Darren Waller

And, you know, by like 14, 15 was when I kind of got into drugs and stuff like that.

Right.

Yeah, just –

around that time just highly anxious from just trying to be so hyper vigilant like I was talking about and you know just depressed like not really feeling like a lot of things that I wanted to see go my way were going my way like football was one of the things that I leaned on as like okay I'm good at this but then freshman sophomore year of high school like everybody got bigger than me and I was like really small and hadn't really hit like the weight room or anything yet and so I was kind of like

and my freshman year rode the bench, and my sophomore year of high school, I was hurt most of the years.

I had, like, this elbow surgery.

And so I was like, dang, football's not working out either.

And just, like, kind of in a low point of, like, I don't really enjoy life per se.

And I never really was somebody that was, like, I wanted to get into drugs.

I kind of knew, like, okay, these aren't necessarily good from what my parents had told me.

But it was presented to me in a way like my friends had –

gone to their parents' medicine cabinets and found like a, like hydrocodone pills and like painkillers.

And for me, it was like, I don't feel good.

And they presented to me in a way that it would make me feel good.

So I was like, I'm going to try it.

And then it was like,

instantly like yes like this is how i want to feel and it wasn't really doing anything crazy it was just like popping a couple pills and watching a movie i mean in the basement i mean all you're describing wait a minute at a at 15 years old i can take a pill that will make me go from feeling sad and lonely to feeling good okay yeah there's not a lot more thought than that right i'm in yeah and then uh you know that you started to get more frequent it went from like

Every now and then to like, all right, every weekend.

And then it was like, all right, a few days during the week.

And then a year after that, there was a kid that was on my football team who was like, he sold weed.