Eric Smith: From Music Prodigy to Mental Health Advocate

Welcome to Why Not Me the World? Podcast hosted by
Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join
us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will
make you laugh, some will make you cry. Real life
people who will inspire and show that you are not
alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World?
Humanity over Handcuffs the Silent Crisis special event. Joining us
today is Eric Smith, a nationally recognized mental health advocate,
public speaker, and consultant. He is a Commissioner with the
Texas Judicial Commission on Mental Health and is the founder
of Eric W. T. Smith Consulting, LLC, where he provides
invaluable support to families and individuals affected by serious mental
illness with his wealth of knowledge and experience. We're grateful
to have him here today. Thanks for coming on. Hey, Tony,
how's it going going great? Thanks? Can you give us
a little background on how your journey with mental health started?
So right around age three, a little kid living at
home with my mom and dad. They had a you know,
old school upright piano, you know, small home, small piano.
I have members of this, and there's a photos of
it somewhere here. Music was such a driving force in
my life. I remember getting ready for a bath one night.
I had this melody in my head from the sound
of music, you know it was. You know, it's the
famous doa Deer, Female Deer song, if anyone's familiar with that.
And I had this in my head, and I remember
the bath is being drawn and I just run, run,
run out to the piano and I'm there, not playing
some expert version of it, but I'm sitting there il
key is se no flats, no sharps for the musicians listening,
so it's one of the easier keys to play. And
I sit down and it's like the notes, doh, what
dear a feme And I'm doing it. My parents are like,
you gotta be kidding me, Like he's transferring melody to
the piano such a young age. And the picture to
which I'm referring that still exists is me sitting with
a I've still got my sweater on, but I've got
like no bottoms on, so I'm just sitting there at
the piano, just kind of like going all out trying
to play as a musician. And I think at that
point it became very apparent to my parents that nurturing
my creative music side was a good idea because it
was something I was gravitating to in the first place.
So let's fast forward to like third fourth grade type stuff.
I am in what were advanced classes. For the time,
I was in advanced Math, advanced English. I had a
lot of friends, which will be relevant to a later
part of the story where I did not have a
lot of friends, But for this time, I had a
lot of friends and I was studying music. It was
a huge part of my life. And it got to
a point where at the start of fifth grade, when
I moved to Texas, there was my piano teacher who
eventually became for the next several years my teacher, and
I'm happy to show her name, Anya Grikowski, who is
a world renowned classical pianist. I started studying under her,
and within a very short period of time, I ended
up starting to learn pieces that were like college entrants
and college exit pieces. But I was like in middle
school at that point, it truly became clear that this
was more than just a hobby for me and something
that I was excelling at. Fast forwarding to high school,
my sophomore year was the last full year of high
school because I dropped out of high school my junior year.
And that's relevant to note because in my right around
that same time, I opted to stop playing music. And
this is after I had had of the local CBS
affiliate do a primetime news story on me about my
musical achievements and the accolades and whatnot. It was after
that I had the pleasure of performing on stage with
William Warfield, Grammy Award winner from a famously known as
Singing ole Man River from Showboat and Everything look like
it was a line where I'm gonna succeed in du musician.
You left high school, you stopped playing music. What changed for.
You to do?
This?
Serious mental illness and addiction through a huge wrench in it.
And I don't want to get too lost in the
weeds of it, but I felt very creative when I
was seriously mentally ill. Very creative. Part of it was
the mania part of it just straight up to psychosis.
There are periods of time I'd stay awake for a
day a day and a half just recording music, writing music,
tightening up the lines, changing up the lyrics. It was
making my symptoms worse. After I finally got sober in
two thousand and six, and after I finally found sanity
some years later, I was afraid to get back to
playing music, performing it, writing it because it was so
closely tied to my addiction. In serious honest and I
don't want to do an injustice by saying music is bad.
I'm saying for me. It scared the hell out of
me that it was so tied to my addiction and
my serious mental illness that I was afraid to have
it be an element in my life again. And I've
only recently, for the first time ever performed publicly again.
