Bible Mistranslations and LGBTQ Marginalization: A Pastor’s Daughter Speaks Out
Episode Summary
Sharon “Rocky” Roggio is my special guest – the producer and director of the award-winning documentary “1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture.” This film explores the profound impact of a mistaken biblical translation of the word “homosexual” and its consequences on culture, religion, and the LGBTQ community. Rocky shares her personal journey as a Christian lesbian, discussing her efforts to seek acceptance and understanding from her father, a church pastor. Through these conversations, listeners gain insight into Rocky’s experiences and the broader implications of this pivotal mistranslation.
About Sharon “Rocky” Roggio
1946’s director, Sharon “Rocky” Roggio is no stranger to the implications of a life completely affected by the predominant modern interpretations of the Bible. Growing up lesbian in a Christian household, with a pastor for a father, has prepared her for this expansive undertaking. Rocky’s experience, of anti-gay biblical teachings, has been incredibly traumatic. She is a strong voice, among the growing chorus of LGBTQIA+ Christians who want to cure the world of this damaging narrative. Once Roggio learned of Kathy and Ed’s work, she was compelled to tell this story. This film is part of her attempts to reconcile a relationship with her family and begin to heal.
Sharon “Rocky” Roggio is an multi award-winning film producer and director living in Los Angeles, CA. She has been a member of three IATSE unions nationwide and has a Bachelor’s degree in Communications with a focus in Radio, Television and Film Her background includes large budget physical production on award winning shows and films such as House of Cards, Parks and Recreation, With Bob and David, Whip It and Red Dawn. In 2016, Roggio associate produced and production designed GOOK, a feature film that premiered at Sundance in 2017 and Won the Audience Award in the Next Category. In 2018 when she heard about the 1946 mistranslation in the Bible, Roggio immediately quit all her other endeavors and has focused all her time, money, and resources on producing and creating this documentary. 1946 is Roggio’s directorial debut.
About 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture
1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture is a feature documentary that follows the story of tireless researchers who trace the origins of the anti-gay movement among Christians to a grave mistranslation of the Bible in 1946. It chronicles the discovery of never-before-seen archives at Yale University which unveil astonishing new revelations, and casts significant doubt on any biblical basis for LGBTQIA+ prejudice. Featuring commentary from prominent scholars as well as opposing pastors, including the personal stories of the film’s creators, 1946 is at once challenging, enlightening, and inspiring.
Watch the full feature film today.
1946 Roadtrip Across America – We are THRILLED to announce our plan to utilize the award-winning documentary, 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, as a tool for civic engagement and to drive voter registration for the 2024 election. Our mission is to organize 14 free public conferences in US cities impacted by extremist ideologies. The primary objective of these assemblies is to activate the audience to vote as we advocate for the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community, standing up for democracy and promoting equality for everyone. We will discuss the power of civic engagement to stop evangelical and legislative domination and provide people with a sustainable narrative of compassion founded on research, history, and facts. AND – We will SHOW THE FILM – followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and director Sharon Roggio!
From This Episode
Kathy Baldock CanyonWalkerConnections.com
Jill Woodward, documentary editor
Jena Surbu, Writer/Producer
Find and Follow Carole and Wisdom Shared:
Subscribe to YouTube channel
Follow and send a message on Facebook
Follow and send a message on LinkedIn
Follow on Instagram
Follow on TikTok
Follow on Threads
The Wisdom Shared Team
Audio Engineering by Steve Heatherington of Good Podcasting Works
Co-Producer and Marketing Coordinator: Kayla Nelson
Production Assistant: Becki Leigh
Listen on:
-
[00:00:00] Rocky: Once the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuals as being mentally ill and society deemed us well, that’s when we see the church do a switch and a turn and make this a moral issue.
[00:00:20] Carole: Welcome to Wisdom Shared, where parents, children, and people on the front lines are the experts and where connection inspires change. I am your host Carole Blueweiss and today I have as my special guest, Sharon “Rocky” Roggio, the producer and director of the award-winning feature documentary 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture.
