things hooked up to me. But the second I woke up, she was like, get out. I, we never heard from, they didn't ask for my real information.

Uh, they never billed me. Uh, the whole thing is very strange. I couldn't tell you what hospital. That was nothing. One of the people that picked me up is... Do you still have that paper? No. No.

I had so many police raids after this. He was saying no, no, no. One of the people that picked me up... Like yard sales. yard sale yeah a lot there was a police raid like two weeks later so whatever uh maybe i didn't die all the way i don't i don't know i don't have but i definitely had this yes experience right so um i come back i get dropped off at a house for like five days by the person who's trying to kill me and um i this is way more i've ever told of this story on a podcast by the way i'm just gonna end up telling it probably um i get dropped off and then i spend five days in what we now call alien school where i'm just with these beings

and they look like aliens but they're not solid i think people think aliens are solid these guys are like entered like like plasma and you haven't taken any drugs. I have not. There's no drugs. No. This is all right there real in your head. This is all me. And they said that Earth is a place that we have played games at forever.

Those of us that are a part of this blue ball of light have been everything. We were the dinosaurs. We were the Egyptian gods. We've been every iteration of, and they were all just a part of this blue ball of light have been everything. We were the dinosaurs. We were the Egyptian gods. We've been every iteration of, and they were all just a series of games. And every game has its own parameters. And sometimes we know we're playing a game and sometimes we don't. And that we are currently about to switch games from a three-dimensional,

fear-based game where the parameters are dichotomy and we're waking up out of that and we're going into like an eight-dimensional game where we're all awake, right? And that the thing that I agreed to was helping that transition, right? For you or them? Because we're all one thing.

We're all one ball of life. And so then I just am with these aliens. By yourself in a home. Yeah, but then for years, they just taught me stuff. And at one point, they were teaching me. We've left the hospital. We're back in reality. Yeah.

Okay. I just want to make sure we're not still part of this blue ball and then you're gonna pop out this is back home now yeah i get back home taking care of you i'm in this house for five days i just get dropped off nobody just me and a uh and the picture of poison and uh okay um then i go back to my boyfriend's house and i'm just a more eccentric version of jessa but uh there's something uh about like now i understand i just know i just understand people i can hear what they're thinking i can tell when they're lying um and then i'm being taught things i was taught how to move things with my eyes which i've never successfully done but like i can tell you how to do it like if we uh got to a higher dimension i could do it like i can tell you where like i can feel it in my body where i'm supposed to do it this also hey

i usually do this uh there's also a thing called meth induced schizophrenia and i might just be schizophrenic so just throwing that i'm completely aware of the fact that I probably have a brain tumor. It's fine. This version is just more fun. There was a point where they were teaching me how to hear people's thoughts. And so I was forced to go give people messages. And

these messages were brutal. And who were you were delivering messages, actual messages to who? Just I would write notes to strangers. You would write notes to strangers. You would write notes to strangers. Write notes to strangers at the dance club and just be like. And walk up and give it to them. The reason you can't find the love you're looking for is because you had to forgive your dad for what he did to you and shit. And you would give hands to him?

Mm-hmm. And then just walk out. The stranger just comes up and gives his note. No, a lot of times they would end up becoming friends with me for a long time. I only had one person ever tell me that it was wrong. And it was so obvious that like his ego just couldn't, uh, you know,

he was like a frat boy. So the stranger presents herself to me with a note and then boom, we're connected and start talking like that. Holy shit. Uh, according to them, that's because like every, like I have P I have keys for people that I,

uh, agreed to give these, uh, connect these dots for with people that, uh, I made that I made like so say it is a video game right and we're all playing somewhere me and you were friends and we're going into the game and we're gonna we're going to go into this amnesia in the game and the agreement is that I'll run into you at this point and I'll just have these two dots that need to be connected and boom you wake up and so that's essentially the premise uh there wasn't virtual reality uh it was a it was a concept not really something we saw yet uh technology was different um so the the metaphor is for it but basically what they said

is there is no such thing as right and wrong there is no such thing as right and wrong. There is no such thing as good and bad. Like these light, dark, all is yin yang is all dichotomy, which is bullshit that we created for the parameters of this game. They said there is no male and female. That male and female are one thing and that gender will cease to exist. That in 2000 made zero fucking sense to me. It made no sense. fucking sense to me. It made no sense. Nobody said gender is a construct. They called it parameters. Gender is a construct until a few years ago. I mean, I'm sure

somebody was saying it somewhere, but we had not been introduced to that. They said that everything that has ever happened to you, you wrote into your own story. That nothing has ever happened to you that you didn't allow and uh this concept of free will is because uh you have a person who's playing first person shooter you

have a version of you that's on the ground seeing out of your eyes and you have a version of you that's playing like an rpg do you know anything about video games yeah and that that's your higher self that person has written things into your script okay is halo rpg yeah i don't know if uh it's you know shooter you can do first person shooter or you can watch the guys run you can do that kind of shit okay um at that point i don't think they had games that did both but it's essentially a game where you do both so now it looks like we were hoping it would look like when we were kids. Yeah. And it's fucking real. Yeah.

No, it is. Like, I've walked into people's houses and glanced at Madden before thinking it was a real fucking game for just a second. It's so crazy. The imagery now is like, it's not far-fetched, right? It's not. So, but when you say, like, we live in a simulation, people think it's because computers took over the Matrix or whatever.