It was small. I'm a member of the board of
directors for the Schizophrenic and Psychosis Action Alliance and a
good friend of mine and colleague, doctor Rob Lateman. You
may have heard his name before. He's there and he
serves on the board as well. So he gently coaxed
me into playing there for the board of directors and
the people who were there for that meeting, and it
was nice. Like I turned around, everyone had their cameras out,
you know, lots of applause, And it was the first
time I'd performed publicly since before I fell ill with psychosis.
And I know that was like a long answer to
your question, but I'm trying to help you understand how
much music meant to me and also how much it
scared me. Did you do to how my life unfolded?
Not a problem.
Music is a very powerful instrument. It can bring back
the best of memories, it can bring back the worst
of memories. So I totally get that what happened that
got you off track for everything that you were doing
at the time. You mentioned psychosis. With that said, what
path did your journey take you to next?
For me, I was a straight edge kid, like I
had never been drunk or high of any kind prior
to my sophomore year of high school. But because my
grades started to dip in middle school, there were parent
teacher conferences called, and the teachers were concerned that I
went from being in advanced classes to barely passing and
then eventually ultimately failing having to go to summer school.
For a teacher, it's you know, it's easy to look
at a couple of red flags to explore is there
fighting going on at home, which was not the case.
I grew up in a very loving family, or as
Eric using drugs or alcohol, which up until the point
I was a software in high school wasn't true. So
we just had teachers trying to just figure out what
in the world is changing in Eric's life my brain chemistry. Like,
I'm no doctor, but I do know what it's like
to start falling ill with serious mental illness.
With all this happening, what did your parents and teachers
come up with? Did they get any answers?
My parents just they rearranged their entire schedules, trying to
take me in to get help, take me into tutoring,
seeing counselors, psychologists, all of that. And as part of
that first the major step in that journey, I did
a long standardized test that would be analyzed by a
Pinnacle psychologist and the team to find out are my
answers for that standardized exam consistent with the answers to
those provided by people with a specific diagnosis. And as
it turns out, I remember sitting in that room when
the results were being discussed with my parents, and I
was there. The doctor said mister and missus Smith, your
son Eric's answers are consistent with individuals who were diagnosed
with bipolar disorder. And they were like, so you're saying
he's got bipolar disorder. Doctor was like, his answers are
consistent with it and would explain some of the high
highs he's having in some of the low lows he's
been having. The piece I'm about to say, this is
actually what, for the first time, really had me questioning
the validity or reliability of psychiatry and counseling because what
he said next was both wild and would later prove
to be true.
That's an interesting point of view for your age.
What did he have to say, He said, mister and
missus Smith, don't be surprised if it's some point later,
when your son is in his twenties, if he also
falls ill with psychosis or some sort of psychotic spectrum
disorder like schizophrenia or skitz a affective disorder. At that
point I could collectively fill in the room like my mom,
my dad, and me, not necessarily in denial, but just
in disbelief, like what are you doing? Like for sports
fans out there who remember, like bay Ruth famously, like
pointing out to the stands and then cracking one out
there come on, Like for a doctor to look at
someone who's in his young teens and say, hey, don't
be surprised if you're psychotic in your twenties. That was
a wild thing to consider at that time. That is
exactly what happened. Fast forwarding kind of through my teens,
where I drop out of high school in my junior year,
I get a general equivalency high school degree, and I
try college. I do okay my first semester, I failed
spectacularly out of it in my second semester. The years
go by, the mental illness gets worse, the addiction gets worse.
As a point of relevance here, I did get sober
in two thousand and six. I did not get full
blown psychosis until about three years later. It's worth saying,
when you're asking me this quest, uh, and you asked
me here a little goo like what contributed to things
going on track? Like what made it happen? Some of
it was choice, right, Like I chose to start using drugs.
The addiction thereafter was not my choice, but I definitely
made a choice to start using drugs.