This film investigates the grave consequences of an erroneous biblical translation of the word homosexual, chronicling the effect on culture, religion, and the LGBTQ community over the last century. That might sound confusing, but it’ll become more clear as this interview moves on.
And you know how I love to explain how I met my guests. Well, Rocky gave a webinar for Women Make Movies, an organization that supports filmmakers. And Rocky was talking about how and why she made her film. I was listening closely, as I too am directing a documentary and I have a lot to learn. As luck would have it, 1946, the partial name for this film, was playing near me. So I went to see it.
I knew then that I wanted Rocky to be a guest on my show to share with you all her story, a fresh and honest firsthand perspective about her identity as a Christian lesbian, and her attempts to find acceptance and understanding from her father, a church pastor. Let’s listen.
What is this film about?
[00:01:47] Rocky: 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture is about the first time the word homosexual appeared in the Bible. We have the evidence that it was a mistranslation. We go from there, from the archives at Yale University, where we discovered these historical documents that lead us to this mistranslation and try to pull back the layers from there and lay out the history of how we got to where we are today, where we see the church pushing back and weaponizing the scriptures, not only toward the LGBTQ community, but towards other people in our society. So it’s a biblical, historical, journalistic documentary film on how did we get here and why.
[00:02:30] Carole: That sounds intriguing. And if I heard that, I wouldn’t totally understand it. I’m not a churchgoer and I wouldn’t catch all the nuance and all the importance of what you’re actually saying. So I wonder if you could tell me as someone who’s curious and naive and a little ignorant about the history of homosexuality in our country. What I learned from the film, am I right that there was never ever that actual word mentioned in the Bible until 1946?
[00:03:06] Rocky: Correct. The first time the word ever appeared in any Bible, in any translation, was 1946. Prior to that, it was 1st Corinthians 6: 9 through 10. There were many different translations over thousands of years, which we look at too.
[00:03:24] Carole: Before 1946, the words homosexual and gay were used, but there was never a mention of it in the Bible. Is that accurate?
[00:03:33] Rocky: The word homosexual had been around for, I don’t know, 70 years at that point, something like that. It was coined in the late 1800s by the Germans. And in the 1930s, people didn’t really know what homosexuals were. They were deviants, they were abusers, they were, you know, all of these negative connotations. They were mentally ill, which the American Psychiatric Association supported that idea in their medical journals.
[00:04:01] Carole: It wasn’t just Christians then. You’re saying it was society in general.
[00:04:05] Rocky: Correct. A hundred percent. What we see when we look at how did the church handle this issue prior to 1946, and what we see is that up until even the 70s, pastors and churches and spiritual leaders were, and this is from the pastoral council magazine, which was a US-distributed magazine, we see clergy being and pastors being suggested to take these issues to a psychiatrist, to a mental medical doctor. This is a medical issue. They’re sick. They need to be fixed. After the 1970s and when we see the word homosexual spread into multiple English translations now in many verses, more than just the one, we start to see the church.
And once the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuals as being mentally ill and society deemed us well, that’s when we see the church do a switch and a turn and make this a moral issue. It was around the mid to late 70s when the switch really happened. And then in the 80s, the moral majority latched onto this as a political talking point.
And so all of these things are in alignment. When you start giving one group certain rights, the church pushes back on taking those rights away. First, it’s people of color. Then it’s women. Now the gay people are speaking up and wanting their equality. We need to get a handle of this.
And now that they’re pushing back, obviously they won the Roe thing. That’s been a thing they’ve been working on for 50 years in basements. Don’t get me started on all of that. But now it’s pushed back on gay marriage, but the targeting of the trans community is just awful. And this is an issue in the church, this is a sickness in the church that is new.
Christians never behaved this way. I mean, okay, when I say never, Christians have behaved poorly throughout history. So make sure we get that clear. But, you know, the church and, you know, my parents’ church didn’t have the kind of hate that we see coming from the church today.