It's like, no, it's you. Like, according to the aliens, it's because computers took over the matrix or whatever it's like no it's you like according to the aliens it's you um and uh that the entire like waking up process is just integrating those two things and if you can integrate the rpg version and the first person shooter version you can just create whatever life you want and then get to live it and experience it how do we do that uh uh there are a lot of steps um most of the activation codes are hidden behind your trauma so it's almost a game where you have to conquer your own programming in order to get out if you believe in this sort of thing anyway so that's what i did the whole time I was on meth. How many hours? I mean, hey, so.

So meth goes on during this whole time. So you are doing meth during this. I am doing meth during this. Any other drugs? After the first year, the club thing kind of falls away and we all become like legit uh meth addicts and yeah it's just it comes around every once in a while but the

party's over um i personally was very i consider psychedelics, ketamine. These are like mental health drugs as far as I'm concerned. I even to this day feel like psychedelics, ketamine, ecstasy, like those are things you can use to better yourself. And properly use to help. Yeah. I don't consider them like addictive drugs. So they are in their own category. So if those came around, we would do those.

But I did psychedelics a few times. Crack, heroin, coke, alcohol, pot. I wouldn't do anything else when I was on meth. But you've done all those drugs in your life? I have not done crack or heroin. The cool thing about having an addict for a mom is that I had a realistic drug education.

And this is the same information that I give my kids. When you tell your kids that weed is the same thing as opiates, when you lump those substances together, they're going to try weed. The chances are your teenager is going to try weed. When you have lumped that together with pills, your kid's not going to trust you. And they're going to try pills. And pills lead to heroin.

And opiates are a life sentence. And so my mom was like. Weed is fine. You know it's whatever. Yes you can abuse weed. But you're not going to lose your life. If you do crack or you do heroin. You are serving a life sentence.

I never would have purposely tried meth. Because that was lumped in the life sentence as well. But it is not. Like, my kids know the difference between popping a Percocet and smoking some weed. And I think... So do I. Yeah, I think...

I hate pills. Fuck. I hate them. I'm so glad. I break out. I throw up. Throw up? Okay, same thing.

I guess it's an allergy or something. That's what to him and i was like thank fucking god oh was that that was you that i was listening to i was listening to your episode with tim and you were what you were describing that's i will just hate him white knuckle it after a surgery because i hate pills and i can't imagine getting addicted to that it's's the worst feeling. And then I feel like I'm still in pain. It's just in slow motion. It's awful. I just got, I got dental implants

because some dentist in Portland saw me glue my teeth in on Burtkast and I got $20,000 worth of free dental implants. Wait, what? Yeah. Dr. Brady Smith in Vancouver,hington saw me glue my teeth we started burt cast and i usually glue my dentures in before i get to the place and realized i hadn't and then was like shit my teeth are unglued so i'm gonna be making gross mouth noises through

this whole podcast so i just leaned because he has a video podcast i leaned out of the frame and talk about burt christ yeah yeah and glued them back in on this and burt was like this is two seconds into the podcast i've never met this dude before in my life i don't feel so bad about the inhaler i took before this show no not at all are you kidding me you're lucky i didn't glue them in here so then burt was like oh God. And I am just out of frame. And I was like, uh, apologizing. He's like, this is fucking fantastic. So then Brady Smith sees it and, uh, he has a podcast and he has me come do his podcast. And he's like, do you want implants?

And I'm like, what? This is like something I've Googled, you know, it'll never be like individual teeth. I would have to get a crazy bone graph for that, but it will be a one piece thing that clicks up into these implants um but uh right now they're like i still wearing dentures they're fusing with the bone takes like um six months oh it's so happening right now yeah so they're in but getting those in was fucking brutal yeah oh we have to go back to this um a year a year or two into tweaking uh post aliens i guess we break into a during aliens still but we break into a dentist's office and all of the tweakers are doing you know they're looking for the nitrous which is in a shed in the back for those of you that want to break into.

Yeah. Whip it. Like crack to me seem like whips. Tell them where it is. Yeah. It's not in the building. They're not allowed to keep it in the building. I am rifling through drawers with things that look like filling material.

I am stealing amalgam, because I'm sure i've heard that word and tools and then i i get everything i need to make my own teeth oh so you're going for the teeth yeah all right so i get home and i fashion a bridge because there was like broken teeth right and so i fashion a bridge like tell me like they just fall out they you said dust. They crumble. Like how? Like you brush them and they just fall apart? I don't think I was brushing them. I'm sorry. I'm giving you like a flask. I have a lot of brushing memories.

You said I don't have a lot of brushing memories. I was standing in a living room. Not eating or drinking. Just standing there. Just standing in a living room and heard one of my teeth go, like when you pour water on an ice cube. Yes. And then it just snapped and crumbled into my,

and I was doing nothing. I was not. Just right in your hand? And right in, I spit it into my hand. It snapped. Oh my God. And just broke off.

And they were hollow on the inside. Like there was just like a black stump in the middle. But then otherwise hollow, which I don't know if that's just what teeth do. Your root dying in there as well. I think that was. Yeah. It was just smoke and lye. I'm smoking meth by this point.

