Watching Mental Health Special Episode | Danny Ballard

On a very special episode of Watching Mental Health, Danny Ballard and I dive deep into a powerful and raw conversation about mental health. Warning, some of the subjects discussed may be triggering for some. We are not healthcare professionals, but we are experts in our own experiences. 

About Danny Ballard 

Danny Ballard founded Triad Custom Web Designs in High Point, NC in 1998 after interning as the webmaster for the McPherson College Office of Communications in McPherson, KS. He relocated to the Houston, TX area and rebranded as CustomWebDesigns.biz before settling down in Las Vegas, NV in 2010. 

Through his business Dork Knight Designs & Marketing, Danny currently provides internet marketing services to over 100 clients with services ranging from web design, logo design, digital ads and more. You can also find him on YouTube hosting various shows like "Dork Side of the Ring", "Nerdfights", and his latest project, "May Divorce Be With You."

Danny was the marketing director for two Las Vegas children's charities for nearly 10 years and is passionate about giving back to the community. He founded the mental health charity, Nerds Never Say Die and is working to get that launched. He wants to give back to the world because he knows what it’s like to feel alone in the dark.

A Conversation on Watching Mental Health 

Katie Waechter: So let's start at the beginning and whatever comfortable with, but I know that you wanted to kind of focus on your first attempt, but even before that, have you had mental health struggles early in your life? Has it been something that's plagued you?

Danny Ballard: Well, I didn't probably, I didn't know because mental health illness is hereditary, and both of my parents have mental health issues. Both of them are on medication. Both of them are doing way better now, but they've got a good 30 year head start on me. And their parents had some issues, but back in that day, but back in the day of the World War II and the Korean War and things like that, men didn't talk about their mental health mean probably really during the Vietnam, gosh, really, man, it was, men didn't really start owning up, I don't think, until the early two thousands really. It was really a taboo kind of thing.

I was born in the late seventies, so my formative years were mid eighties to mid nineties, and I had a pretty decent childhood, upper middle class family. There were some things, I don't want to cast any aspersions on my father. He is a born again Christian, but I did not have, my father was also an alcoholic, his father was an alcoholic. And sometimes that just breeds chaos at the household. And there was a point in time right around 13, where I just started kind of hating life. I didn't want to be home. I made any excuse I could to hang out with my best friend Jason, who I still know to this day. I've known him since I was eight years old, and I'm thankful to still know him.

He's actually serving right now on the USS Teddy Roosevelt. He's a career Navy man, but got called back out because of all this chaos in the world right now. Thanks Biden. Just kidding. You can edit that out. Anyway, so I probably did, but didn't realize it until the straw that broke the camel's back and what that was. So I was 14, I had just turned 14. This was the Christmas after I turned 14. So this would've been 93, I believe, 1993. And my dad had gone out, okay. My dad had gone out of town for a business trip, and we'll get back to that in a second. And my brother, because it was my mother, my father, myself, and my brother, my brother was spending time with my uncle Billy and my aunt Diane. So it was just me and my mom, and I've always been a mama's boy.

I love my mom. Always had great relationship with my mother, and it was a period of a little over a week of just my mom and I just hanging out. It was during Christmas break and all that stuff, and I was out. I used to play street hockey with my buddy Jason a lot, and we'd just disappear. This was in Thomasville, North Carolina, a simpler time in the early nineties. We could just get in our roller blades and just literally skate all over Thomasville and wherever we could find a spot that was, whether it was a tennis court, we'd play there until we got kicked out. We're not supposed to be playing there or whatever, things like that. Then, so I got home little later than I was supposed to. The rule was when the street lights come on, I'm supposed to be home. I might've been about an hour late, but I was also rollerblading all the way from my buddy's house, so was, and my mom wasn't there, which wasn't a big deal.

I'm like, ah, cool. I'm going to throw some wrestling on, blah, blah, blah, make some popcorn and just chill. By that time, my dad had done very, we were upper middle class by the time I hit 12, but we really struggled before I remember the struggles, but my dad took his, started taking his career more seriously, but it also meant he was never home. But then there was also the catch 22 of like, well, I'm kind of glad he's not home because he used to be home a lot. But then he used, so I remember I was watching, I was literally watching wrestling and my dad calls, and this is back kids before cell phones. This was a landline. So he calls the house and I answer the phone and he is like, Hey, blah, blah, blah, checking in on me. I, he's like, where's your mother?