It’s really just progressed. And the bullying, the name-calling, and it’s allowed because of our current political culture. So it’s just a big mess right now, which is why we wanted to make a movie that doesn’t vilify the other side, because this is an institutional problem. And I do believe that good people were played by a political system and by a power structure that’s designed to uplift.
And uplift them into power and use good people and use religion as a stepping stone. And so we wanted to make sure that people who are religious, Christian, Jewish, that they don’t feel that we’re pulling out the rug from underneath you. That we’re just, you know, throwing out the Bible, and we need to just kind of talk about this. I always say that this isn’t an attack on God or the Bible or religious people. This is an intervention.
[00:07:07] Carole: That’s what’s so fascinating about this film and what you’ve done. And I just want to kind of focus on this a little bit more. It sounds like what you’re saying is this particular instance is very specific, but it’s really about a powerful organization choosing a group to persecute, and it could be any group.
So this is really, in that sense, a universal theme. It’s not just about homosexuals and not just about the Christian church. What’s so fascinating that I learned in the film, it was, it’s like all this is kind of, you learn it, you don’t, we’re all confused, like in the public, with so many things, including history and politics and what’s going on now in the world, because it’s, you don’t know what’s true, what’s not true, and you’re hearing all these things.
What I learned in the film was the evolution of the, I might be not using the word correctly, but evangelicals, the detailed evolution that you described that story of when it comes to scripture and when it comes to interpretation and how those different versions of the St. James Bible changed. Can you talk that through? Because that was so clear in the film and that was so elucidating. About how something like religion can become political.
[00:08:26] Rocky: When you’re looking at translations, and one of the things really that separates our film from other films that do a great job or dealing with homophobia in the church is looking at how we got our English Bibles that we have today. We never think about this translation and where does it come from and who’s doing this. And we all know the telephone game, right?
You know you say one thing and by the time you get to the end of the line, It’s changed. And a good example is like the word butterfly, you know, it’s not butter and a fly. We know that a butterfly is different than the actual, a butter and a fly. And so just thinking through little things like that. So those are just some of the simple mistakes that could happen just through trying to get the text to align with the reader.
Another example, I remember when I was growing up, I remember hearing that missionaries would take the Bible and change things when they were going to tribal lands. And instead of having Jesus come into your heart, you know, their centerpiece of the body was the stomach. So they would change it from heart to stomach.
And so that’s a translation change. So we only have certain amount of copies of the scripture to know what kind of those changes may or may not have happened. But to that end, those are things we can deal with. Those are things we can live with, right? Those are, that’s doesn’t really impact how it’s become politicized or how it’s become weaponized.
Where the problem comes in what we want to look at are the committees behind these translations and what’s really going on there. And as we can see the Bibles that are more conservative will 100 percent subjugate women. Another good example, the New Testament in ’46 and the Old Testament, Full Bible in ’52, that Bible was more academically correct than any other, but they got pushed back as a liberal Bible and a communist Bible.
And the conservatives wanted to bury that Bible because they did things like they took the virginity of Mary away. They made Mary a young woman instead of a virgin. But that’s what the Greek is. That’s the original Greek, young woman. And so they were just trying to be accurate to the original Greek.
[00:10:34] Carole: I also don’t know a lot about Bibles because you go to a hotel, you see a Bible.
[00:10:40] Rocky: It’s the King James version of the Bible that you’re referring to. And that was published in 1611. And that was the widest Bible that the majority of the people used until the mid-century 1900s. And so that’s when the revised standard version was the first major translation to come out to modernize the text, to get rid of that old English.
And so then from there, once the RSV was deemed a communist Bible, because not only did they take the virginity of Mary away, they took the deity of Christ away because they called him on the cross. Surely this must be a son of a God, not the son of the God. And so in the stats, when we see the other translation committees come together to make their version of the English Bible, to make sure that we let people know Mary was a virgin and Christ is the only God.
And just because one person’s perspective says, surely this must be a son of a God, a person in the crowd that would have seen Christ that way. So why can’t we be honest with the text? Why do we have to change it? It’s about power and structure.