I'm sorry. How fast do you say? Just quickly they fell out? Six months? They were already bad. Like I'd already lost most of my molars from pregnancy. I already had an implant. I already had one implant. So my teeth were already bad. Like, I'd already lost most of my molars from pregnancy. I already had an implant. I already had one implant.

So my teeth were already fucked up. I'd already had the, but I like. They look nice though. Thank you. They do look really nice. This one's super glued in. This is whose work here? What's his name again?

This one, these are dentures still over top of the implants are fusing with the bone. This is Salt's Dental Center in Pennsylvania. Chester. But it's super glued in. So, I i mean do what you want with that information um i uh quick i don't know within a year they were bad and so they were bad enough that there was like uh no middle of my front two teeth and stuff so i take this stuff and i mix it and i just put it on and I make a bridge that if I'm across the room from you, I look like a normal person.

I was going to say, does this look like tea? If I'm up close, it looked like maybe I had been eating some dry walnut. I mean, it was You eating paste? A little textured, a little more textured than, you know, I needed to steal like a but those things are all like

uh pneumatic tools or something like into the wall so i didn't i needed a dremel anyway it worked it worked for like it looked like the i had teeth from far away but every time that would like start to fall out it would take whatever it was glued to with it. And so I just kind of took my teeth out faster with that. And then there was, there's a, there's a death process for a tooth. It's like abscess. And then there is the nerve gets exposed at some point. And the nerve getting exposed is just sticking a fork into an electrical socket. It's an awful pain. The abscess, I had just garlic pills work as antibiotics. So I was just on a constant thing of garlic pills. And then i had just uh garlic pills work as antibiotics so i was just on a constant thing of garlic pills and then i had just lanced my gums and would just spit all the time they'd

say don't lance your gums but listen if you have an abscess tooth and it hurts it gets rid of the pain immediately and it's probably how what do you do you just find it uh your gum will be like swollen and there'll be a very glossy, uh, piece of it. And I would just poke a hole in it and it would all drain out. And I would just spit cause you don't want to swallow that. So this is, would probably kill you,

I guess. I don't know. According to the doctors, it was like, this is, you're going to get infection in your brain. Uh, obviously the meth also,

uh, kills it. But I had like almost permanently Lance gums at one point. And then I would have to to prevent that exposed nerve from happening after a couple teeth i learned that once it broke i needed to saw it down and then i would just like cut the gum open and so that it would good god within a couple days grow over top of the tooth and so there was just a lot by the time i got to a dentist to get dentures he was like he looked at the uh x-ray and was like what how did this happen how did your mouth get like this yeah he said i had exposed nerves uh floating bone

fragments a dislocated jaw i was like i think the dislocated jaws were my boyfriend. It was a wreck. It was a wreck. The surgery was a nightmare trying to get all that out of there. Okay, yeah. So that's the dental. But then there was something about losing my teeth that was like body image boot camp. And I used to have jokes about i used to lose and gain weight really bad and i had to stop doing them because women would uh afterwards if i was thin

they would be like nobody wants to hear a thin woman talk about this you know even though it's my actual experience if i was heavy then we'd be like you're beautiful and it's like yeah i know i'm beautiful uh i can't worry about my big thighs they're in style now but like i didn't have teeth in my 20s right yeah you're 20 dude that is but that is but you better fucking love yourself and your personality better be doing motherfucking push-ups if you think you're gonna peel any of these dudes from their hot girlfriends because i don't have fucking teeth like it is open season on the tooth some dudes like thick chicks like some dudes like overweight women like some uh it wasn't

acceptable in society like mainstream back then but like no one has ever been like i like my bitches without teeth that was swimming upstream and i i found a way i was like anything you do with unshakable confidence people will just follow suit i got found a way i was like anything you do with unshakable confidence people will just follow suit i got whoever the fuck i wanted without teeth and i loved that i also the ecstasy dealers uh parents were cosmetic dentists and he offered to get me a full set of implant back then it would have been you know however many individual implants. And I said, no. Sometimes I'm obstinate and regret it. I said, no, because I didn't like him that much. And so I was like, if you want to be my boyfriend,

then you're not going to fit me into that fucking Barbie doll box. What an idiot. What a fucking idiot. I could have had goddamn implants. I i'm fine with it though dentures are fine teeth look great thank you and uh you get to get new ones you start to not like the look of the last one got real chiclet like and then the mormon and the meth head promo is all an old pair of dentures that i got a dremel and some paint and i turned them into tweaker teeth and so i just have tweaker teeth i can pop in. I saw that picture.

Okay, that's what that is. Yep. And that's realistic looking. Yeah, that's what they look like about a year and a half in. So you're snorting the whole time. No, so I'm snorting first year. And then you convince yourself that you would never, right? This is like, I don't say, I would never smoke it.

The people who smoke it the people who smoke it are sketchy then you end up at someone's house who's smoking it and they only they won't make you a line they'll only smoke with you then you smoke it you realize how good that is and then you smoke for a long time and you look down on people that shoot up and then you get a boyfriend and your boyfriend shoots up and then he's shooting up with a girl and they have a special bond and you feel uh left out of their special bond so now you want to shoot up so then next thing you know you're a person that shoots up but then you have tiny veins and uh the only way you can shoot up is in your neck your neck my neck my jugular was the only uh vein big enough

to take the needle yeah because you tried and just tried and just wouldn't work? Yeah. I never had... I got my appendix... They're bigger now than they've ever been, I think, because you can see through my skin. I got my appendix out when I was 14 and they missed... You do have little veins. Tiny. They missed

and blew up. I have a dream. I got a girl right there. Yeah. Geez. I always stare at men's veins still. The nurses like me. I'm a dream. I got a girl right there. Yeah, jeez. I always stare at men's veins still. The nurses like me. I'm like, just hit that one. Yeah, you have this top one right here. That's very impressive. I don't like that.

