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Marc Moss: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m Marc Moss. In this week’s podcast, you’ll hear stories about the transcendence of overcoming addiction, and a daring horse rescue on a forest service road in Montana. Our podcast today was recorded in front of a live audience on September 24th, 2019 at The Wilma in Missoula, Montana.

Eight storytellers shared their true personal story on the theme Leap of Faith. Today, we hear from

to

of those storytellers. Our first story comes to us from

Tomi Cook, whose downward spiral into addiction is transcended when her drug dealer takes a leap of faith of his own and treats Tomi with compassion. This is Tomi’s story of healing and grace. She calls her story One Leap at a Time. A warning for our more sensitive listeners, Tomi shares openly and with frank language about suicide and drug use.

If you or someone you know needs help with depression or suicidal thoughts, you can call the National Lifeline one eight hundred-two seven [00:01:00] three-TALK. If you or someone you know struggles with addiction, you can find help at addictionresource.com.

Tomi Cook: I’m in a bathtub in Tokyo, Japan, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I feel totally at peace. I’m wearing my favorite outfit. It’s this long, flowy, white and gold kimono, and I’m just mesmerized watching it float in the warm water, and it’s making me reminisce From the time I was six months old, my family moved every two or three years, and so I had a desperately lonely childhood.

And by the time they settled down and bought a house outside of Seattle, I was in junior high school. So I had my big Coke bottle glasses that would fall off my face if I looked a little too fast. I had really bad acne and braces for three years, and I didn’t know how to do my hair, so it was like this [00:02:00] crazy triangle fro.

And to this day, my right arm is much stronger than my left arm from carrying around a tenor saxophone all day every day, ’cause I was in all three bands. Woo! And I just didn’t understand why nobody wanted to be friends with me, so I would sit in the back of the lunchroom reading my Star Trek novel, eating my Cup O’ Noodle, uh, you know, just trying to make eye contact with people.

And my home life just wasn’t much better. It was either icy cold and silent, or it was raging scream and violence, and not much in between. So I very quickly got excited when this boy I had a crush on offered to hang out, and I was stoked that somebody was paying attention to me. And so when he offered me heroin-

I tried to play it really cool, and I was just like, “Oh, yeah, heroin, no big deal.” But as soon as it hit my blood, it was [00:03:00] everything that I had been looking for in my life. I felt loved and safe and like I belonged, and all of my fears and sadness and terror just melted away. And I went from being this 4.0 student that was vice president and on varsity cross country and swim to v- barely, barely graduating high school because I was in and out of rehab.

I kept relapsing, just couldn’t get clean. I was in and out of jail. I was in and out of emergency rooms. My parents had to kick me out. I was h- living out of my car by the time I was 16 because I was so hell-bent on self-destruction. And so my last stint out of jail, I decided to do a Hail Mary, and I sold my vehicle, and I bought a one-way ticket to Tokyo, Japan, thinking that would be the answer.

Like, just, you know, I haven’t been able to get clean here, but if I move to a whole new country, it’ll be amazing. And [00:04:00] as soon as I got there, in less than a month, I found Roppongi, which is, like, the dark, seedy underground of Tokyo, and it’s run by the Yakuza, which is the Japanese mafia, and the Nigerians and the Rastafarians.

And, and for the next three years, every single night, I started to play Russian roulette with my life, doing whatever it took to make the two to three hundred dollars a day that I needed just to function. Because at this point, my tolerance had gotten so high- I wasn’t even getting high on heroin anymore.

I needed that much just to get out of bed, just to function, just to go teach English and make it through. And so after three years, I’m so exhausted, I ask my dealer for something cheaper, and he gives me my first bag of crystal meth. And what I had been able to kind of maintain for seven years using heroin, I lost everything in less than six weeks on meth.

[00:05:00] I lost both my jobs. My roommate left for a month, and when they got back, it was the middle of summer. The curtains were drawn. I hadn’t slept in ten days. I hadn’t eaten in two weeks. I was just this Skeletor, and there was bugs in my skin that I couldn’t stop clawing at, so everything is just bloody and, and swollen.

And she found me just tweaking out underneath the computer desk. And I remember the next morning, there’s sunlight coming through the window, and I see it on my body, and I feel nothing. I don’t feel warmth. I don’t feel any emotion. And I realized I’d finally done it. I had killed my soul, myself, my spirit, like who I really am, and I was now just this empty, hollow shell.