[00:11:51] Carole: What’s the name, then, of that Bible that you just said was translated that way?
[00:11:55] Rocky: The Revised Standard Version Bible, the one that we’re talking about that did the word homosexual, they’re the ones who took the deity of Christ away, according to the conservatives, and the virginity of Mary, because they made her a young woman, which was more original to the Greek. So each one will have some sort of title. One of them is the NIV, which is the new international version.
Then there’s the ESV, the English standard version. Then there’s a Standard Bible, the Living Bible, you know, there’s tons of them. And so you have to look at who’s on those committees and what are their objectives and goals. The ESV Bible was put together by the most conservative that you can think of. And so you’re going to find a lot of these conservative things.
And what I always encourage anyone who’s Christian, who’s struggling with this, I always encourage them to go talk to a Jewish person because our Jewish brothers and sisters, they understand this. It’s in the writing. It’s the writing adapts as it goes.
And you’re able to breathe with the writing and work within it into your modern life. You know? And so as they read the Bible and go through these lessons again, through the months, each year, you’re going to, they’re finding new things. And that’s wonderful and beautiful.
[00:13:10] Carole: You just take things for granted like the Bible says, and then.
[00:13:13] Rocky: 100%. Look, it says it right here in my Bible. Does it? Is that? No, that’s how the Bible reads. Let’s see what it really says, you know? And we really need to look beyond. And in other social sciences, in culture, in history, which is why Kathy Baldock’s work is so amazing. If anybody doesn’t know, definitely look her up, she’s the lead researcher in the film, who was the first to ask the question, who made this decision and why, to put the word homosexual in the Bible.
Her next book will be coming out this summer, and it’s called, How the Bible Became Anti-Gay: Forging a Sacred Weapon. And she calls it a sacred weapon because that’s what we see in the letters that we discovered at Yale University. The person who challenged the translation committee said this is wrong and here’s why.
[00:13:59] Carole: So, Kathy Baldock. She wrote a book and you were aware of the book and in that book she did extensive research on these topics and there was another gentleman that was helping her with the research. Their research became your journey in this film. So can you just start at the beginning where you realized that, wow, I think I’ll make a documentary?
[00:14:24] Rocky: Sure. It was the summer of 2018 when I had been pushing back on the church and asking questions. And I reread the Bible and learning all of these things about homosexuality in the Bible that I told my friends I was going to do a documentary on this subject to find affirming theology that could help affirm my identity with my non-affirming parents.
Meaning they don’t affirm me as a fully, you know, inclusive person of society being gay. They don’t permit it, you know, that kind of stuff. And the only way to really communicate with them is through the Bible. And so it was about two months later, I took a class on homosexuality in the Bible at a church in Toluca Lake, California.
That’s where I learned about Malakoi and Arsinokoitai, which are the two Greek words that were combined to mean the word homosexual.
[00:15:12] Carole: Can you say those words slower?
[00:15:14] Rocky: Yeah. Malakoi and Arsinokoitai. And we’ll get into the meanings of those in a minute. And so I’m like, what are these two Greek words? And they were combined to mean homosexual. So I had learned about that. I didn’t know about the 1946.
Oh, that’s interesting. And then it was that night that somebody in the class said, Oh, you need to look up Kathy Baldock. And so I looked up Kathy Baldock. I went home. I binged watched Kathy Baldock. Now, she had only had previous stuff out from her other work.
So that’s the only work that I really knew. I didn’t know that she was involved in the Malakoi and Arsinokoitai discovery of homosexual mistranslation. I just knew her other work from going to that class. And so then I found out that in October of 2018, she was coming to Los Angeles to do a seminar and it was the same weekend my parents were coming into town.
And, you know, my parents would have me go to Love One Out, and if anybody knows what that is, in the 90s, that’s a Dr. James Dobson conference, where they would go to towns and teach people how to not be gay through the Bible, and to work with parents on how to deal with, you know, either mourning a loss of their gay child, because they’re now no longer in society, you know what I mean?