Post a picture of that. That one I don't like. I bet it rolls. That one hurts. When I went through a bunch of stuff for health, and they were hitting my veins, and then finally they were like, look, we're using these too much.

We have to hit one. When they hit one over here, I was like, uh-uh, uh-uh. That was one of those thin ones, and man, I, we're using these too much. We have to hit one. When they hit one over here, I was like, uh-uh, uh-uh. And that was one of those thin ones and man, I felt that shit. No, fuck. Also, you have arteries that go the other direction

and that's bad. So if you shoot up into your artery in your neck, your head catches on fire in a way that's not pleasant and you don't get high. And that's happened. It has to go to your heart.

Yeah, my fucking brain. And then people would miss because in your neck, you have to hold your breath and like press uh press your breath into your neck so that it won't roll and then uh there were times where it took them to because someone else has to do it and uh has to be someone who's comfortable doing that and then uh you have to trust them a lot and i did let people do it that i didn't trust and it never it didn't go well and then one time i just like couldn't hold my breath anymore so i start breathing that fucks it up so i'd always end up with like high when you say fucks it up no it

like wouldn't go in the vein it would just go into my neck god so that would cause what people uh addicts get like abscesses and stuff right but i knew natural cures for everything which was uh kind of my hustle in i couldn't do crime because i didn't have teeth and was nuts and so i learned natural cures for everything i knew how to cure toothpaste on that i know how to cure mursa and uh other mursa's methicillin resistant staph infection it's a staph infection that antibiotics doesn't fix. Does shit drugs teach you? Does it? Yeah.

Very popular apparently in the Mormon community. I found out that they were getting it on their missions but addicts would get it from jail. Okay. And it would just like

eat your skin. And it was misdiagnosed as brown recluse bites a lot. And so I would just I don't remember what I was doing shoving cayenne in there or something batshit but um i did know how to fix abscesses uh if you missed and you got wet tobacco and just put it on there it would draw it out wow and so i had just tobacco coming out of

band-aids on my neck oh uh a lot and i chased that high because the rush is its own thing. It was the summer, I think I started shooting up in 2001, maybe 2002. And it was the summer of 2004 where I was like, I don't think I like this. I don't even think I like it. I would so often not get high because it would miss. And it was such a frustrating journey to get it. It just wasn't. My body didn't like it. But when it hit.

It hit. It was like an orgasm. Is that the best, like, okay, I just have to, I just want to know. Yeah. Because I feel like a virgin sitting next to me when it comes to drugs. Not to glamorize or anything, but what's the best high from any drug you've ever had? Would it be meth? Yeah.

Would it be by needle or smoking or how? Smoking, it turned you in like a space cadet and you had to smoke it all day to stay high and then you just wouldn't accomplish anything. Smoking created, it like took the focus out of meth. So smoking would create the kind of high where you're like, I'm going to leave the house. And then you're going to leave the house and then you're like, oh, real quick, I got to grab my purse before I can do that. And then you get to your purse where you're like, I'm going to leave the house. Then you're going to leave the house and then you're like, oh, real

quick, I got to grab my purse before I can do that. Then you get to your purse and you're like, oh, my purse is too full of stuff. I have to empty out my purse. It's like this backwards flailing where you accomplish nothing. Shooting up was you get high in the morning, you're high for the rest of the day, you're very focused.

You are. You're not like a heroin high like falling asleep. No, there is an immediate rush that feels like an orgasm. And then you're just like, got your thing. But when you're addicted to that rush, because it's the only way to do it that has a rush. If you can't successfully find a vein, like I cried and cried. Like you're chasing this thing that is devastating if you can't get it um the dope changed also uh they made it increasingly more difficult to get the ephedrine

and so there was less of the meth cooked in trailers and more of the meth coming out from mexico and it was awful cut Cut and just gave me a headache. So I think I slowly started coming down. I also had like graduated from this alien school. Okay, I wanted to go back to that real quick because it just sort of ended. So the four years you spent with the aliens, it was right?

Is that what you said? And then poof, they're gone? Yeah, when I got clean uh so um there were a few things that played into that uh something that they told me would happen uh appeared as if it didn't happen and so when i got clean i was just like oh that whole thing was bullshit like the whole thing was just like drug induced uh bullshit and i for the first time in my life really doubted myself like really uh i have you always been someone that just like has life experience and then deals with the consequences

and um doesn't like isn't driven by fear and uh when i first got clean like that was the most afraid the most legit the most uh like what are the rules okay i want to follow the rules and i've never really been that person i've been very like rebellious like i'll follow the rules i don't care to break uh kind of person and um when i got clean i just felt betrayed by the whole thing but you got so deep in the meth in your story you talk about drinking it your pee oh yeah yeah because you really thought that you were like i know i'm i watch fights and there was a god who the hell was it i can't remember now one of the mexican fighters and he was believe he believed that he was urinating his vitamins out he's like this is valuable shit right here so he's drinking it back and he got

flooded by doctors like yo your kidneys are a filter. They're doing their job. All the shit that you're supposed to have in your body, you have it in there. Stop drinking your urine. There are a lot of people, when I was doing research on this subject, there are a lot of people that believe that urine is a byproduct of blood production. And that when your body is filtering for that moment, if it already is saturated with whatever vitamin, that your body will just put it out of that cycle, but that you could then drink the pee and get it for the next cycle or whatever.