And so I needed to complete it, and I decided to take my life. And that’s when I put [00:06:00] on that long, flowy, beautiful outfit, and I locked myself in that bathroom, and I took the biggest shot of heroin that I could. And just to make sure that the job was done, I laid in that warm water and I just watched as it turned pink and then red and then crimson, and I’m blacking out as I hear my friends break down the bathroom door to save my life Those friends rallied and they got me a ticket back to Seattle.

There just weren’t any resources in Tokyo, and so, um, they were gonna send me back to be with my mom. But I still felt nothing, and so I felt like there was no point in trying to get better. So I packed up everything I own, my contacts, my glasses, my laptop, my jewel- my clothes, everything, and donated it to the homeless shelters in Tokyo, and I threw some shit in a suitcase to make my friends feel better, and I got on this plane.

And what they didn’t tell me was that there was a [00:07:00] seven hour layover in Honolulu, Hawaii. So when the plane touched down, I just left my suitcase, left my purse with all my ID and money, and just walked off the plane with what I was wearing, and I didn’t look back. I lived on the streets of Hawaii for over a year, homeless.

Um, no one knew where I was. No one knew if I was dead or alive. And I tried to take my life three more times, and the third time I wake up, I’m on this beautiful beach and I have this bent needle in my arm, and my lips and my hands are blue, and I just, I don’t understand why the universe won’t help me be put out of my suffering.

Like, why won’t it release me from this place? And I crawl back to my drug dealer, and he looks at me in all of my patheticness, and he throws me this little brown baggie. And I think, “Oh my God, he finally took mercy on me.” Like, this is a lethal dose of some k- sort of poison. And so I rip it [00:08:00] open and I take it.

And a little bit of time goes by and I start to realize I can’t feel my hands. I can’t move my hands. I can’t move my face and I collapse onto the living room floor because what he had given me was iboga, which is this West African coming of age root that they use for their ceremonies. It is one of the most powerful psychedelics on the planet.

It puts your body into an 18 hour catatonic state while fast forwarding you through the opiate withdrawal process, which is incredible in and of itself. But I had never had psychedelics until, until this moment, and so it was mind blowing what I was experiencing. I was having visions of myself as an old woman in this dark room, and every time I would inject myself, I would just melt like rubber.

And then I s- felt my mother behind me [00:09:00] holding me, and my aunties, and my grandmothers, and every woman that had ever come before me just rocking me and reminding me of the strength that I had come from. And I saw the perfect balance of good and evil in this world and how one cannot exist without the other, that everything is exactly how it’s supposed to be.

And it made me realize I was living in this cold, dark, empty shell where my religion was that I am worthless. I’m a worthless piece of shit. I don’t deserve to be loved. I don’t deserve to be happy. This is all I’m good for. All I wanna do is die. I hate myself. I hate myself. And that’s all I knew, but this experience was so profound that it cracked open that shell and let in light for the first time ever in my life I stopped trying to die after that day.

And at this point, you know, my family had disowned me, my friends had all given up. I had burned every bridge that had [00:10:00] ever existed many times over. And so the only person I knew with any resources was my drug dealer. And lucky for me, he had parents who lived in Lakeside, Montana, with an empty basement they’d be willing to let me detox in if I gave them my food stamps every month.

So in the biggest leap of faith of my life, I get on this plane to Montana, which is a state that I had never heard of, thought of, had no idea what people do here. I knew no one, and I owned nothing. But I showed up on October 22nd. There had been an early snow. All I owned was a pair of shorts and a Hawaiian dress.

And so I’m just in my Hawaiian dress, at least my knees are covered, hoping that I, I will get warmer, freezing my ass off, wondering what I’m doing here. But I make it to that basement, and I go through the most hellish cold turkey detox you can imagine. But I make it through, and I start volunteering at this mental health center, and it makes me [00:11:00] realize there are so many people who are suffering, and the people who are working with them don’t have lived experience and deep empathy and compassion.

And so that lit a fire under my ass. So I went back to community college, went back to school. I saved up my money. I got this piece of shit Hyundai Elantra that would rattle over thirty-five miles an hour and thought I was gonna die every time it rained or snowed. And I got my first pair of long johns and a snow jacket and felt like it doesn’t get any better than this.