You made that choice, that happens. The other part of
this is your doctor brought up bipolar and mental health
illness in the future that wasn't your choice. What happened next.
The worst the illness got, and the worse the symptoms got,
the less control I had over any of it. I
went through a period of more than a decade's worth
of trial and error with antipsychotics, antidepressants, anti anxiety mens
SSRIs like the whole gamut of everything, and things kept
getting worse. So I finally got to this dangerous point
rooted on deeply, deeply flawed logic but made sense to
me at the time, which was this, if I had
any of these diagnoses that all of these meds are
designed to treat, when I took them as I did,
things should have started getting better. But things kept getting worse.
So I finally got to a point where I was like, look,
I don't have those diagnoses because the meds that are
designed to treat those diagnoses did not and do not
help me. I was convinced I could just live the
rest of my life the way that I did. But
at some point it got so bad the FBI got involved,
the Secret Service got involved, various embassies and consulates from
around the world. Unfortunately, were brought into the mess of
things For people who are listening to this sort of like,
oh my god, Eric, did things ever get better? Yeah?
And I hope you can impact that. And it included
me being pointed in as commissioner by the two highest
courts in Texas, our state Supreme Court and our Court
of Criminal Appeals here in Texas where I live. I
am so grateful to have had opportunities to, year over year,
be invited to talk with Stanford University law students about
my journey, talk with them about policy and practice. This
is a university that I would never have ever had
a chance getting into. Now I get to talk with
students who are living their lives hoping to change the
future through whatever line of work it is they choose
to do, being involved in major media, doing this conversation
like I'm doing with you right now, Tony, the way
my life ended up right now, the rest of my
life will be spent trying to help other people who
have desirable outcomes because on paper, dropping out of high school,
failing out of college, getting arrested for stuff related to
mental health and mental honess, that generally doesn't bode well
for the trajectory of things. But I got lucky. I
got the treatment that I needed, I got the resources
that I needed, I had the support that I needed,
And for the rest of my life, I will be
spending it trying to help other people also find that
life it is that they want.
That's a great thing to do. Now, you brought up
the FBI and other agencies. Can you expand on that
in what part of the journey that was for you?
That's both interesting and terrifying. What happened, right, So I
appreciate the question. It was like two thousand and seven,
two thousand and eight, right around the time Twitter first
came out. And I will assume for the sake of
this discussion that people know what Twitter is. If they don't,
it's famously called x right. Now, here's why it's relevant
to this conversation. It was brand new at that time.
It was like the wild West. Social media was not
how it is right now, where everyone's walking around with
a smart and cameras and followers and all of that.
Social media existed, but it was fringe, like Facebook was
established mostly for college age kids. MySpace existed, and it was,
for the most part, like an established user base of
emo kids and musicians. It wasn't like it looks right now.
And here's why that's relevant. We are now living in
an era where musicians, models, writers, world leaders, they have
tens of millions of followers. At that time, people had
a few thousand followers because it was so new, and
because there were so few people on the platform, it
was huge if you had like ten thousand or twenty
thousand followers. And I remember John Mayer, I think was
the most followed guy on Twitter for a while, and
he had like fifteen or twenty thousand followers at the time.
Just to put that in perspective. So I'm getting on
Twitter at a time where it's very easy to throw
a tweet out there at somebody and they'll see it
and like within like a day or two, they'll write back.
Unfortunately for me, because I was so unstable at the time,
I started to feel this inflated sense of importance where
like I remember I tweeted at Paul Wall who's a
famous Texas rapper, and he tweeted back a few times.