There's a lot more pseudoscience in 2000 this is 2004 2005 i read an article about this is after i did i quit shooting up so i'm eating it eating it what do you mean i don't even know you could do that you can do it you put it in your butt you can do uh so you could just i just put it inside a paper towel and eat it just crush up a little rock or something and yeah uh i think maybe i realized no okay i'm still shooting up when i realize that it's in the p uh i don't start eat it's hard like i had to tell the story a certain way to consolidate it for the thing and now it's hard to remember so the thing that gets cut out of the this is not happening story is the meth lab where i'm trying to make it got it um so a lot of people

are like she went straight to drinking it i did try to make it first but uh uh what in practices what's that called the lawyers for comedy central said that was instructional and i think standards and practices had to be taken oh so you're so you're actually telling them how to make it. I'm telling them how I was trying to make it. So I read an article that's like Time or Life, some mainstream thing. It's talking about the difference between meth and coke. And the reason that so many people are addicted to meth is because it lasts so long. It lasts so long because your body can't metabolize it.

And your body can metabolize coke. So it basically said you're pissing out like the the body has no idea what to do with meth because it's similar to adrenaline or something i don't know so it uh it just pees it out and i'm just storing it and releasing it yeah so i'm like so there's meth in our piss well like you could smoke from a meth bong and then turn the meth bong water back into meth right you could just put it in a tupperware in a like a pyrex in the microwave and get the like it turns it in a straight meth right yeah and so i was like we should be able to do that with piss but i have a very limited like i know how to cook meth because like i've been there while people did it, but I don't have an understanding of the chemistry.

I'm living in an RV at this point and I'm trying to manufacture. I'm just saving buckets of piss and trying to manufacture meth out of piss for a while. Your piss. You're just peeing in buckets. My piss, boyfriend's piss, friend's piss. He said he didn't convert one person.

Nobody was into it, man. At some point that rv gets raided and it's just refrigerators filled with piss i wasn't there for the raid so i didn't have to answer for it but i tried putting it in a pressure cooker i tried mixing it with acetone trying to strain it to get that yeah like uh i've seen people in the comments that are like you should just boiled it like i hadn't fucking tried that right um nothing turned it back into meth i somebody so in googling it though i found that there was a biker uh gang's warehouse busted that found buckets of piss so we were probably doing piss meth somebody who like the bikers know how to make meth. So somebody had figured it out at this point. I see. So you're saying the meth you got

was probably made from piss meth. We had probably encountered it at some point. I had definitely done meth that tasted like piss. Really? Yeah. I don't know if those two things are correlated or not. But it had been done. It had been done.

And since then uh there are people that know but um then i give up on that mission because i'm not living in that rv anymore and uh i still think about it all the time just pre-breaking bad and everything yeah yep i think about it all the time it's one of these things i had a few ideas while I was on meth that nobody would listen to. And this was one of them. And so then towards the very, very end of me getting high, I drink it. And what was that like? Like a psychedelic. It was a completely different high.

I was fucked up. You got high? You did get high. I was fucked up. You drank your urine. I drank my urine. That had meth in it. And you got fucked up. I went to the place in the Matrix.

That part's true. I went to a control room. Different from the blue ball of electricity. We had bodies and stuff there. Plugged in and shit. We were plugged in and then there was a conversation that took place with me that I took to be as proof later that it wasn't real but then all of the things that were said in that boardroom did end up happening after i got clean they did since they didn't happen while i was getting high i was like none of this is real this has just been a

drug trip i'm done with all of this and then a year and a half later i realized that everything they said was going to happen happened after I got clean. Yeah. This was us, though. Like, we were the aliens, but we had bodies. This was like a different level of the dimensions or whatever. Because the aliens said, like, they are us. They're just not in bodies.

And so, yeah, I get clean. I get clean very much like, meh. That's what you said. Just don't do this. I'm done. Yeah. It didn't happen. In that story, I kept trying to tell it the way it did happen because I thought it was funnier.

But it flopped every time I tried to tell it as a story. So in the story, she yells at me and I quit. The true story is I tweaked at her house for hours and it was an awful nightmare for her. And then like a week later, I'm in a relationship with a guy that hits me sometimes. And not like battered woman. This is just a violent lifestyle. This is not the first boyfriend that ever hit me, but this is the first boyfriend I couldn't take. You know?

Yeah. that ever hit me, but this is the first boyfriend I couldn't take, you know? And so, uh, but there comes a point where my self-esteem is just like, my self-esteem is very high at this point in my life. I have accepted myself. I've loved myself and I just like, uh, leveled out of this lifestyle and it ran its course. And, uh, I didn't know that I was going to quit. I was just going to move to Delaware by now now I have, yeah, I've told my parents who thought I was dead for years, by the way, I was missing for years. What do you mean? Uh, I didn't talk to my dad or see my dad for the entire five years.