Like, how do you deal with your child that’s gay? It’s like, we’re mourning. I’m like, oh my gosh. Anyway, so the conferences they asked me to go to, and I’m like, I said, yes. And I went, so I was like, okay, mom and dad, I want you to come to this conference with me. So they said yes, and I asked permission to film it.
This woman’s great. So I got a crew together, and I filmed us all going to that event. It was a six hour event. That’s where I met Ed Oxford, who’s the other researcher you mentioned. And so he started working with Kathy a couple years prior, when he found out the same way that I found out about this homosexual mistranslation.
So, he started buying old books, Bibles, lexicons to get to the bottom of Whoa, he’s like the word homosexual wasn’t in the Bible till 1946? I find that hard to believe. So he started doing the research on his own and because of his book collection, he woos Kathy, they become friends, they start working together.
So it was Ed who discovered that the RSV translation committee who made this mistranslation had left all of their archives at Yale university. So they’re telling us all of this information in this day conference at this church in Los Angeles, and I’m just like, what? I had no idea about the mistranslation.
And then they tell us about the man who wrote this letter in 1959, challenging the translation committee. David was his name. He was a young seminary student, 21 years old, who wrote a beautiful letter with an appendix saying, this is a wrong translation and why. This is going to be yielded against the community as a sacred weapon if you don’t fix this.
And so I’m sitting in this conference next to my dad, and I’m just like, this is the documentary. This is the story because this isn’t my interpretation. This isn’t a stretch on exegesis, which means taking or hermeneutics where you, you know, you want to support your ideas and interpretations through scripture.
And so it’s not a theory. This was a tangible mistake, a mistranslation. We have the historical documents to start a conversation from there and then we can build the film. But to that end, the advocacy work continues. So we’re working on our impact and educational campaign this year with 1946 and really immersing it into the community and including a workbook discussion guide that we’re about to get connected with a big publishing company to put that out with us, which was just amazing.
[00:18:42] Carole: As a child, were you somebody who felt like you wanted to advocate for others?
[00:18:48] Rocky: So my nickname is Rocky and that’s kind of for a reason. You know, I’m the kid that would always stick up for the underdog on the playground and call out any kind of injustice.
I do remember at one point there were these straight white dudes in high school that went to school in dresses as a joke. And this is the 90s and they were suspended, expelled. And I went straight to the administration. I was president of student council. And I was like, you can’t suspend these students.
Here’s the student handbook. They didn’t break any law. And we took it to student court and the next year, they updated the handbook: guys can’t wear dresses in school. So it wasn’t really a win. So I was always able to stand up for the underdog and then kind of add some levity to it, which is a pretty good balance.
We are having trouble finding a distributor, sales agent. Networks are not interested in this. They love the film, but they’re either trepidatious or they’re, you know, there’s so much competition, they want to go with, you know, the documentaries that are moving have celebrity appeal, have true crime, have global type things like global warming, where I was under the impression that something like the Bible, which impacts everyone in the world, whether you’re Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or not, but there were 300 documentaries that premiered at DOC NYC in 2022 and that’s just a small piece of all the films that are created each year.
[00:20:22] Carole: Do they include ones made by in-house companies like Netflix and HBO?
[00:20:27] Rocky: Yes, absolutely. And more of the film festivals are taking more so it really doesn’t feel Independent anymore. And then the independent producers and films keep getting pushed out and we have to rely on alternative ways. It’s just us adapting each day pretty much with the ever changing industry.
[00:20:50] Carole: My impression is that that you get a little bit of a boost on that because that’s something that our society has decided is LGBTQIA not usually talked about. So therefore we want more people to talk about it, but that doesn’t sound like what’s happened.
[00:21:11] Rocky: We are an LGBTQ film, but we aren’t. This is a film about history, politics, religion, people, society, culture. And I really wanted those themes to stand out. Now this is the group of people that have been impacted by this mistranslation that came through religion and came through scripture and came through society that impacted culture.
