Tell me about your life.

“I met my girlfriend six years ago when we worked together. I first saw her when she was sitting outside on the picnic bench. She was reading a book and she was having a cigarette and I was like ‘Whoa.’ I started talking to her there. And then I didn't see her for a while. I just had this huge crush on her. I wrote my number on a paper and I gave it to one of our bosses. I didn't know what was going to happen. I just went for it. I didn’t see her for a bit. I went into work to go shopping one day because I knew her schedule. Our schedules were posted in the lunchroom. I saw her there and she was just surprised. We were both happy to see each other. I waited for her to go on break and she told me she couldn’t do this because she was married. I was disappointed. Later on, she was going through so many things in her marriage. During that time, we ended up falling in love. She's been through a lot of trauma growing up. She's really friendly with people. She has two daughters with her previous marriage. I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I was 21 at the time and I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know anything about holding a relationship or even have a household with kids. I mean, some things happen for a reason. I just can’t explain it. I thought it was pretty rare because we fell in love instantly. I ended up pretty much living with her at her apartment, right off the bat. We just moved so quickly. It was such a big change for her kids, but it worked out. We just kept moving forward, there was a lot of things that we had to go through. I haven't been the greatest over the years, but I've definitely improved. When I met her, I thought I had my shit together. She did so much work to change the quality of her life. I put her through a lot and she just stuck with me. She’s really helped me understand myself.

I always knew I was going to study jazz music. I knew I wanted to be a really great guitarist. I had this dream in my mind that I was going to go to New York. I made that decision when I was in grade 11. I was really influenced by the teachers around me and the festivals we were attending.  I just love music in general. Little did everyone know that I was hiding behind a guitar for a long time. I didn't want to sing in front of anybody. I wanted to join the vocal jazz groups in high school, I wanted to join choir. I thought people were going to make fun of me. I was traumatized from when I was growing up. I don't blame my mother for it, at the end of the day. I respect her and you know what, she's only dealing with me the way she was brought up and that was the way she was taught. She supported me but just not in the way that I needed. She was really hard on me and really strict. She would compare me to my brother and sisters. My sister just jumped over her childhood trauma and decided that she was going to overcome it. I always looked up to my brother. I always thought he was super cool. He was just really talented. He was athletic and he could just pick up anything and do it really well. But he became a drug addict and he has been for 20+ years. I got really bad and I was getting worse so she would tell me that I was going to be like him. I didn't make the right choices in my life. I decided to do things that were going to mess me up really good. I just didn't have that support.

My mom was kind of abandoned by her mother. There was this family that she was friends with, and her mother told her that like she should go live with them because they were rich or whatever. She lived with them for a while because her mom told her that she’d be well off with them. When she wanted to come back because she missed her family, her mother told her she was stupid for it. I didn’t know my grandparents that well, but they were around when I was a child. I know she's been through some trauma that obviously fucked her up. Because she’s been through that, it makes her act a certain way without her maybe even knowing that she's being that way. Just cause that’s all she’s known. This is what she's done for so long. I know she sees through some of her actions sometimes. She has gotten better and I still love her dearly. I always will.  I've been putting in so much work into unbecoming. You take on a lot of your traits from your parents or some of the things you've been through as a child. Those things follow you until you recognize that some of those things are not what you want. And it's not something you want to act like anymore. I cannot totally blame her 100%. Our relationship is much better now. I just separate myself from her when she’s being negative. It’s better that way. Luckily, my dad was pretty supportive.  