Uh, nothing, not one bit of, what about your daughter? I wanted to keep asking, you ever checked in on her or she's not here for you? I would, um, weirdly call them on like mother's day and say something to the mom that was raising her uh the father worked like three jobs and one of those was delivering papers so he'd be out at like five o'clock in the morning in portland and see me uh just wandering around the streets yeah and he like the first time it happened was like jess like i'd been missing for a year and a half or something. Missing.

And, yeah, my mom thought it, like, I was, my mom only knew I was alive because sometimes I would break into her house and steal all her groceries or steal her checks or something. But long stretches of time, holidays and shit. I think the longest stretch was, like, two years that they thought I was dead. Jesus Christ.

And, um, uh, but yeah, my dad who I hadn't had any contact with, um, I see my mom, I'm kind of starting to reintegrate without even realizing it.

And I'm like, I am going to steal someone's identity to get dentures. This is my fucking great game plan. And she's like, uh, runs that plan by my dad. And we can thank them that I'm not in prison. And my dad takes money out of his annuity and is like, I will pay for it.

It's like 10 grand. I will pay for this, but you have to come visit. And so I end up going out to visit. I get on an airplane with a fake ID with my real information. Yeah, I still have the ID. Like, thank God they didn't have the blue lights yet. I try to ditch a meth pipe. So I miss my plane because the printer for the fake ID isn't working.

Then it has a big janky line through the middle of this ID. Like the printer just wasn't working in one spot. And I am standing in line. I look like someone who's on drugs. And I look down and realize that there is a dirty meth pipe sticking up out of my bra. But how? I thought you were clean at this point. No. When I'm going out to visit in Delaware, no. You're not. Okay. So the deal for my dad was I'll pay for your top teeth you come out here and visit and then

we'll do your bottom teeth and so this is the beginning of me getting clean i don't know it yet i have drugs in my pocket and uh it's 2004 and i haven't been to an airport since 9-11 so i have no idea that the airport is different now i mean i know that 9-11 happened, but I have not flown. I go to ditch the pipe. And I think that standard operating procedure for ditching a meth pipe is very similar to standard operating procedure for putting a bomb in a trash can. You know, they're looking for this kind of behavior. I slide it down into my sleeve and then I lean my entire arm into the trash can. I switch my plane ticket and then it's this thing where you got to like walk your bags over behind you to drop them off to the security.

While I'm doing that, I turn around and now they have like a group of people surrounding this trash can searching through it, right? Nobody grabbed me, which is weird. I run to the bathroom. I pull my hair up or down. I tie the coat around my waist, and I eat all the drugs that I have. What do you have?

I only have like a teener of meth, which is like- What's a teener? Like 1.75 grand, like half of an eight ball, which is, where do I relate this? Enough to like stay awake on this trip and not be high um i also had a couple hits of acid and some took that dextro amphetamine i ate all of it jesus christ at once yeah i'd be scared to sit next to your ass i didn't want to throw it away the acid was bullshit i guess because i didn't get fucked up i um and then trapped in the san francisco airport for eight hours they catch

you coming out of the bathroom no uh my layover is just eight hours because i had missed my flight and so now it's the middle of the night i don't have five dollars and so i'm just like twacked out trying to work up the nerve to like shoplift something from um like a store at the airport and i don't and it's just awful i then get to uh the philadelphia airport and my whole life i've been flying across the country i've been flying unaccompanied minor since i was five some of my favorite memories are of uh running off the plane into my dad's arms you know yeah um they don't let people go to the gate anymore and i don't know that you know i don't know? They don't let people go to the gate anymore. And I don't know that, you know,

I don't know that they don't let you go to the gate to meet your 28 year old daughter. So I get to the gate. I now have been without meth for long enough that I just need to sleep and I pass out at the gate. So it takes a long time for my dad to realize what has happened. And so then he has to send someone down to get me. And then, so my dad's like a few years clean at this point, maybe he's like six years clean. And he just manages to not talk about it. Like nobody addresses the elephant in the room,

which was so brilliant because eventually I end up saying something. The trip is very surreal in that I don't have any drugs and I'm still smart and I'm still funny and I'm still happy and I still love myself and these were all things that I gave credit to meth right I thought I would do meth every day for the rest of my life I had no desire to get clean and all of a sudden I'm having this kind of paradigm shift where I'm like could I be happy in society I loved everything about meth I didn't care that about meth. I didn't care that it was awful. I didn't care that I was intermittently homeless. I didn't care that the violence that happened around me and to me,

I didn't care. Like to me, it was like, this is the price of doing business. Other people like go to detox and shit. And I would be like, give me your drugs. You're wasting them.