I was like, I don't know. And again, this is before cell phones, so he can't call her. We have no idea. I'm like, she's probably out shopping doing her thing. It's Christmas time, blah, blah, blah. So he is like, all right. So then a few hours go by and he calls again. She's still not there. Again, I'm a kid. I'm like 14 years old. I'm actually kind of digging it. Hindsight being 2020, at the time, I would've had invited my, because I was actually dating the woman who would become my second ex-wife at the time. Stacy, I would've invited her over, and we would've been in all kinds of trouble because I was there at the house for several hours. And so my dad decided to call the police. Now, Thomasville is a really small town and one of those towns where practically everybody knows everybody. And so he called, I don't know if it was a buddy of his or what, but a couple police officers. So he tells me, so he calls me back. He's like, Hey, I got a couple police officers who are going to come over to the house. They're just going to hang out with you until your mom gets home. I was like, oh, okay. I didn't know that was okay. Yeah, yeah. I didn't know that was a thing, but so he does that, and they come and they were cool.

One of 'em even shot the shit about wrestling with me. So that was nice. And then my mom got home and she had a bunch of shopping bags and stuff with her, and she's talking to the police and everybody works everything out, and everything seemed really out of a Hallmark movie moment, or Norman Rockwell picture. Everybody's super cool, and they're like, okay, well, hey, give Dale a call. He's worried about you. Okay, thanks for stopping by. And they leave. Then, so my mom calls my dad at the hotel from her bedroom, and I couldn't hear the conversation, but I know it wasn't good. I could hear yelling, you know what I mean?

And my mom gets out and we talk, and I'm like, is everything okay? She's like, where were you? She's like, oh, I was just shopping, hanging out, blah, blah, blah. I would later find out that wasn't entirely true, but that's fine. And then I go to bed. So the next morning I get woke up by a phone call. So back in this, in 93, I had a phone in my room with probably a 30 foot cord so I could walk all and back then I got a phone call from a girl I had been dating before Stacey, and it was not a pleasant phone call, and basically letting me know. She was like, this is high school drama, bullshit, dating one of my friends or whatever. Fuck it, whatever. Hang up the phone, walk out of the bedroom. I start noticing things are missing. We had a split level house, so the bedrooms were on the top level, and then you go down the stairs into the middle area where the dining room kitchen and a den was, and then there was a lower level with the living room and another bedroom and bathroom and washroom and the laundry room and things like that.

And so I noticed that when I came out, my bedroom, a table at the end of the hallway that was there was not there. So then I walk downstairs to go to the kitchen, and I'm noticing lots of shit's gone now, and I'm thinking, oh my God, we've been robbed. So I run upstairs and start beating on my mom's bedroom door. She didn't answer. I open it and that bedroom is practically empty. And I was like, yeah, yeah. So I'm freaking out. I think we've been robbed. Maybe my mother's been kidnapped. I am just going to all, and then, so I call my dad at the hotel and I'm like, oh my God. And then I see mom pull up and I'm like, oh God, okay, I'll call you back click. Because my mom was driving a minivan at the time. And so while I'd been sleeping, she had been moving out, she had finally gotten tired of my dad's stuff because the work trip he was on was a ski trip with a mistress, you know what I mean?

Or whatever. And she knew about it, and they got into this huge fight over it. That's what the fight was about. And so she told me she was leaving my dad, and I was like, great, take me with you. I'll start packing my stuff. And she's like, I was like, well, why not? She's like, well, I'm moving in with this guy. Good for the goose is good for the gander, apparently. So she found out he was cheating on her, so she started cheating on him, I guess. Yeah, you can't make this shit up. So anyways, but he didn't want any kids. And I'm like, I'm 14, I'll be a man soon. Take me. And she planned on coming back to get a last trip. And this had gone so poorly, and she didn't expect me to be awake that she literally, she drove off late, she gets back into the car, locks the car.

