AN EASY LIFE IS NOT A FULL LIFE WITH GEOFF SPEYRER (P.1) transcript

[Music] hi everyone welcome to buckle up podcast i'm natalia earl and i'm a certified business and life coach that loves talking to people i'm fascinated by humans and how our brain works what is it that makes a decision good or bad and how does that decision ultimately shape our path and destiny everyone loves to talk about success but what about the flip side how about adversity failure is such a big and often necessary part of life and it's simply unavoidable so i invite you to join me on this inspiring honest unpolished interview show with breathtakingly real conversations that go deep on setbacks and hardships that are part of the puzzle that ultimately lead to growth discovery of inner greatness and what makes us resilient grab your helmet and buckle up people it's going to be a bumpy ride but what a ride it will be [Music] today's guest jeff sparrow served 12 years in the army as a combat engineer and an infantryman while deployed to iraq he was a lead vehicle gunner on an eod escort and security team as well as on route clearance when returning home from iraq jeff didn't realize or understand what ptsd and tbi was until he was so deep into addiction and selling drugs that he didn't even know how to ask for help nor did he really want it for the next 13 years jeff would suffer from suicide attempts incarceration after incarceration different institutions and five and a half years of being a fugitive it wasn't until the last incarceration that he found his fire for life and decided that he would invest as much energy into rebuilding his life as he did destroying it jeff knew he was destined for more than that pit of hell he was living in so you served for 12 years and then coming back home i know you touched on it what was it like like did you feel like i don't belong here i don't fit in um i had a lot of resentment towards like everybody um so when you go i feel like for myself um going through the type of situations that we went through out there and stuff like that like we i worked with um my unit was attached to uh eod so we did uh eod escort and security missions i was a gunner on a humvee out there uh i we also did route clearance missions which if you don't know what that is that's like riding down the road basically at three miles an hour three to five miles an hour you have to maintain these distances between each vehicle you got these warlocks frequency jammers and all that good stuff that's going on um to protect you from anything that's like um like like radio debt or wirelessly detonated or something like that anything that's going to have like a frequency or a cell phone on it hopefully right so uh it won't stop anything command it so like if it's attached to an actual like deck cord and shock tube and um detonating device and stuff like that then it's not going to it's not obviously not going to stop a hard-wired um ied but um coming home after the uh the deployment that that we had uh the resent that i had towards people and then like i had a couple like i had a couple people that after a while you know were like man you gotta like how are you not over that yet and i'm like you wouldn't even know because you were never there right like so that was the first feeling of complete detachment that i felt from everybody i already knew i was different i already knew that the situation that had taken place uh changed who i was you know everything and not just that it's just i changed into a completely different person and i was mad at a lot of people for situations that took place in my relationship situations that took place in this and what i really didn't understand was the amount of ownership that i needed to take for these situations people were like but man you didn't my life just really started falling apart um you know i i was in the strip clubs all the time and and doing drugs and you know selling drugs and just trying to basically kind of maintain a habit that was forming um i got really really hard off and or really bad off into selling drugs and the street life and and and all that stuff uh i was given medication to help with some of the issues that i was having with like night terrors and um and just like the the stress that i was dealing with um and i was put on some medication to help with that and by the military and then my leg got messed up i developed compartment syndrome um ended up in the hospital uh they did a fasciatomy on it cut it open um and then some unfortunate situations took place with uh with the leadership that i had and i lost my uh tricare so and people don't know how to help you either necessarily at this point in time in 2004-2005 uh they i don't think anybody was really ready for the amount of trauma and and whatever like that that was going to come back with with everybody right or that because i mean you didn't necessarily exactly and this is another thing that i didn't realize was that i had resentment towards anybody that didn't go to combat or like that wasn't like in the thick of the [ __ ] right like if you didn't have to fight for anything i was just like oh you didn't really you didn't really do anything and that was a very that was very like shitty on my part that was not cool of me that was like you know and ever since then i've done so much like i've had so much growth in the past like 15 years and i mean this isn't something that that actually um that i even gained appreciation for until after like i was getting sober until after i had went like been incarcerated this last time like a little over three years ago it's not even like i felt that way all the way up until the past couple years like i just had resentment towards people i was just like pissed off at the world i i didn't know how like you know i was just mad at everybody because i felt like it was you know what it was it was a victim's mindset i was i felt entitled to certain things um and that was wrong now i believe in like literally working like working for everything you know um i feel like that if you're not if you're not working and you're not you know working hard and you're not you know trying to instead of being a victim being a victor you know like it's the only thing cool about being a victim is overcoming that [ __ ] right you know what i'm saying and like leaving that mindset behind you you know and like overcoming that like just com getting to a point being like you know what we're gonna own everything from here right you know and so what was that and that took place is a a couple days after that sentencing i was supposed to go to a program that was like literally five mount like five minutes up the road um so it's like instead of getting shipped to a program five minutes up the road i got shipped five and a half hours up the road to prison okay so i wasn't supposed to be sentenced to state time i was supposed to be sentenced to county time or in louisiana which is where i'm from parish time it's the only state that's got parishes uh so anyway i get to i get there and like a few days after i was there um i get the [ __ ] kicked out of me by a guard i like not just kicked i get beat i get sprayed i like with mace and all this stuff i lost vision in my eye for a while i was like just you know it was a really bad situation um so after the situation i was like i never want to put my life in somebody else's hands like that again the only time that i'm comfortable with my life being in somebody else's hands is in combat with my brothers and sisters right you know what i'm saying like i just don't want to put my life in somebody else's hands especially not in that situation because generally they don't have the empathy for you or compassion for you because in their eyes you're just the [ __ ] up you know what i'm saying in that situation in that facility i'm not saying that it's like that in every facility i'm not saying that all people are like that i'm just saying in that particular situation right because jail did turn my life around it did help me become a better person you can either become a um institutionalized and want to live that way forever or you can take those situations and be like and realize i never want to be in that again and then take ownership of your life and do the necessary steps take the necessary steps to go forward and improve that yeah definitely so that's kind of like that's the situation that kind of like that switch in this six month period is when that switch really flipped of like i'm meant for something else tonight you know what i'm saying uh while i was locked up it's whenever i re-found my passion for reading while i was incarcerated that's the freest i have ever been in my life while i was locked up you're literally not going anywhere have no i mean i want to say no access to the world but you have very minimal access to the world but the books were my access to whatever i wanted to to uh to be read you know feel um and think about you know so i read some really good books in there that helped me um develop a better mindset uh i was net it was like very minimal time that i was actually inside those walls because i read that much and i would talk to guys and i'm like the whole time that i was in there i'm like man i don't say the whole time but like in that last half of the three months i was telling people i was meant for more than this i'm gonna get out and i'm gonna do something with my life i don't wanna come back i don't wanna