You know, like you're a pussy. Shit or get off the pot, you know, like just in or out. And i was in and now all of a sudden i was thinking uh am i giving meth credit for things that are just me now and anyway it's very strange and at the end of the two weeks i said uh to my dad um like the last night i was like this is the longest i've been sober in five years and he starts starts talking about recovery. And then I was like, oh, I'm not going to get clean. Uh, I just was saying, he takes me to the airport the next day and he says the smartest thing he could have

said, which was if you get home and life is a little stale, you always have a home here. And, uh, if he had said, uh, scary or desperate or awful or painful or uh devastating or any any of these words that people associate with the kind of life i led it would have uh not clicked at all still but if you want to talk me out of something imply that i've already done it implied that the course has been run imply boredom and i will uh i'm so afraid of being in a rut i'm so afraid of um staying on the same track for too long as my life is all these drastic changes of scenery and stuff i'm afraid of of at the end of my life being like well there's a loop i was stuck in for a decade that's my my worst nightmare. And so stale was the word I needed to hear because I get home and my boyfriend

has robbed my friends. So now I have to live with him, even though I said I was never going to live with him again because last time he was mean to me. And now I have to live with him again. And then I look at his phone or his camera and he had been fucking his ex-girlfriend. This is all like stale. This is all life experience I'd already had. I'd already done all this. And it was like, then we got to try to get the money for the drugs and blah, blah, blah.

And so I kind of just was spending a lot of time thinking about getting out of it. He hit me one more time and I, it was it. I was like, I can't, I'm not staying here.

I still was going to do drugs. I called my dad and said, I want to come back. It's stale here. And then I like made arrangements for someone to mail me meth once a month. And then I got my teeth. I got on my bottom teeth. I got on the airplane.

But isn't that just fucking the teeth up? Dentures, yeah. We'll eat dentures also. We will, right? Yeah. But like, I, you know, you can buy new dentures. The expensive part was the oral surgery. Right.

I get on the airplane. I get high one more time before I leave. And then I get on the airplane and i just was like playing the tape forward and was like i'm gonna get ripped off by tweakers i'm gonna send them money they're gonna take the money they're just gonna they're gonna want to send me the drugs but they're not and then if i do get the drugs i'm gonna get high by myself in delaware like they don't have meth there i I'll just get sober. And that was it. I, by the time I got to Delaware,

I was just like done. And, uh, how old are you at that point? 20. It's like a week before my 28th birthday. 20th? 28th.

I mean, Jesus Christ, you live 10 lives in 28 years. Yeah. So then, so, and how many children do you have now? I have four. So I have a 24 year old. I have a, that's the one you had when you have now? I have four.

So I have a 24-year-old. That's the one you had when you were 16? Yeah. Okay. I have a 16-year-old stepson who we're not together anymore, but it's still my stepson. I hear you a lot. And then the younger two are eight and five. Okay.

And they live with me in LA. You have two young kids right now. Mm-hmm. Holy shit shit you're doing all this out here right now yeah so and they're homeschooled are they really yeah by you you homeschool how do you know how to do that is there a curriculum that's on the internet i don't like i could have never done it back when uh it was books and shit when your sister-in-law was doing it yeah yeah no uh but now it's just like they log in and uh i just say like how like the the eight-year-old's gifted and so she does like a grade every four months really so yeah she has to be like pushed otherwise she gets bored so uh we've been really lax with it i've been letting

her uh spread it out quite a bit but she she still grades ahead, so it's fine. So at 28, you're clean and sober, and you've been since? Yeah, I do psychedelics now. I'm not an addict. That took a long time for me to figure out. I got clean. I just recently came out of the closet about this also. I got clean. I moved to, I just recently came out of the closet about this also. I got clean. I moved to Delaware. My dad's in recovery. And I remember I was just done. I had no desire to use. I was just like, I decided not to do it anymore. I just wasn't going to do it anymore, which isn't very addict like. just wasn't going to do it anymore which isn't very addict like um and then uh i was coming down which takes months of like this like uh uh like buzzes in your brain and like this like the it's

not as bad as heroin but it's a process and uh i remember my dad playing pool and him taking me to a bar and him being like uh is it hard to be at a bar? And me thinking, oh, does he think I'm never going to drink? Like, I'm going to drink. I just want to finish coming down first because alcohol is a downer, you know? And then he took, I had crippling social anxiety. That was the worst thing that happened.

Well, I did stare at the sun. Oh, we forgot that story. I did stare at the sun. So I have burnt maculas while I was high on meth. You stared at it with your eyes open? For four hours. No.

Yeah. And it burned your eyes? Yeah. So what happened? I'm lucky I'm not blind. Yeah. That's what the doctors tell me. What is that?

How does it affect you? If you look at that light bulb for a second, for like 20 seconds, and then look away, and you see the flashing blue and red. So I just have that permanently. Permanently? Every time you blink, you see that? blue and red. So I just have that permanently. Permanently. Every time you blink, you see that. Yeah.

I mean, I can see it right now. It covers up like the black part of your eye. One eye is worse than the other one. And the macula also controls the, the fine detail that you see. So like if there's multiple brunette dudes in a show, I can't tell who's who

uh it kind of gives me a form of like face blindness face blindness like a mental thing but like um and then it i had 2020 vision it fucked up my vision because my eyes are always trying to maneuver around the blind spot so it's a dumb uh conspiracy theory i had how are you doing comedy at this time or are you not i'm not so i quit i quit doing comedy uh about a month into math because i hallucinated that i saw a crawdad on stage and walla walla that was a wrap man uh i was bombing i've lost weight super fast and all my jokes were about being chunky and then because i've only been doing i've been doing comedy full-time but i've only been doing comedy for nine months at this point and walla walla washington was one of these rooms where it's like 150 people they treat you like a rock star you know they all want to fuck you and be your

