Hope Is a Drug Worth Sharing

Hope is a drug worth sharing.

I’m standing in line to get food. If you’ve never had to do it, let me tell you — it’s a miserable experience. This isn’t a restaurant. This isn’t a choice. When you stand in line waiting for chow that is government food provided by the lowest bidder, this is a need, not a want. You are not there because you’re hungry for something good. You’re there because your body has to eat and this is the only way it happens.

So you wait. An endless government bureaucratic line to get some of the worst food you’ve ever tasted in your life. Standing outside, baking in the sun. Sweat running down your back. Nobody talking much. Everybody just trying to get through it and get back to wherever it is they go to disappear for the rest of the day.

The guy in front of me in the chow line is the scariest man you’ve ever seen.

I don’t say that for effect. I mean it. He’s Pacific Islander, which in there means he runs in the Asian Pacific Islander gang. He’s absolutely jacked out of his mind. Massive muscles poking through his prisoner uniform like the fabric is barely holding on. He had tattoos from his fingernails, up his arm, across his throat, and onto his face. It’s like he woke up every single day trying to figure out a way to look scarier than the day before. And it worked. Every day it worked.

This guy is scary. Let’s just leave it there.

And then he turned to me and asked me what I was gonna do when I went home.

Now you might think that’s a perfectly innocent question. Totally normal. Two guys in a line, killing time, what are you gonna do when you get out. Except it’s not. Not in that environment. In that environment, people like him don’t talk to people like me. Different races, different groups. There’s a fair amount of segregation in there, and a lot of it is self-imposed. You stay with your people. You don’t cross the line. You definitely don’t strike up a conversation with the guy behind you in chow who isn’t one of yours.

But he did. He asked me what I was gonna do.

And I gave him a nothing answer. I said I don’t know. I was gonna go home and figure it out. Probably have to go into business for myself, because that’s all I really knew how to do.

And that’s when it happened.

He hung his head. This sort of sad, defeated huff of air comes out of him. And now this large man — this man who has spent every morning trying to look more terrifying than the last — is standing there in the sun staring at his own shoes.

He says to me, in this thick Hawaiian accent:

“Brah. You know about all that business stuff. I don’t know how to do that. I’ve been locked up so long I’ve missed my daughter’s whole life. Now she has a grandbaby. And I’m going to go home soon. I want to be around for her. I want to do what’s right. But all I’ve been is a stupid drug dealer my whole life.”

A stupid drug dealer my whole life.

I want you to sit with that. This mountain of a man. This guy who could break me in half without changing his expression. And inside, he’s carrying the belief that he is stupid. That he is worthless. That he has nothing to offer his own daughter except the story of a life wasted.

And what happened next surprised even me.

I snapped at him.

I kind of got in his face. And I was pissed. Not at him — through him. I was tired. I was so tired of hearing these stories from these guys. Guys who had been so beaten down by friends, by family, by their community, by law enforcement, by every voice they’d ever heard, that they had come to think — no, to really believe — that they were worthless. That they were a piece of shit. That there was nothing in them worth saving.

And it’s not true. It’s just not true.

So I snapped at him. And I said:

“You do know about business. You understand everything there is to know about business. You understand product. You understand processing. You understand supply and demand. You understand distribution. You understand customer satisfaction — because in your line of work, if the customer wasn’t satisfied, you didn’t get to keep breathing. You understand logistics. You understand supply chain issues better than half the MBAs walking around out there with a degree on the wall.

You understand everything there is to know about business.

The only difference — the only difference — is that you poorly chose which product to sell. You chose a high-margin, high-risk product. And now you are feeling the inevitable consequences of that choice. That’s it. That’s the whole difference.

Had you chosen coffee beans. Had you chosen HDMI cables. Computer chips. A lower-risk, probably lower-margin product — you would not be standing here today. You’d be running something. You’d be somebody’s supplier. You’d have a warehouse.

You can do this. You already know how to do it.”

And then.

Then he turned and looked at me.

And this is the scariest man you’ve ever seen. Head shaved. Bald. Tattoos crawling up his neck and onto his face. And he’s got tears in his eyes.

He said to me — quiet, like he almost didn’t want it to be true:

“No one’s ever said that to me before.”

No one’s ever said that to me before.

I don’t know how to explain what I saw in that moment. I saw something move across his face. I saw a humbled man. But more than that — I saw a man who had hope. Maybe for the first time in twenty years. Twenty years.

Here’s a man who wanted to do good. Who wanted, more than anything, to go home and be a provider for his daughter and his grandbaby the right way. And somewhere along the line he had just — relinquished himself. He’d handed it over. He decided he didn’t have the skill set to be that man, because nobody had ever told him otherwise. Nobody had ever given him the benefit of the doubt. Nobody had ever handed him the confidence, the self-esteem, the one sentence that said: you already have what you need.

Everybody in his life had told him what he was. Stupid. Criminal. Dealer. Lost cause.

Nobody had ever told him what he could be.

And here’s the thing that got me, that still gets me. It didn’t take much. I didn’t give him money. I didn’t give him a job. I didn’t give him a plan or a program or a twelve-step anything. I gave him a re-frame. I took the exact same life he’d lived — the exact same twenty years he’d been carrying around as evidence of his own worthlessness — and I held it up to a different light. And in that different light, those twenty years weren’t a rap sheet. They were a résumé.

That’s all it was. Same man. Same history. Different story about what it meant.

A little bit of empathy. A little bit of passion. It goes a long way. Further than you think. It went twenty years deep in about ninety seconds, standing in the sun, in the worst place on earth, waiting for the worst food I’ve ever eaten.

I’ve thought about that man a lot since. I don’t know his name anymore, if I’m honest. I don’t know if he made it home. I don’t know if he’s with his daughter right now, holding that grandbaby, being the man he wanted to be. I hope he is. God, I hope he is.

But I know this. For at least one afternoon, he had hope. And he had it because somebody bothered to give it to him.

That’s why I say hope is a drug. Because it changes your chemistry. It changes what your body does when it wakes up in the morning. It changes whether you fight or whether you fold. I’ve watched it wear off men, watched them go grey and quiet without it. And I’ve watched it hit a man like a shot of something and put the light back in his eyes.

And here’s the part I need you to hear, wherever you are, whatever you did, however far down you think you are right now:

It’s a drug worth sharing.

You probably have somebody in your life right now who thinks they are a stupid drug dealer. Not literally, maybe. But somebody who has taken their whole life and boiled it down into one ugly word and decided that word is the truth about them. A screwup. A failure. A disappointment. Somebody who has relinquished themselves.

You might be that person.

The same skills that got you here can get you out. The same intensity you poured into the wrong thing works just as hard on the right one. Nothing about you needs to be thrown away. It just needs to be pointed somewhere else.

You already know how to do it.

Somebody just has to be the first person to say it.

So let me be that person, if nobody else has been.

You can do this. You already know how.

Next chapter: Into the Lion’s Den →