But the LGBTQ community is just one in line of a list of tons of others that this has happened to in our society. So when we were on the film festival circuit in 2023, we played, I mean, at least 80 screenings last year, which were phenomenal. And a majority of them were queer or LGBTQ film festivals. But every single time we got into a non-LGBTQ film festival, I was more excited or I was equally excited, just more grateful for the opportunity to be able to play to an audience that really needs to hear this too.
Of course we want our LGBTQ brothers and sisters to hear this message, but we need other people to move so our culture can move so that we can stop weaponizing the Bible and using it against these people.
[00:22:28] Carole: We all as filmmakers have to decide that and I’m curious what did you come to, who is your audience?
[00:22:34] Rocky: You know every filmmaker says this film is for everyone. But if we had to narrow it down, we would say LGBTQ, allies, people who care about LGBTQ rights, social justice issues, equality, Christians, non-Christians, practicing Jewish people, people who like history and politics. This is, as I say in the film, a global message that whether you’re Christian or not, I’ve said it before, you know, you can relate to this film because the characters are relatable.
The stories are relatable. The institutional issue of power and structure over other people is relatable. Whether it’s this issue or not. And the movie is fun to watch. Our editor, Jill Woodward, who is a New York local, is phenomenal if anybody’s looking for a storyteller editor. And she was able to, with our writer and producer as well, Jena Serbu, and the three of us really structured the film.
And then Jill was able to give us those juicy notes as an editor that of course we weren’t able to do as much. And she was in the footage doing wonderful things with the pacing and the breaths and the laying of the scenes, stacking them on top of one another with the information. It’s a heady project and there’s a lot of information and we wanted to make it entertaining, relatable, fun, journalistic, but also like a, we call it the documentary Da Vinci Code. Cause we’re in literal archives reading historical documents in real time, discovering something, you know, so it’s got that journalistic discovery kind of feel. It just started from me being curious, me asking questions, me being a filmmaker, me wanting to affirm my own life and help me and my family.
And once I learned that mistranslation, I’m like, It would be irresponsible of me not to make this movie. Now, my dad will probably never change his mind, but I’ve got nieces and nephews, you know, and a lot of people might not change their mind, but there’s enough people out there. This issue has been weighing on their heart.
And now we’ve provided a tool for people to be able to do their own research, continue their own conversations and hopefully change our culture more toward love and inclusion and equality. So it’s fascinating. And then of the characters, Kathy and Ed, they’re amazing characters. They’re funny, they’re witty. They’re humble. Just. Really great characters on film and in person, you know, real life people. I’m a still a filmmaker, so we call them characters. And then David, David Fearon, a retired minister from the United Church of Canada, who was a homosexual. His letter was phenomenal, ahead of his time.
[00:25:11] Carole: Can you explain in your words more specifically? I remember this letter was a super powerful and awe inspiring. Can you say exactly what did he say?
[00:25:22] Rocky: So, yeah, David Fearon was a pastor at the United Church of Canada, but at the time that he challenged the translation committee, he was going through seminary school.
He had only taken a year and a half of Greek, but really the most impressive thing was him going through all of the different translations over time. Citing them all and being able to trace how, again, this is an act as opposed to a person. They’ve now, the new revised standard updated edition that came out in 2022 says illicit sex with men or something.
And it’s like, okay, well, what’s this illicit and you know, to whom and all these different questions. It just forces the reader to think as opposed to putting a blanket statement like a pervert or a homosexual, or even pedophilia. Now that’s a mistranslation too. A lot of the European Bibles did use the word boy molester there.
And that’s because of what was going on in the ancient world of this pederasty, which was sex with young boys that was accepted up until they hit puberty. And they wanted to have sex with the boys for many different reasons, but mainly they didn’t want to spoil the women because they needed to be virgins.
And it wasn’t really more about like sexual release or pleasure. It was about power. So that could have been what St. Paul was condemning, but we just don’t know. It could have been slang. You know, he made up a word to describe these people that he didn’t like. And so, you know, if he wanted to talk about men who loved each other, he could have used a dozen other Greek words.