I'm trying to get into the car, she's backing out of the driveway, and I'm still holding onto the car running with her. And then she drives off down Ferndale Avenue, and I'm running as fast as I can until I just collapse. And I see her drive off. And I was a sobbing mess in the middle of the road. And I dunno how long I was laying there crying, but I finally got up and I walked back home again, this is a very small community I lived, I knew everybody on my street. It is not like Vegas. All us neighbors knew each other. Everybody, they were all homeowners. We all partied together, whether it was because we had a swimming pool. So dad would throw barbecue pool parties and we'd have our neighbors over and the neighbors across the street. So people are seeing this shit.

So I go back to the house and I was just terrified of the thought of life without my mom. I was terrified of the thought of being stuck with just my dad. And I felt like, and I know it's not true, it's just at the time I thought that nobody loved me. The one person that's supposed to never leave me, your mother drove down the road. Yeah, who I was very close with. So when I walked into the house, I went through the side door, which goes into the kitchen, I walked straight to the medicine cabinet, and I'm not even kidding. I literally ate every single pill. I drank every bottle of medication. I took everything in that medicine cabinet with the intent of killing myself. And I dunno how much time had passed. I remember I was sitting at the kitchen table, and then last thing, so I was sitting at the kitchen table.

The next thing I remember, I'm waking up at the hospital with my parents standing over me arguing with each other, of course, over whose fault this was. That's what I woke up to. So I would later find out, and this made me that kid, which really sucked because I was a relatively popular kid at my school at Thomasville High School. I've always been really outgoing, always into debate theater. I was an anchor for what they called WTMS, which was like they were a channel one school. So for those of you who know what that is, it's like Channel one would give money to schools, and every morning they'd do a news broadcast and you could piggyback off of that with your own news broadcast. Kind of like in that Spider-Man, if you've seen the new Spider-Man movies with Betty Brandt, things like that. So it was a lot like that.

And for me, a lot of amazing opportunities I got to interview when George Bush came through Thomasville, because they had this thing called the big chair when he was running for president against Perot and Clinton. He did one of his stops there. I got to be one of the kids that got to interview him on the scene and all this other cool stuff. And I was a part of a lot of mock presidential debate. So the three of us pick a candidate, and we would debate on behalf of that candidate, and mine was Ross Perot, to give you an idea of where I was back in the nineties. And so everybody knew me, even if they didn't know me, they'd seen my face on the morning news thing. And so I later found out that what happened was my uncle brought my brother home, they found me on the kitchen floor.

They call 9 1 1, ambulance shows up. And apparently this attracted a crowd of people at my house, and they stretched me to the ambulance and take me away. And then for some reason, the word at school was that I couldn't handle the bad news I got from that. And so when I get back to school, everybody's like, and I can relate to this in my recent life, it takes years to build a good reputation. It takes seconds to fucking destroy it and have to start all over again. And this had nothing to do with her, had absolutely nothing to do with her. And so when I woke up from the hospital and I found all that stuff out later, so I woke up and they're arguing and I'm having to, they did, it was like this black tar treatment that they gave me to kind of kill everything.

And then later I would find out that because of, I took so many different kinds of medications, some of them basically slowed down. If I'd have just taken an entire bottle of Tylenol or something, I probably would've died. But instead, I took everything in there and I had some mandatory, I had to go to different, I had to go to therapy by myself, and I had to go to therapy with my dad and my brother and I had to go to therapy with my mom all at different times for a while. And then eventually when the parents finalized their divorce, my dad decided to up and move us to Texas, which sucked because I had just started. By the time that happened, that would've been about two, three months into my sophomore year. I had just started kind of coming back, fixing my reputation at school, just kind of, you know what I mean?