Eventually, I started slowly losing control of my life and my goals and the things I had in mind. I started to become a drug addict, I started using when I was 16. I’ve had other childhood trauma that has affected my life, my relationship, everything. I was also molested by a family member as a kid and it really fucked me up. I was threatened to do it. I was just a kid and didn’t know what to do and I didn’t understand. That’s a part of my anxiety and childhood trauma. So, I never really felt really good about myself. I never believed in myself. And I always felt like I had to turn to drugs and alcohol because it was going to help me be not so rigid or it would help me be more confident. But after that, I was just looking for things to make me feel good. I started out smoking weed in high school. I was smoking weed all the time. I went to Brandon University to take the music program. Things were going great but then I met a friend that was really, really, toxic for me at the time. He was partying, drinking, and doing drugs. He’s still a good friend of mine. But he started introducing me to drugs that I’ve never done before. I was curious and I wanted to feel good, I wanted to feel better. I struggled because the drugs were making me lose focus. Part of my focus was still that I still wanted to become a really good musician. I wanted to be really great. Living in dorms, I look back and it was a really good time. But I was making really bad choices that were breaking me down mentally and physically. I left my first year and I didn't do as good as I wanted to. But I did become a better musician. I was always devoted to becoming better at that and I practiced my ass off. My Academics weren’t so great. I was suffering and the school was disappointed in me. When I went to Brandon during the Jazz Festival, I played for them and they were really impressed. I got a resident scholarship for the whole year. When I came back to Winnipeg after my first year, I was skinner and my parents noticed it too. Everything started to catch on later. My mom asked me if I was doing drugs. She knew, because she had already experienced this with a child who is a drug addict, which is my brother.  

I ended up getting heavily addicted to cocaine for a few years and doing any drugs that I could find. Cocaine was the main one. When I came back to school for my second year, I did much better. I brought my grades up, and I was just going through this recovery phase. I don’t think anyone ever knew that I was a drug addict.  Third year came around and I left school because I got in trouble at the bar, and with the law. I was drinking one night and ended up getting charged with assault on a police officer I think I ended up punching him. I was kind of blank on some of the things I did but I knew that I messed up. My friends and I had graffiti damage, property damage, assault on a police officer and resisting arrest. I was in the drunk tank for one night then I walked home from the police station. I wrecked this tree at school, and I had to write an apology letter to the person who planted the tree. It was a special tree planted in front of the school. When I told my dad, he said: ‘You’re going home.’ During school, I did tell him a lot of the times that I was depressed. I'm still actively pursuing sobriety. I’m doing much better compared to before. Addiction is a horrible thing.

I always had a pretty low self-esteem and my girlfriend has helped me recognize that. A big part of probably why I’m so nervous and anxious of what everybody else thinks is because I never believed in myself. I’m usually afraid of a lot of people because I've been hurt.  I think about my identity, what I think of myself, what I believe in, and how I perceive myself. But I'm getting better at it. I just tell myself to not be afraid, and to just be normal. It's built up over the years. I get nervous every single time before I perform. I know it’s normal to be nervous. But I get to another level of anxiety where my mind just goes blank. It doesn’t seem like it though when you see me perform, if you really knew me, you’d know I was nervous. I have to tell myself that not everyone is paying attention. It’s something you feel so exclusively. If it's strong enough people will feel it. They will start to feel your aura and your energy. A lot of is in my head, because I make it up. It’s this battle that I’m trying to deal with. My struggles stem from all this conditioning that I have. I just wasn’t always aware or cautious of it. I wasn’t questioning why I was the way I was. It was almost like I was on autopilot. I was just letting my mind think whatever. I never even questioned why I was afraid.   

I’ve learned more and more along the way that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself for. At the end of the day, this was just an experience that I went through. Sometimes I don't give myself enough credit for like being good at what I do. I’m always trying to find a way to get myself out there as an artist because I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of years. I basically didn't spend a lot of my time building myself up and catching up with the scene around me. We’ve just got to enjoy this life. The main goal is that everybody just wants to be happy. You have to unbecome the things that you don’t want to be. We’re all here letting life unfold. Everybody has some sort of purpose that they want to pursue in life. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. I know I have these desires and I know that I have these dreams. But I don't know what direction life will take me. I just have to go with that and enjoy the ride a little bit more. I realize that none of us are in control. You got to go through it to experience it. You have to heal from your past and all the things that traumatized you and hurt you. I know it’s never too late and I’m just trying to overcome all these fears that I've created for myself. I have to constantly catch myself through awareness. I’m trying to rebuild who I am as a person and my beliefs. And I’ve done a lot of things to improve my quality of my life; meditating, exercising, healthy eating and prayer.”