The Monster Got In The Van

We sold what we had and put the rest in a van. People hear that and think it sounds free.

It was not free. It cost us a fixed address, a steady income, and every safe thing we had left. We did it anyway, because the alternative was the life I already knew how to lose.

Here is the part nobody puts in the highlight reel. The monster got in the van with us.

You do not outrun it

I spent thirteen years inside the system. Group homes first. Four years in federal prison after that. I came out in September 2010 with a meth addiction behind me and PTSD in front of me, and no idea that the second one was going to be the longer sentence.

For a while I believed the story everyone tells you. Get clean. Get out. Get somewhere beautiful. Then you will be fine.

So we went. We have wingsuited, paraglided and climbed in 80+ countries since then. Norway. Romania. Pakistan. Places I could not have found on a map when I was using.

The monster came to every single one of them.

It does not care about the view. It does not care how far you drove. It is there at four in the morning in a van in a car park in Serbia exactly like it was there in a cell, and if you built your whole recovery on the idea that a new place fixes you, that morning breaks you.

What flying actually does

I am not going to tell you that jumping off a mountain cured anything. It did not. There is no finish line here and anyone selling you one is selling you something.

What it does is smaller and more useful than a cure.

When I climb a route and jump from the summit, there is a stretch of time where there is no room in my head for anything except the next thing. Not the past. Not the fear. Just the rock, then the air. My whole attention goes to one place because it has to.

That is the closest thing to quiet I have ever found, and I had to go a long way to find it.

Then I land, and it all comes back, and I have to show up again tomorrow.

PTSD is the monster. Flying is how I manage it. Manage. Not beat.

Sandra

I do not do this alone, and I want to be clear about what that means.

My wife Sandra climbs the same routes and jumps the same exits. She is not behind the camera watching me have an experience. She is on the wall. She has her own monsters and she fights them the same way, in the same places, on the same days.

Two people who both understand why the other one needs the mountain. That is the part I would not trade for a house.

Why we film it

Because when I was at the bottom, nobody showed me a way out. Not one person put a picture in front of me of a life that was still possible.

So we film everything. The flights and the failures. The days it works and the days I am sitting on a hillside with my head in my hands. We put it out for free, because somebody at their own bottom is scrolling right now, and the only thing that ever reached me was proof that another person got through it.

That is what Just Care More is. A 501(c)(3) built to make that proof and give it away.

The only method I have

Show up. Struggle. Suck less. Repeat.

Four lines. No breakthrough. No before and after photo. You get up, you do the hard thing badly, you do it slightly less badly, and you do it again tomorrow.

Fifteen years sober and that is still the whole method.

The monster is in the van. It is coming to the next country too.

We keep driving anyway.