And Stacey and I were actually really serious. The only reason Stacey and I broke up was because I moved to Texas. And then when I came back, she, that's the reason she's ex-wife number two, not ex-wife, number one, because when I came back, it had been years and she'd moved on with her life and was dating somebody else. And stars never aligned until, that's a whole different discussion I should write a book about. Because Stacey and I have a fascinating relationship. It's a lot, almost a lot of near misses, but we've known each other for 30 years. We're still really, really good friends and care for each other deeply. But the joke we always make, which may or may not be a joke, is that if we were still married, one of us would be dead and the other in jail. So that's not good for anybody, especially our kids. Well, I think

Katie: That's why your new podcast is going to be so good. I'm really excited to listen to that because you do have such a unique relationship between the two of you, and I think that that's going to make a really great conversation.

Danny: Yeah, no, I've been editing it a lot. And when you're editing video, you're rewatching stuff over and over and over and over again. And a couple of my buddies have seen little clips and stuff, and I've gotten nothing but positive feedback. A lot of people think this is going to be awesome. Not really anything like it out there, because we're literally sitting next to each other talking about, so the first episodes, the Witches of Eastwick. So we're reviewing that and it's fine. I'm thankful. I'm very thankful that she and I are still friends, and I'm very happy for her and her relationship with her boyfriend that she's had for about a year now. I mean, he's perfect for her. I'm not into kayaking and reggae music. So yeah, it's good. So

Katie: Let's back up for a second. I want to talk, so you did that at 14? Yeah. Seems like such, it feels like it's so out of left field. Had you thought about suicide before then? Or was that kind of

Danny: The first time

Katie: You thought

Danny: About it? No, honestly, that was the first time. It was just such, I'd never felt so hopeless. It was the most hopeless I'd ever felt in my life.

Katie: Like a rock. And then you were like, no, I'm out.

Danny: Yeah. So

Katie: Does therapy help?

Danny: Oh, yes. Yeah. Well, okay, well, the therapy, where was one-on-one helped therapy with my mom. I think we only did two or three sessions and my mom was checked out. And then with my dad and my brother, a part of me, God, I hope my dad never watches this part of me thinks my dad was just trying to put on a show or save face or whatever. He made us continue that therapy, even though it was just not, I didn't feel like it was going very well. But the therapist, and I don't remember her name 30 years ago, but the lady that was one-on-one with me was extremely helpful. She didn't have me on any medication or anything like that. And I remember she had this crazy thing, I'll never forget this. I wish I could remember her name. She had this optical illusion thing.

It was like a cone, like a metallic cone with a metallic cone top that had a little frog at the bottom of it that caused, somehow caused the whole hologram of the frog to hover above it. And I remember, I thought it was the coolest thing back then, but no, the therapy worked out. And then when we moved, and honestly, I think it helped my dad too, because when we did move to Texas, to his credit, he was a completely different, he didn't touch me again well until the last time, and I can get into that. But he put forth an earnest effort to be the best single daddy could because he realized how miserable Chris, my brother and I were when he just kind of ripped us away from all of our friends. We'd been in North Carolina at that point, well, for eight years. But as far back as I

Katie: Parts of your life,

Danny: Yeah, I don't remember. Before North Carolina, I was born in Indiana, then we lived in the Houston area, but I don't remember that. I was so young, you know what I mean? So my earliest childhood memories saved one are from North Carolina, and I established lifelong relationships. I still have to this day, whether it be Stacy, whether it be Jason or other people that happened in North Carolina. So he tried to make that time in Arlington, Texas is where he moved us to. So three months into my sophomore year, I started going to Arlington High School. Now you got to understand Thomasville High School, graduating class of like 50, you go to Arlington High School, graduating class of like 1200. The school is huge. I went from being somebody who was on the TV screen in every classroom every morning to being a little nobody, little, little

Katie: From a big fish in a small pond to a tiny fish in a

Danny: Big pond, exactly. But I made a friend there through what they called it, oral interpretation was the class. So I did a lot of national forensics league, NFL stuff. So I learned, I got into speech and debate. I got into humorous interpretation, duet, theater, stuff like that. So that was a good escape for me. Did

Katie: Your dad stopped drinking? You said he tried.

Danny: He did. But unfortunately right around, I want to say right before spring break, he got this job that took him, because the cool thing, so when we first moved out to Arlington, he was working for the official car dealership of the Dallas Cowboys, and he was kind of a big up, he wasn't the top manager, but he was the second in charge at that place. So we got to go. We were going to Dallas cowboy games for free all the time. I remember my first car was a Nissan pickup truck. I only paid 700 bucks for it. I bought it from my dad's place.