And I transferred to the University of Montana and moved to Missoula so I could finish my bachelor’s degree and go to graduate school. Saved up a little more money, got a two thousand and two Chevy Malibu, felt like this is it, like I’ve made it. Doesn’t get any better. And I just loved it. I was learning.

I was learning how to help other people, how to help myself heal and grow and thrive. And, and at the end of it all, I ended up with five degrees so I could be a therapist.[00:12:00]

And a yoga teacher so I could dedicate the rest of my life to helping people, so I could use everything I’ve been through, so I could pay it all forward, so we could turn our darkness into light, so we could fight the good fight, so that way nobody has to walk through the darkness alone if they don’t want to.

And that landed me my dream job at this incredible organization right here in town, working for the people who are in the exact same position I was in not that long ago. And it feels like my life has finally come full circle. And next month, almost exactly to the day, I’m celebrating seven years clean off heroin and meth.

And there’s just, there’s [00:13:00] not a single day that goes by that I am not absolutely overwhelmed by gratitude at the amount of love that is in my life today. Um, I’m reconnected to my family. I have the best friends anybody could ask for. I met the love of my life right here in this room.

And all it took, all it continues to take is to find the courage to continue to just keep on taking these leaps of faith. Thank you.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Tommie. Tommie Cook recently graduated from the Clinical Mental Health Master’s Program at the University of Montana, and then landed her dream job at Open Aid Alliance. She’s a New Yorker who spent the early parts of her life moving around the country, including several years in Japan, before she found [00:14:00] Montana, not by choice, but by luck.

Thanks for listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. If you enjoy the stories you hear, please recommend the Tell Us Something podcast to one person who has never heard it before. You can subscribe to Tell Us Something wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. We have one more story in this episode.

Before we get to it, I want to take a moment to thank our sponsors. Thank you to our title sponsor, The Good Food Store. The Good Food Store, supporting Western Montana farmers and ranchers for almost fifty years, and local artisans stirring up our favorite salsas, baked goods, kombucha, ice cream, and more.

Learn more at goodfoodstore.com. Cabinetparts.com, the number one source for cabinet hardware since 1997. Anyone searching for the best kitchen cabinet hardware at a great price needs to go to cabinetparts.com. Cabinetparts.com combines knowledgeable hardware specialists with all the best online shopping experience nationwide.

[00:15:00] Cabinetparts.com is the direct source for all of your cabinet hardware needs. All right, let’s get back to the storytelling. In our final story, Anna Haslund performs a daring horse rescue on a Forest Service road in Montana. Anna calls her story Joe and Balthazar. Note that Anna is deaf, and you may hear her voice in the background of the American Sign Language interpreter who is voicing Anna’s story.

Anna Haslund: About four years ago, me and my best friend Erica were in Frenchtown at an organization called HEART, which is an equine recreation and therapy organization

We were volunteering with those horses. Erica asked me if I wanted to go up to Flathead to pick up four new horses for this therapy ranch, and I was so excited. I said, “Of course I do.” [00:16:00] So it was me, and Erica, and her half sister, Selena We met the owner up there at this other ranch, and he said, “Go ahead and pick your horse.”

So I looked at all the horses, and I saw this beautiful, perfect horse. He was huge. He was brown and flowing mane. And I w- felt a little nervous though. I knew it was important that we had to be able to trust each other. So I offered him my hand, and he sniffed my hand. He let me pet his nose. And I asked the owner, I said, “What is this horse’s name?”

He said, “Oh, the horse’s name is Joe.” And I said, “Well, that’s really funny. My mom’s name is Joe.” So apparently this is meant to be. This is a good connection. So I got on the horse. We’re riding along, and the way most people communicate with a horse is they make a clicking sound. Well, I can’t [00:17:00] click. So I decide to make a kissing sound instead.

It worked great. It worked great. He liked it. So a few months later, Erica and I decided that we wanted to take these horses out on a trail ride, and there were four of us. Again, it was Erica, Selena, she was about seven at the time, and the ex-wife of the owner. I’m not sure how she got in the group, but- So we’re riding along.

