AUgust 22, 1993 • A really bad night

Six months before I ever dreamed of backpacking through Europe, I hit absolute rock bottom.

It was a Friday night at The Dome — the biggest, loudest, most notorious party house in Kearney. We were about to start our senior year, and this was the rager that would set the tone for the entire year ahead. We had already built a full Olympic-size sand volleyball court in the backyard. The student body knew us. The police department knew us. For over a year we had been the party house in town.

That night the house was packed with probably a hundred people. The music was blasting. Kyle and Curt, who worked at Bill’s Liquor, kept the beer and hard liquor flowing nonstop. We had even built a real bar right between the living room and kitchen, just steps from my bedroom door. Keg stands, body shots, drinking games — everyone was having the time of their lives.

Everyone except me.

By this point, partying had become my entire “T-Dog” identity. It was how people knew me. But it was also destroying me. I had already partied my way out of Arizona State, losing a full-ride scholarship. Now I was right back in the biggest party house at UNK, stuck in the same destructive cycle.

The voices in my head were screaming louder than the music. I was drunk, deeply depressed, and spiraling. I told a couple of friends I was in a really bad place. Their response? “Aww T-Dog, chill out man — we’re having a party. Let’s do shots.”

So I did more shots. The alcohol only fed the darkness.

As the party grew louder and wilder outside my door, I walked through the chaos without saying a word to anyone, shut my bedroom door, sat on my bed… and took a razor blade to both of my wrists.

That’s the last thing I remember.

Thank God — by the Grace of God — I woke up the next morning.

I had sliced both wrists dozens of times and there was blood everywhere. But I was still alive. Somehow, in my drunken, broken state, I hadn’t hit an artery.

Kyle was the first to notice me wearing a long-sleeved sweatshirt on a warm summer morning and the bandages underneath. He pulled me aside, and when he questioned me I broke down and confided all my feelings to him.

He drove me to my parents’ house and stood beside me while I told them what I had done.

My Dome Crew brothers rallied around me. I started seeing a counselor.

Slowly, things began to get better.

That night became the emotional jet fuel for everything that followed. It lit a desperate, burning fire in me — a fierce need to do something, anything, to prove that my story wasn’t over.

Six months later, that fire and jet fuel combination turned into my escape to Europe.