But in the spring of my sophomore year, he took this job that took him all over the country, going to dealerships, teaching their f and i, which stands for finance and insurance, their f and i departments, how to maximize profits because, so once you buy a car, that's the salesman's job sells you the car, you buy the car, then you go to F and i, and that's where they try to get you to upgrade your warranties to buy other things, or where they try to talk you into, oh, I only want a three year loan, but you know what? I can get you this lower monthly payment if you do a six year loan, plus I can put in this other warranty for you, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing. So he was really good at that. That's what he had done to make all that money I was talking about earlier.

So he took this job and he traveled the country. Well, in doing that single dad, he left a lot, sometimes a couple weeks at a time, sometimes even longer. And I was 15. And I had already got what they call in Texas, a hardship license, because my dad was a single parent. And fortunately, I had already taken driver's ed in North Carolina and had a North Carolina driver's ed certificate, and I had already had a learner's permit by the time I had my North Carolina learners permit before we'd moved to Texas. So then because of that, I was able to get an actual driver. I couldn't drive past nine o'clock unless it was for a job. It had all these restrictions, but I could drive. And so my dad would leave. I was in charge. I had to do all the grocery shop and take care of my brother, take him to, and he was an ice skater. He was very good ice skater. He's very accomplished. He's won several competitions, never got to meet his dream of going to the Olympics. But that was something that my dad was very serious about for my brother. And so what,

Katie: You picked up the slack, though, it's a lot of pressure, I feel like, for you at that age.

Danny: And here's what happened. It's not a happy ending. So I started resenting him for being gone all the time. And so then I started hanging out with the wrong people. And you got to remember, so my dad's leaving me all this money that I'm supposed to be, and this is before, it's not like now where he could, Hey, I need to go to the grocery store. Oh, I'll cash app you or whatever this is. We're talking the mid nineties, almost the dark.

Katie: Yes, go do the right thing.

Danny: Yeah. So I'm going to be gone for three weeks. Here's $2,000. Make sure that your brother gets to school and he's fed grocery shopping. Maybe go to the movies once or twice a week, blah, blah, blah. Well, I was hanging out with the wrong people, and I got really bad into drugs, and I don't even think I've ever told you this story. And it ultimately is what got me kicked out of my house at 15. So I was throwing big parties, getting really out of control, and my brothers we're Irish twins. He's barely younger than me. It's like a year to year and a half younger than me kind of thing. And so he would always get pissed because he'd be hungry. And it was like, there's ramen noodles in the cabinets, and that's about it. Yet I'm throwing parties with half naked chicks and mountains of cocaine on the coffee table, and he can't even get a burger.

So he ratted me out to my dad. Well, I was such a convincing liar that I had my dad convinced that my brother was just jealous or whatever, and if he had a problem with it, he should just stay home and he can take care of everything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what got me caught was, this is a true story, swear to God. What got me caught was so my dad in the hallway going toward the bedrooms, he had this decorative mirror thing. So it looked like it was one big mirror, but it was in three pieces. So it was kind of art deco looking, but it was like mirror. Well, we had taken that mirror the night before. My buddy Mike and I had taken that mirror, put it on the coffee table, and that's where me and all of my degenerate friends had.

And these friends ranged from my age 15 to way too old to be hanging out with young kids type of age and just doing drugs off this mirror. Well, apparently when we cleaned up, whoever put the mirror back on the wall, forgot to clean the fucking mirror, excuse my language, sorry, forgot to clean the mirror. And that's how my brother got me. And that's how my dad caught me. And I'll never forget it. And I have a picture of it somewhere. I'll never forget it. My brother tells him What's up? My dad walks to the hallway,

Turns around without, and just bam, just punches me right in the without any hesitation, first black guy I ever had in my life swelled up huge. I looked like the joker. It brought my side of my mouth up the next day and he kicked me out. So I had to get emancipated at 15 over that. And the reason I don't mind talking about, actually when I went to college, I got to go around to schools and give kind of speeches because I've always been a public speaker kind of guy. And it was through one of my classes also, but public speaking class, I believe, and share that experiences like, Hey, kids, don't f up like I did.