We keep going. We’re on this Forest Service road. It was a nice big road, perfect for four people, four horses. So we’re all riding along. We go on up a few miles. We were just gonna go up and turn around and come back. Everything was going on great. And of course, I was on the lead horse, which is ridiculous because I’m deaf.

But here I go. In about 10, 15 minutes, I start feeling in my gut like something’s not quite right. I turn around, and oh my gosh, Erica’s waving [00:18:00] frantically, and I knew quickly that something had to be wrong. So I’m trying to kiss at my horse again to get him to stop. I tur- we turn around, and we see that the ex-wife was on one of the meanest horses.

She yanked on the reins, and he kicked her right off, and she actually broke her leg. Oh no. So I look over at Erica, and we see Selena. It’s her first time on a horse. Now, she is scared to death. She’s screaming hysterically, and we knew that we needed to calm her down so that her horse didn’t get scared and buck her off.

So we’re trying to keep her calm. We don’t want her to scare the horse. And now we’re trying to figure out what are we gonna do now. How are we gonna get four horses down? And oddly enough, these two men come walking up the Forest Service road. We thought, “Well, this is perfect timing.” And they asked if they could help.

We said, “Uh, yeah, that’d be great.” So we said, “How are you gonna help?” They said, “We have a truck right over [00:19:00] here.” So they were able to pick up the ex-wife and put her in the truck. Helped her out. We said bye. So then Erica takes me to the other horse, and she brings me the reins to guide the other horse down the trail, and the reins slipped out of my hand.

Then the horse, he just kept trotting along like nothing was going on, and I thought, “Oh, great, now we have a runaway horse.” So I have to get next to this horse. I’m riding my horse. I’m trying to use my horse to guide the other horse so that I could grab the reins And while we were going down the Forest Service road, it was really curvy.

We finally get to a flat spot. I look at my horse, I look at the other horse, and I have this incredible plan. I know it’s a little crazy, but it’s a great plan. So I’m talking to Joe, and I’m saying, “Stay here. I have faith in you. Do not take off on me. Just stay [00:20:00] with me.” So I go over sidesaddle, and Erica is looking at me.

She knows exactly what I’m gonna do. She tries to tell me not to. I jump off of Joe, I scream, I land. It kind of felt like Zorro, actually. I jump over.

Tomi Cook: Okay.

Anna Haslund: I land on this horse- … this mean one. His name is Balthazar. And I feel, “This is incredible. I really should be in a movie. This was amazing.” “I should be a stunt person.”

So I grab the reins, I pull him back. Everybody’s absolutely shocked. Erica says, “You are insane. What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I said, “Well, I, I actually can’t believe I did that myself.” “But look, everything is, everything’s great. Now there’s no more problems.” So the ex-wife was taken to the hospital.

Yes, she broke her leg. Selena got over her fear of the horses, and she’s [00:21:00] fine. And Erica and I are still best friends, thank God. Now we have a story we can tell our grandchildren- … for years to come of what crazy risk-takers we are.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Anna. And thanks to Bonnie Kurian for voicing Anna’s story. Anna Haslund loves to help the community with her kindness. She is the one who breaks the barrier and who can do the impossible. Watch out for her crazy skills with jazz kicks. Her nickname is Anna Banana

Thanks to our sponsors, Clearwater Credit Union, a force for good, clearwatercreditunion.org. Missoula Bone & Joint, providing superior clinical orthopedic care to their patients for over 60 years, missoulaboneandjoint.com. Axis Physical Therapy, an enthusiastic team dedicated to providing compassionate

and comprehensive care to their clients. Learn more at [00:22:00] axismissoula.com. Missoula Broadcasting Company, locally owned and operating four stations, including The Trail 103.3, Missoula’s quality rock, Jack FM 105.9, playing what they want, U 104.5 FM, your at-work listening station, and ESPN 102.9, focusing on city, state, and regional sports, giving exposure and insight to teams and athletes in and around Western Montana.

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at missoulabroadcasting.com.

Thanks to Cash for Junkers, who provided the music for the podcast. Find them at cashforjunkersmusic.com. Podcast production by me, Marc Moss.

Thank you to everyone who attends the live events, those of you who download the podcasts, and most especially to the storytellers, Tomi Cook, and Anna Haslund. Thanks for listening. Remember, your story matters. Learn more at [00:23:00] [00:24:00] [00:25:00] [00:26:00] tellussomething.org.