friend and everything else they all laugh at every single thing i'd already done this room and crushed i get here i'm skinny i'm skinny because i've done a ton of drugs already and uh all my jokes are about being fat so it's off-putting and then uh i'm not there's no inflection there's no delivery i'm just saying the words from the jokes and it's awful and they're all staring me like what the fuck and then some giant crawdad scorpion uh thing starts walking towards me and i stop and did you really see i react to i mean it didn't exist but i saw it and then i react to it and then stare at it for a minute long enough to realize like okay that's not real and then have to look back and realize there's an audience

staring at you staring at me staring at this thing right and I'm sure I went like and jumped and so I end up running off the stage crying and locking myself in the bathroom and then that club owner told me that I could have my money or my hotel room or bar owner

because I didn't earn both. And so I really needed a hotel room because I needed a fucking nap, but I need the money because I needed another tiner. So I took the money and then I drove home asleep. I was sleep driving through the fucking gorge. I don't know if you've ever been through the gorge in Oregon. Gorge of George. And in my head.

Oh, that's in Washington, the one I'm talking about. It is on both sides. Columbia River there? Yeah. Okay. So I'm driving and in my head... Oh, that's in Washington, the one I'm talking about. It is on both sides. Columbia River there? Yeah. Okay. So I'm driving and in my head, I'm in and out of this like twilight sleep. And in my head, I'm being guided by the trucks with their lights are driving my car. In reality, they were just flashing their lights because I was going six miles an hour.

I have no idea how I didn't die. That's one of these like life is a video game i do start to get pulled over at one point a cop stops me and i wake up enough and the adrenaline kicks in i realize i'm being pulled over and then someone just flies by so fucking fast that the cop pulls out from behind me yeah uh i have no idea how I lived through that night. Like, that is one of the scariest things that I ever did. So, you're so open with all of this. How do you tell your kids not to do this stuff? Or is it just, like, listen to what I've been through and it should be enough for you?

Like, what's the... I give my kids a very honest... I teach my kids honestly and openly about everything. And so, the oldest one one i taught her what i told you about drugs which is weed is not the same thing as uh pills here's uh here's why pills seem cool but she listens to this stuff i'm sure yeah she did at one point decide that she wanted to party a little bit harder um back when i thought i was an addict i was very afraid of her becoming an addict you know and uh and projected a lot of that stuff on her and like my,

one of my sisters and stuff. And, uh, it was stricter than I would be now, but, uh, it was hard to keep her off of weed in high school. Um, and, uh, she like couldn't smoke weed and not get kicked out of school every fucking day. So I was like, you have to stay sober. So I'd like drug test her and stuff and like bribe her through high school. And I'm glad I did that because I do think she had a little bit of a tendency toward that. She's grateful that I made it so difficult. And then she was partying pretty hard right out of high school. And I was like, you can't live here and do that. You know, people ask me all the time, like, how do I help my kid who's on drugs? And I'm like, kick them to the curb. And if your kid's on heroin, that's on drugs and I'm like kick him to the curb and if your kid's on heroin that's fucking awful and

scary because it's they might die but they have to go figure it out without the comfort of your home is the most dangerous place and so she partied like a rave partied

for like six months and then you know she smokes weed she's fine She's a mom. She's a mom. Oh, you're a grandma? Yeah. Oh, congrats. Look at you go. You're doing great.

So clean and sober for how long? I quit meth in 2005. That's a long time. And then I didn't do anything for like seven years. And then I tried mushrooms and then didn't do anything again for years. And then in this last year,'ve done uh like acid and stuff uh it took me a long time to get to the conclusion that I'm not an addict and I hate alcohol and weed makes me self-conscious like I just I don't like most substances and I said, I think psychedelics serve a different purpose.

So I'll do those. Plus that's very, you know, you're not doing acid every week. But I just like being sober. I figured out how to do all these things sober that now I feel like why would I add alcohol to the mix? Right. You know, I figured out how to be in social situations without it. I think weed is medicine. I'm very pro weed.

I'm very pro weed. It just doesn't do anything, but freak me the fuck out. I hear you now. But that's because scientists are growing this shit now, not farmers. Yeah. You guys are fucking taking it to another level.

I think different people have different chemistry, and I know so many people who like, don't have to be on psych meds because, you know, they're able to treat their own depression with weed and stuff. I think that's fucking fantastic. My mom has R.A. It is the best medicine she's ever had.

So I'm super pro weed. It just doesn't just makes me self-conscious and hungry. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming. You have been. We stopped and took a bathroom break, and I'm just shaking my head over here like you are something else. You are. You really are.

Thank you so much for coming on here. Thank you. This was great. Thank you for being open and honest. I mean, you're the first person I've ever talked to that's died, and a lot of that drug stuff is first time for me too. Yeah, you're really something else. Thank you so much, for real. It's been awesome to sit and talk to you. Thank you.

Will you please, one more time, anything you want to promote, your podcast, your website, all of it? Mormon and the Meth Head is the podcast. That's the biggest thing. Start at the beginning. It is an unfolding story that won't make a lot of sense otherwise. And then we are touring

the East Coast and the Midwest coming up soon. So just jessareed.com. All right. Well, thank you again. Thank you. I really appreciate you being here. As always, Ryan Sickler on all social media, ryansickler.com. Talk to you all next Wednesday.