It's really bad. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, there was a lack of parental supervision, but I, I also, I had a lot of people fooled because I grew up, I had to grow up so fast, and you're a good liar, which is probably what got me into sales a little bit later. But whatever, I'm glad I'm not in that anymore. But during this time, it would be easy for somebody to be like, oh my God, you got emancipated at 15. I literally had a lease in my name. I moved to Oklahoma City, had a lease in my name in an apartment complex at 15. I had to, Oklahoma doesn't have a hardship license program, so they wouldn't recognize my hardship license. So I had to wait, and I skateboarded back then. So I would skateboard to and from school until I turned 16.

And then I finally got my license and I went through, I swear to God, I went through probably like eight cars because, not because I was wrecking 'em or anything, I just was, all I could afford were cheap, a hundred to $300 cars, which existed back in the nineties, by the way. I know they don't now, but they did back then. And I drive the thing for a week and then boom, the engine would blow out on it. Okay, nothing I can do about that. I got to save up some money, buy another car. I'm not even kidding. That happened a lot. And it was the first time in my life I got a C because the school I went to had a block schedule, and the first class was art. And as I'm sure, well, at least I'm a pretty artistic guy and there's absolutely no reason in the world I should be getting a C and art.

And it was because I slept through, it was the first period. And in a block schedule, your class is an hour and a half. And because I had to work to pay my bills, I was emancipated. So go to school, get off school immediately, go to work after work, go home, do my homework, pass out type of thing. So I slept through all of that first period, and the only reason I got a C instead of getting flunked was because I did so much extra credit stuff for her and tried to explain to her my situation, but I could see how it would be really easy for, wow, you've already tried to commit suicide. Were you suicidal at that point in time? And I wasn't actually, which is weird. I mean, looking back on it, I'm like, I'm surprised. I didn't feel, I didn't have suicidal ideations again until my first wife left me.

So quite some time, it was always some kind of abandonment. That was something that I learned a lot in therapy. Most of my suicidal ideations and my triggers come from abandonment issues. So the first one was when I felt abandoned by my mother. The second one was when I felt abandoned by my wife. You know what I mean? So that's a big for me, and that's something I thought I was over. But as you know, I had something very similar to that happen again a few years ago, did the exact same thing to me. So it's not something, this is going to be a nut I'm going to try to crack for the rest of my life. I'm sure you know what I mean.

Katie: So for you, what was that? I know you've had a large journey, I think with mental health, and you've had a few different moments where you've reached, I think a crisis level. What has been that changing moment or moments or those, that time where you're able to say, okay, I'm able to get help, or I'm ready to get help, or this is a turning moment for me, and what did that look like and why?

Danny: So I'm very thankful and fortunate, extremely grateful for the people in my life, quite frankly, who many of whom I do not deserve, yourself included. I would actually put you in this category. So I remember when I almost said the name, sorry, I remember the last time this happened. I like an idiot. So I bought, I had, gosh, so my buddy, I'm such a nerd. So my buddy Eric came in from out of town for the first season of Picard, and they got a hotel room at the Rio. We had all this big plans, and the girl I was dating at the time was photographing AV N, so she couldn't actually be with us, but the plan was when she was done at AV N, she was going to come meet us at the sushi place. And then we were going to go to the hotel and watch this premier, because the premier was at midnight kind of thing of Picard season one.

And we're all a bunch of Trek nerds. And I mean, we spent the day playing Trek, trivia trek board games, doing dumb shit like that. And that particular breakup happened in, so she meets us at the sushi restaurant, breaks up with me in front of everybody, doesn't even sit down at the table to eat. Apparently she'd been talking to some friends at AVN about our issues that we'd had, and they were just basically just cut your losses kind of thing. And she thought it was a good idea to do this in front of people. And I'm kind of an emotional guy again, mama's boy, all that stuff. And I wasn't drinking. That was very, at this point in time, that was a problem in our relationship, was me drinking. So at this point in time, I wasn't drinking. And the sad thing is, I can't remember if this was the first or second time she broke up with me.