I remember I tweeted it White Clas will I Am
and other famous musicians that you might know out there,
and they wrote back, why left? He retweeted something I
wrote to all of his followers, and I remember right
around that time, I was like, Man, this is a
guy I grew up like listening to and I love
his music. And now it feels like I've made it. It
feels like I've arrived. So the stuff that I'm doing now,
whatever music I'm writing, all of it, it all matters
like I'm elevated. I'm on this new level where people
are just paying attention to me. Unfortunately, that was accompanied
by paranoia that had long been bubbling up, and it
went from me being excited about people kind of knowing
who I am and paying attention to me feeling like
things were almost Truman Show Essue if you're not familiar
with the movie, where like I thought, there were cameras
everywhere people were watching me. I couldn't get away from
all of it. Very shortly thereafter, there was a very
steep decline. I remember waking up one day looking through
random just Twitter feeds people were writing. I thought that
I had found a code decoded it that identified there
was going to be assassination attempts on President Obama, who
was the president at that time, and the Queen of Jordan,
who was one of the first world leaders to kind
of hop on Twitter and understand its value. The more
and more I got into it, the more and more
I was convinced there was definitely going to be an
assassination of President Obama and the Queen of Jordan to
destabilize the West World War three. All hell breaks loose,
and I did what any sane person would do. I
googled the FBI's phone number, and I called them to
tell them about it. I told them everything was going on,
the code that I believed I had broken. They asked
if I'd be willing to meet with them. I did,
on several occasions meet with them, a few times in
a blacked out suburban and a big business parking lot,
and also at their FBI headquarters where I live here
in the city of San Antonio.
That's an interesting story. Was you in full blown psychosis
at that time? Ultimately? How did they handle it from
that point?
I was in full blown psychosis at that time, and
after several meetings with the FBI, they tried to tell
me as much. In fact, the last meeting that I
had with them, the FBI agents who I was meeting
with their offices there in that San Antonio headquarters. They said, Eric,
are you diagnosed with any mental health conditions? They're being
very delicate and respectful about it, and I was like, well, yeah,
why are you on medication for it? And I was
like yeah, why. But now I started to get mad
because I saw where this was going. They were like,
I could see they weren't believing the things that I
was saying. They were trying to tell me essentially, you're
a crazy person, you need meds, but they were trying
to do it as delicately as possible. All that really
made me do was have to prove that much harder
all of the stuff that I said was real. So
I want to be very clear in all of this,
like I was full blown psychosis already. I was not
walking around with even one toe in reality. I was
full blown psychotic at this point. I remember leaving that
FBI offices for the last time and understanding I needed
to prove all of that was real. And I had
stuff going through my head of like, well, maybe the
FBI knows about all of this, Maybe they're in cahoots
with all of it, and they're just trying to tell
me that I'm crazy, and maybe they're really involved. Maybe
they're the ones who are the reason that there's going
to be World War three in the assassinations. So I started,
I started with the paranoia, hitting hard on the psychosis,
hitting hard, realizing that maybe I was on my own
with this possibly having to just one man against the
world to stop World War three and assassination plots. So
I remember at that same time my mom and dad
they contacted my then most recent psychiatrists who had fired
me for being too difficult to the patient to treat.
And I want to say, like, I understand both sides
of that, and I think this is important for your
audience to hear. I was very difficult to treat. The
meds were not helping up to that point. The paranoia
and the psychosists were making it where I was very
rude to everyone I was interacting with, even if they
were trying to help me. So like in session with
my mom and dad with a psychiatrist there, he'd seen
me rude to my mom and dad. He'd hear me
being rude to him. His staff didn't like the way
that I was talking, like with the secretary. I was
very rude to her and she didn't like that. So yeah,
like I get why he stopped seeing me as a
patient didn't like it. I do also want to say
playing Devil's advocated for a minute, or just talking other
side of things. Psychiatrists, much like people like let's say,
working in a jail or a prison, should expect certain things.
And if you're going to work with people who don't
like have it all together, particularly folks with serious men's illness,
you should expect individuals who are going to be rude
and not understanding or caring about what's going on around them. Right.
So I don't want to give the psychiatrists a past
that he just fired me for being difficult to treat,
because that's that's kind of comes with the territory. But
I do understand him ultimately deciding that he didn't want
to treat me anymore. But to his credit, my parents
contacted him while all of this was going on, because
my parents knew I told him about these assassination of plots.