So this isn’t about consensual loving relationships. So those are just clues that again, we hope the general public will start to understand. So we can start to together push back against religious oppression because we’re all going to be in trouble if certain people get elected and certain people want to dominate this land and the world with their religious views.
And we can’t allow that. This country was built on freedom of religion and separation of church and state. Some people forget that.
[00:27:31] Carole: Is lesbian an okay word to use? Is that like a politically correct word these days?
[00:27:36] Rocky: Sure, yeah. I mean, you know, some people don’t like the word queer. They don’t like the word homosexual. And then, you know, but that these are just, this is just semantics, but then some people identify as queer. Some people identify as lesbian or gay, you know.
[00:27:52] Carole: So where does that come into this story, into the Bible?
[00:27:55] Rocky: It doesn’t really. These are modern ideas as we know more and grow and language changes and we have words to start describing different things. A lot of it too is, you know, when we look at history, all of the research has been done on men. And even in the Bible, you know, the Bible doesn’t condemn lesbianism. It condemns men doing sexual acts because the Bible was written by men for men and women were considered property.
And then even then that seeps into society. It’s like, well, who cares what women are doing with their bodies? Who cares what women are doing or who cares about women’s health? You know, Kathy in one of her conferences talks about, we didn’t learn that women had orgasms until the 50s. You know, and Kathy jokes in her conference, she’s like, they could have just asked, you know, it’s like, but nobody’s doing this research.
Even when we look at conversion therapy, which was an awful time in church history, all of the research was done on men. And, you know, they would have the theories would be you have an overbearing mother, smothering mother, and, you know, you don’t spend enough time with the boys and your dad and just different, you know, it’s like, no.
People are born gay. Like some people like to be a ballerina and some people like to, you know, swing hammers and whatever, like let it go. And this is the social issue.
[00:29:16] Carole: Can you tell me a little bit more about your relationship with your dad? In the film, it’s clear that it is very painful and it was quite remarkable to see your expressions and to see him speaking without being aware of the hurtful words he was saying. Can you talk more about that. Are you comfortable with doing that?
[00:29:33] Rocky: Yeah, sure. So, we knew right away that we wanted to make the film more than just the researchers and the documents. We wanted to be able to have a tangible example of how it plays out in real life. And we interviewed a lot of different people who unfortunately have dealt with these kinds of issues.
But we didn’t really know my dad was going to be in the film until he really showed up. All of this kind of just happened again, when that first day we filmed in October of 2018, I didn’t know my parents were going to be coming to LA. So I just threw everybody in the room, like I say in the movie, and I just started filming.
I mean, it’s just like, that’s really how it happened. And then I learned of the mistranslation and I’m like, oh my gosh, like this is going to change the world. I believed, you know, and then my dad, maybe he thinks this is going to change the world too. And now he’s like, uh oh, he’s got to make sure his voice is heard, right?
And so for me and my family, we’ve been dealing with this agree and disagree for many years. And that has taken on many forms in our relationship from years where we don’t talk to one another to, you know, times where I’m back and I’m coming over for Christmas.
[00:30:44] Carole: Can you start with how he found out, like, just even when he first found out, you know, that you were gay, like that was the beginning of this?
[00:30:51] Rocky: Well, sure. So when I was younger, I mean, there were signs. And my dad read my diary and he, you know, I’ve forgiven him for that now, but he did that because he was legitimately concerned for my eternal soul because he believed what he read in the Bible, that homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Now, he’s now moved and come to that understanding like Dr. Weigel did in that letter where, oh, it might be homosexual practices and not just being gay. And so now he has changed a little, but he’s still, you can’t act on it, you know? So that was when I was right out of high school. And so I was able to leave home and I left home and I never looked back basically.