There were three different times this particular person broke up with me, and I took it really hard. We get back to the Rio, I go to the gift shop. I bought a bottle of, I believe it was four roses, took it up to the room and everybody's doing their thing. And I'm just drinking straight out of this bottle. Just I'm glad that in Vegas, you can't get out on the balcony anymore. I probably would've just fucking flown off the thing. Again, I'm sorry about my language, you can beep it in post. But I remember, and I hate this, this is why social media, this is why your phone should have a breathalyzer. So I did some kind of Instagram post where I was very, I took a picture, even in my depression, drunk in depression state, I was trying to be artistic. So I took this kind of artistic photo of an empty bottle of four roses I had just killed. And then I captioned it. I don't even remember what I said, but it was enough to where I literally had over 50 people hit me up, whether it was through direct message on Instagram, whether it was a text message, whether it was through Facebook Messenger, whether it was phone calls.

And so one of 'em, the one that really sticks with me is a guy named Colby who owns or owned, unfortunately not around anymore, a comic book shop called Cheese Boy Comics. And he called me and convinced me to, first of all, delete the post, which I did, and then talked to me kind of off the leg. I don't know. And it sucks. I wish I could say, and that's why I've been, and I haven't even talked to you about this yet, so don't judge me. I've been kind of getting back into my, I was raised Christian, I was raised Lutheran and McPherson's a Christian college, and while I was there, I kind of lost my faith. And I had been very atheist, agnostic, whatever you want to call it for a while. And moments like the one with Colby and kind of these instances where I've let this abandonment issue, I seem to have take over my better reasoning and put me in a place where I would do harm to myself, has kind of actually brought me back to God, which I hate. I don't want to be a Bible thumper or whatever, but because God's never going to abandon me, and I hate that I've, because I used to talk so much crap, but I've kind of become that person now where I kind of need that, because what would've happened if Colby not called me? I don't know. I mean, a lot of other people reached out to me. I believe you did too, actually. I'm fairly certain you did.

But you've always been what I love about you, I don't know if cold is the right word. You're kind of a hard ass. You're a hard ass. Very direct. Yes. But I appreciate that. But I've always appreciated that. So to answer a long-winded way of answering your question, the people, when I felt hopeless and nobody loved me and blah, blah, blah, people seem to come out of the woodworks, be like, you fool, what's wrong with you? You are loved. You're a good dude. You do good things. Everybody messes up. So that didn't work out. That's not a reason to throw it all away. And all the sum of our experiences. And I know that this abandonment issue of mine is going to be, I mean, that's the crux to me. That's the key thing that I have to work on.

Katie: That's your trigger.

Danny: Yes. Yes. So that's why this is the longest I've been single in my adult life right now as we're speaking. This Is helpful. and I'll never talk to you about that. I do too. And I think I don't want to answer another relationship again until I feel confident that I'm not going to lose my shit if that relationship doesn't work out. So you know what I mean? So that's kind of the phase that I'm in right now is I'm working on me

Katie: Learning to love you

Danny: And God, I hate to sound like that guy, but I also, the strength that my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ gives me is also very helpful with that. And I would've punched somebody in the face if they told me a year ago, I would've said this, something like that. So I feel so weird saying it, but it's helped me a lot. I spent a lot of time by myself now. I was always, I mean, you've known me a long time. What's the longest I've been single? Like a month? You like to

Katie: Be with people, you like to be surrounded by people.

Danny: Yeah, I'm a social butterfly. I like to be out. But right now, with the combination of the hip replacement, I can't drive. I'm at home. I don't live with anybody. I mean, I got my cat and my dog, so that's helpful. So it's just a lot of reading, a lot of writing, a lot of these podcasting, a lot of self-reflection, just working on myself and I don't know. What about, let me ask you, I know that you're interviewing me, but does one ever really get over that kind of an issue? Or is it just something like I was saying earlier, I just have to work on it forever and just keep it at bay kind of thing?

Tune in for More

Catch Danny’s entire episode here. Like and subscribe for more videos like this one!