They knew how out of it I was, so they
called that psychiatrist and they were like begging and pleading
with him. They said look, we know our son is
not your patient anymore, but you are the most recent
professional to have ever interacted with him. What can we
do to get our son help?
That was really good for him to have that discussion
with them on the situation that you were in. What
did he advise them?
This is what he told my mom and dad. He
told my mom and dad that my best bet to
get treatment, given the fact that he didn't believe I
would meet that very high bar of involuntary care at
that time, because it's not illegal to be crazy, right,
He also understood I could not be on my own.
He told my parents this, I mean, this is earth shattering,
cosmic stuff that is fuel for all the advocates out there,
and people will want to make a change. Also, families
who have loved ones locked up right now, or if
you happen to be locked up in listening. This is
what he told my parents. He said, your son's best
bet is to get arrested for a nonviolent, low level offense,
and then while he's in jail, hopefully before he gets released,
a judge can find out about this and hopefully have
him transferred before he's released from jail, hopefully he can
be transferred to a hospital Involune tarily where he can
be stabilized, and then hopefully, if he can be stabilized
in a hospital, he can be released to lower level care.
That's exactly what happened.
Okay, well that definitely makes sense. Once you were in
the hospital, how long did it take with the treatment
they gave you for you to get back to a
path to where you are today?
So, Tony, you were asking the golden questions. Man, it's
no surprise to me whatsoever that your show is as
popular as it is because you were asking all the
right questions. Man, it just is so Yeah, they put concisely, which,
if you've been listening to me talk up to this point,
is not my brand. I do my best to be concise,
but dude, there's just so much to talk about, man.
So yeah, it was like this. The first hospital stayed
the first of three in total over as many years,
about two and a half three years. The first day
was three months in patient stabilization, immediately followed by step
down care. After I was no longer meeting criteria to
remain in patient, I did a year of court involved
outpatient care assist about patient treatment, and I was taking
my I just prescribed. I had next goals already lined
up that I was working towards, and I was taking
my meds as I say, to emphasize this exactly as prescribed.
They stopped working. So I had to be brought right
back again to the state hospital another three months where
I'm stabilized on a different regiment of medications, and I
am released again into court involved outpatient care assists at
outpatient treatment after several months of me doing it exactly
what I'm supposed to do, taking my medsis prescribed, go
into my hearing, seeing my doctor, my social worker, my
treatment team, all of that the med style working again.
After being out of the hospital for just several weeks,
so I go back in for the third and final
time of my hospitalization, and about halfway into that hospitalization,
I am at that point now being given above maximum
recommended dosages of anti psychotics because they're just trying to
do anything to bring me back to reality, and that
was what they tried. So after ruling out this is
such a golden part of the story and like of
the journey, I want people to know, after more than
ten years of chaos due to a bunch of failed antipsychotics.
I remember sitting across from the table from my psychiatrist
in that hospital, and she says I I see her
looking at this paper and she's crossing stuff off. And
there was this long list of antipsychotics that I had
been tried over the years that all just failed. There
was one thing on that list that did not have
a line through it that that doctor had not crossed out.
And she passes this paper to me across the table
and I'm still full on psychotic, like I'm in the
middle of a hospital, and so I'm sitting there in
this doctors like Eric, we've tried everything, almost everything. There
is one med we haven't tried, and we should try it.
And I'm like, what is it? Like, I'm like, I
don't even have hope any of this is going to
work because I'm not ill. As dolor Xavier Ahmador says,
I'm not sick. I don't need help. It's the title
of his book, title of his talk. That's the life
I was living at that point, full on lack of insight.
I didn't understand I was ill due to the nature
of my illness. The doctor says, it's called close apine.
I said, oh, no, I've been given that a bunch
of times, and she goes, no, not clon nazipam close Apine.
