Building from Zero After Addiction, Prison, and a Felony

I spent ages 14–16 in a maximum-security juvenile prison, became a felon at 19, lost almost everything to addiction, and later rebuilt my life through software, open source, and a few people who took a chance on me. I've wanted to write this for a while, but kept finding reasons not to. It felt too personal, too risky, and too easy to misread. I wrote this for anyone quietly wondering whether they have no chance at a future. Below is the much-condensed life story of my struggles with addiction, poverty, and incarceration + life after being a felon. My hope is that it serves as encouragement to others who are in similar circumstances that things CAN get better. I was a model student up until around puberty and middle school. Then, I think a combination of being bullied for being overweight and teenage hormones, led me to be just the wrong combination of resentful, angry, unhappy, and rebellious. I started getting in fistfights with people that made fun of me, being a huge asshole to teachers, stopped doing schoolwork, and started experimenting with drugs. The beginning of the end: The day I bought an Adderall from a classmate. When that amphetamine feeling kicked-in, it was as if life was perfect for the first time. I was happy, confident, felt I could do anything. I wanted to feel this way every waking moment for the rest of my life. Being 14, I had no job, and I do not come from money. So, logically, I did the thing one must do if one wishes to sustain a drug habit: Devise a way to make money. The easiest way to make money at 14 turned out to be dealing drugs, so I started selling various prescription medications on a "buy-low-sell-high" basis from other students at school. This was short-lived, as I had the huge mouth of a rebellious "I'm invincible" 14-year old boy, and I was shortly arrested and charged with 17 counts of Possession with Intent to Manufacture or Distribute a Scheduled II Controlled Substance. I wound up spending 2 years, from 14-16 at a maximum security juvenile prison (Lookout Mountain YSC, Golden CO). In prison, I got my GED, and after release briefly enrolled in community college. I was working as a landscaper doing manual labor for $8/hr and then riding a bus 1hr each way to night classes. Not to say this sort of thing can't be done (people do it all the time), but I didn't have the tenacity or motivation to keep it up, so I dropped out. I stayed sober for a brief period between 16-17. Not having learned my lesson, I again started selling drugs. I had learned about The Silk Road and the Darknet and was ordering (what was then) a legal "Research Chemical" with effects similar to MDMA (Methylone/bk-MDMA) shipped to my parents house. Eventually, my dad got home early from work and intercepted a package. Asking me what it was before I left for work, I told him "I don't know, never heard of the return address name". My father was not an idiot; he told me he was going to open it while I was at work, so I confessed "it's drugs." Cue huge argument, him insisting he was going to remove everything from my room except my clothes and bed (most of which I paid for myself) and I would not be allowed to leave except for work. This was not an agreeable circumstance to me, so I refused -- at which point my dad said "then you won't be living here anymore!". It's important to note that in Colorado (at the time, at least), emancipation of a minor was not a status one could file for, but instead purely a court status to be recognized during legal proceedings. That meant there was technically no avenue for me to legally move out before 18 with proper legal status. So this, to me, sounded like sweet freedom & release, rather than a punishment. "You really won't call the police if I leave?" "Nope." I packed my backpack with my laptop and cash savings, and a suitcase with my clothes, and left. I had no plan but that was a bridge to be crossed. It turned out that the parents of a friend had an unused bedroom in their trailer they would rent to me under-the-table for $300/mo. I jumped at that and slept on the floor of a trailer for 6 months. I worked as a landscaper, at a lumber mill, and as a cashier at Walgreens, continuing to sell drugs on the side. Inevitably, I wound up being arrested again on drug-related charges, and spent 18-19 in county jail. It was then that I became a convicted felon with a low-class felony. While I was in county jail, one day the newspaper had a small article in it: "Tech company offers internships to at-risk & underprivileged youth" I had spent my childhood on the computer, playing videogames and eventually teaching myself to program to make game mods. I knew from a young age I wanted to be a programmer (I thought I wanted to make videogames, as most young children do). This to me, seemed like a fortuitous opportunity. I cut the article out and put it in a documents folder. Eventually, I was moved from regular jail population into the Work-Release jail progra

Building from Zero After Addiction, Prison, and a Felony

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