I grew up in a messed up home, both my parents were heroin addicts and I spent much of my child hood bouncing from apartment to apartment, living in cars, homeless shelters, etc.

I started smoking at 9, and drinking and smoking pot around 12. The first time I did cocaine I was still in elementary school.

When I was in 7th grade my mother and father got clean and shortly after my father died of cancer. My mother didn't know how to handle me and I didn't know how to deal with her or the sudden need for rules, so she kicked me out. I spent the next few years bouncing around from house to house, friend to friend, and occasionally would end up at home. around 17 I ended up on the streets, sleeping under bridges, squatting, and hopping trains.

During this time I would try and get a job but every time I did I would get picked up as a run away and sent back home, only to get kicked out again and have to start over.

While on the streets I really started to drink heavily and would occasionally dabble in hard drugs, but the fear of completely ending up like my parents kept me from jumping too heavily into it. To this day I have never done heroin. I went from being around 220 pounds to weighing about 165 in a few months and subsisted off of diet of Carls Jr. Spicy Chicken sandwiches and gut rot whisky.

For some reason some women still found me attractive and at 17 I lost my virginity. Just like everything else in my life at the time I took it to excess- I had no concept of no. I don't remember most of these years, but fortunately I didn't contract anything I couldn't walk away from.

One night a "housey" (punk that had a home, but hung out with us) kid I had become decent friends with offered for me to stay the night at his house. I did. That was the beginning of my first big turn around.

His parents offered to let me stay at his home, rent free, so long as I followed a few rules: I had to get a job, I had to put at least half of my earnings into a savings account, I couldn't do any hard drugs (cigarettes, drinking and pot were okay), and if I decided to leave I needed to tell them.

I had recently turned 18 and could get a job without getting sent back to my moms, so I agreed.

While I lived with them they taught me how to handle finances, helped me get my GED, started teaching me how to drive, as well as many of the other things I needed to know to live a normal life. I started playing music again and formed a little band. I started weight lifting and quit drinking and doing any drugs at all. I quickly realized how much I love to work and excelled quickly at my job at KFC so my friends mom got me a job working downtown doing shipping and receiving at her work.

After a few months working at my labor job I started talking to a few friends I had back in the smaller town I grew up in. They were skinheads (traditional, non racist and anti-racist) and I started getting asked if I wanted in. I got my haircut shortly after and moved back to my old town.

After the chaos of most of my youth I found I loved the subculture- the working class mentality, the regimen, the hierarchy, the dress, the rules. For the first time I took pride in my appearance and the work I did. We didn't do drugs, we went to work, we got into fights, we drank too much, we were all one big fucked up family.

This went on for a few years spent the time moving from to a few different towns, worked a few different jobs and been living the type of excess that was at this point more of a habit to me than fun. I was in the later half of my 20's by this point, and although I had enrolled myself in college I was starting to feel stagnant. I saw my friends, the bars, the fights, the stories we told, and it all felt like a rerun of the same thing. I started to notice the guys that were in their late 30's and early 40's that were still doing this, and it all just seemed so hollow to me. Then I met a girl.

I went out to the bar with a friend of mine and his girlfriend brought another girl, and from the instant I saw her I knew something was different. I've heard the clichés about love at first sight and I never believed them, but the moment I saw her I just knew that was it. I was done.

I sat at the bar and watched as my friend tried to play the normal cocky shit with her and laughed as she strategically tore his delusions about himself to shreds, all while making it funny. I saw a woman with zero fear and I loved it. I followed her around like a puppy, did all the stupid crap that guys that are in love do when they are blinded by love (including dancing), and six months later we were engaged. One year and one day later we were married.

I finished college and about six months into being married we found out she was pregnant. Suddenly my life couldn't be about me anymore. I was scared, I feared being a father, fear being like my parents, feared raising my kids in an unhealthy environment. I went to my friends, hung my boots up and started making plans to move.

We ended up moving a few hundred miles from where I went to school, to a smaller town with a higher need for my skills. Shortly my wife gave birth to healthy baby girl and I've never looked back.

Since she was born I don't smoke, rarely drink, have had my career-killing tattoos removed, bought a house, a mini van, and a pop up trailer tent. I wake up every day having the family I always searched for, the stability I never knew how to create on my own, and have found friendships that I would have never been able to make in my younger life. As far as those around me today, I haven't told but one or two people about my past for fear of being ostracized.

I'm a husband, a father, and a provider now. It's everything I was ever looking for and I'll never look back. I'm just a regular Joe.

TL;DR "partying hard" was the only lifestyle I ever knew until a few kind people and a good woman set me straight.