I'm like, oh, I hear you. There's a difference. I said,
what's the deal. She says, Okay, if you go on this,
you will have to do blood draws every morning. If
if you stay on it, there's a chance like, if
things are going well, we can start lowering the frequency
of those blood draws. But for now, if you do this,
you will have to do those blood draws. That was
a huge sticking point because I thought that by that
point I was so full on psychot it that like
I thought that I was, you know, some sort of
being that was created truly by like divine beings, and
that my blood had secrets in them that mankind shouldn't
have access to all kinds of stuff like divine secrets.
It was bad. And if you ever saw a photo
of me at that point, my hair was longer, I
had a beard, I was a little thinner and younger.
There were people who frequently would meet me in public
and be like, oh, you look like Jesus. I started
to think that maybe that was the case. It was rough,
so I didn't want to give people access to my blood.
I also thought by that point, since the Secret Service
had gotten involved and everyone else was involved, I felt
safe enough that if I did give my blood that
either the divine secrets would be protected or it would
go to like some top shelf, top security lab where
people who could have access to it would do it.
By the luck of the draw and by the roll
of the dice, I happen to be in a weird
enough psychotic state to agree to close the pin at
that particular point, so I was put on close epine, sorry,
at very low dose. I want you a quick shout
out to Team Daniel Running for Recovery, doctor Rob Lateman
and his wife, doctor Ann Mandel, and all of the
people in this group. They have a stellar reputation for
managing closeipine. And here's why I'm saying this is a
value directly relates to what I'm about to say. Ten
plus years of failure on psych meds. My parents losing
more than a decade of their lives, Me losing more
than a decade of my life, lost relationship, lost money,
lost time, lost energy, lost everything for more than a decade.
In your mind and in your parents' mind, you'd lost
a decade. Now you've changed your medication, how did that
affect you?
I am put on close epine. About two weeks into
being put on close ape I woke up. I'm in
my hospital room. I look around and it's quiet. And
I don't mean the type of quiet where I can't
hear anything. I mean the type of quiet where I
didn't know I had that much noise going on in
my mind until the meds started to quiet stuff down.
I looked around the room. Everyone's getting ready for breakfast,
Like this guy, you know, he's brushing his hair. This
guy's putting on some jeans, and I'm like, it's eerie quiet.
I wonder what's going on. And because I was still
half psychotic, I wasn't like a switch of coming back
to reality. My first thought was, oh, I must not
have any missions from the FBI or the CIA today.
I'd be hearing about it, which is what I thought
the noise was up to that point. I thought I
had been hearing General David Petraeus. I thought I had
been hearing Leon Panetta. I thought I'd been hearing like
the big names in my ears. The whole time about this,
and then I remember going to breakfast like twenty minutes later,
and I'm looking around. It's a different type of quiet.
I hear people, you know, normal breakfast cafeteria stuff, cutting things,
eating food, drinking stuff, putting on their cup, and I'm like,
what is this? Like, well, what is this feeling of
like Wyatt and an absence of noise and calm. And
later that week into the following me the first I
would say major milestone towards recovery and coming back to sanity.
I remember walking around the halls of that hospital, walking
around outside shooting some hoops because there's a they had
basketball outdoors. I'm like, Eric, you've never been to Quantico,
that's where the FBI trains. You've never been to Langley,
that's where the CIA trans You drop out of high
school your junior year. You don't have the skills necessary
to break codes that you think that you've broken, Like
what is this that you've been doing? In essence, I
was able to start questioning myself in a way that
everyone for ten plus years was like, Eric, you're out
of it, Like you need treatment, you need meds. And
it was such a powerful experience that I now walk
away trying to help as many people as possible understand
this med that saved my life, that turned things around.
The treatment that I got. International recommendations are after two
failed antipsychotics, not failed because of untoward side effects, but
they didn't manage symptoms. International guideline slash recommendations are close
of them. Is what you go to. Good luck finding
a majority of treatment providers to pop onto that bandwagon,
because there is red tape associated with it, like the
blood draws at the beginning, which to be very clear,
here in the US requiring that blood work that is
not something a lot of the rest of the developed
world does. They just let doctors prescribe and if they
want to order laborca sometime they do. It is because
of all of the red tape and the lab work
and all of that stuff that a lot of doctors
are apprehensive, they're kind of on the fence about wanting
to prescribe it. And here's this thing that gave my
life back in a way I never once thought, never
thought possible. I went back to school within one year
of being discharged, From the time I was an undergrad
sophomore all the way through the end of grad school.
We're in my master's degree at a flawless four point
zero gpa. This from a guy who dropped that high
school jail addict, all of it mental illness. And I'm
not here trying to say cloths of pen is what's
going to do that for everybody? But I think it
speaks very loudly that the general consensus internationally is after
two failed anti psychotics, this is what people should have.
And I want your listeners to ask themselves a question.
How much of the ten plus years of chaos could
have been avoided if that red tape wasn't there. For
the people who are currently in jail, or have family
members in jail, incarcerated prison, currently in rehab, currently in
the midst of addiction, I want people to ask themselves
how much of that could be avoided if this drug
that internationally is so highly regarded could be more accessible
with less barriers accessing here in the US.
Absolutely, Now, you went from this stellar person in high
school to a decade of lost time and finding yourself.
Ultimately you did find yourself. Now there's this bridge. You've
been on one side of it for ten years. On
the other side of the bridge are people that will
accept you. Unfortunately, we live in a world of people
that look into your past of what you've done, rather
than looking at what you probably can do. How did
you work with those people to ultimately get them to
accept you and to help get you to where you
are today?
Wow? Yeah, so it definitely was. It was deliberate, it
it was intentional. I could have never known how would
unfold like this. But I was tired of running from
my past. I was tired of it weighing me down,
and quite frankly, I was tired of looking for acceptance
from other people. I needed to be able to accept
myself and myself well me included the history of serious
men on us and addiction and being jailed and dropping
out of high school. So I really think that the
happiness that I found finding myself on the other side
of that bridge, it was just a true understanding that
if I wanted to continue working in corporate America, which
is what I had worked most recently prior to things
going really bad, the type of journey that I've been on,
it's not necessarily openly celebrated there Like, if anything, people
want to find a way to get rid of someone
with the history of serious spent it on us an addiction,
but simply I didn't want to exist in a world
where I was not going to be able to accept myself.
And I live in a world now where I accept myself,
and I can accept others and help them learn to
accept themselves, and they can make their own informed decisions
about do they want to pursue a life where they
have to run away from this for whatever reasons, or
do they want to pursue a life where they can
be their authentic selves and find happiness and meaning perfect.
Now, where do people find you so they can check
you out on your consultation and the other things that
you do.
Www dot Eric Wtsmith dot com. That's er I WS
and Winston ts and Taylor Smith smitch dot com. People
can learn about some of the work that I've done.
They can learn about specifically my consulting work. They can
email me directly. And I love hearing from people all
around the world, all around the world, throughout the US
and around the world. I love hearing from folks. Maybe
you've dis got some questions, some comments, maybe you're interested
in my services. And actually I do see folks internationally.
I currently have clients throughout the United States, including Hawaii
and Alaska, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Jordan, and the Republic
of North Macedonia. If you are in any of those
places or elsewhere, I am here for you. Please I
look forward to hearing from you.
That's awesome. This has been a great conversation, great information.
Thanks for coming on.
Thank you, Tony. I appreciate you inviting me to be on.
It's been my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking the
time out of your busy schedule to listen to our
show today. If we hope you enjoyed it as much
as we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know
anyone that would like to tell us their story, send
them to tonymantor dot com contact then they can give
us their information so one day they may be a
guest on our show. One more thing we ask tell
everyone everywhere about why not me, the world, the conversations
we're having, and the inspiration our guests give to everyone
everywhere that you are not alone in this world.