And so it’s been 20 plus years of this challenge and complication in our relationship and really just the loneliness, sadness, all the things that go with separation. On both sides. And as I was talking earlier about how parents go through mourning, my parents went through a mourning process. That’s what they were talking about with their Christian counselor.
You’ve lost a child. Like, I’m not dead guys, you know, and so that was all really interesting, but it wasn’t until I was living in Los Angeles in 2017, when I went back to church as an adult and started to really recognize the issues that are in our society are coming from our church building and seeping out into our society and what you call sin, I don’t call sin.
This isn’t right. And I’ve always felt that the way that the queer community and other communities have been treated by the church just did not seem like a gospel message, like a Jesus message that I was presented with. And that’s why I always challenged. And a lot of it has to do with women’s issues as well, you know?
And so it was just kind of natural for me to fall into that role. But the way that we got my dad to be in the film, you know, he really does care. And as we say in the film too, the only way that we can really be an influence with one another is to be in relationship. So we were in a pretty good place in relationship.
I was learning this stuff and I’m, like I said, we went to that conference. We’re there filming together. So now he’s already in the movie, you know, but now I needed to convince him to sign the release form and get in the interview chair. So about a year later, we got our first round of funding. And then we went to The Reformation Project in Seattle and I invited my dad to come.
And he said, he wasn’t going to be filmed, but then we didn’t give him the microphone. He couldn’t ask a question. You know, it was like, dad, you have access to all these people. We told you before you came here. Then he was like, I’m ready to talk. And which was great because honestly, like it did afford him the opportunity to tell his authentic perspective and his conviction behind it.
And then it afforded our audience the opportunity to see the struggle, but then also, you know, let the evangelical audience see themselves and walk through this together. So I’m so grateful that he did say yes, and it was painful on both ends to relive the trauma and the past experiences. But we knew going in, and I say we, Jena Serbu, our producer, writer, we’ve known each other for 20 some years.
So she knows me, my family, Sal, the whole nine, like we knew he was going to give us everything, everything, because we know what he’s going to say, you know, and it was just a beautiful representation of the reality. So we’ll see. The story’s still going. I mean, the movie is complete, but the story still goes.
[00:34:25] Carole: Thank you very much for explaining how you made the movie, why you made the movie. I think that it’ll make other people also think twice about many, many, many things. So thank you for making the film.
[00:34:37] Rocky: You’re welcome. I’m so grateful you had an opportunity to see it and it’s impacted you. I’m so grateful for this opportunity too, to share it with your audience.
And I’m so grateful to everyone from our donors, to our volunteers, to our paid technicians for helping me create this wonderful documentary.
[00:34:59] Carole: Well, I think that we’re all very lucky that this documentary is out there and I hope that it gets picked up and screened in theaters all over the country so people can learn about how her story came to be. And really it’s a story on many levels for many groups out there who are stigmatized. Thank you, Rocky, for making such a film available to so many.
I have many takeaways from this film that I just want to share with you. I learned that the word homosexuality became a rallying cry for evangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in the 1980s. By 1997, after one copy of the Living Bible, which is an abridged version of the Bible, got into the hands of Billy Graham, 40 million copies were sold.
And in that version, the word homosexuality was used six times, but it wasn’t even mentioned in the Bible before 1946. I learned how politics and religion became a mixed deal. And then how gay people became central figures in the cultural wars that are still with us today. Now I understand better how politics, religion, and sexual orientation have become so closely entwined.
You can see 1946 online. Check out the show notes for details on how to watch this important film. Thank you so much for listening to Wisdom Shared. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to check out all the other episodes. Go to caroleblueweiss.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you like what you’re hearing on Wisdom Shared, please spread the word and share this podcast with your friends. Leave a review and subscribe so you can receive wisdom every month. Thanks for listening.
[00:00:26] Carole: Welcome to Wisdom Shared, where people are the experts from their own experiences and where connection inspires change. I am your host, Carole Blueweiss. Today, I have as my special guest, Noah, a California native. I had the good fortune of meeting Noah a few years ago in Alaska where he had a summer job and where I was on a family vacation.
You see, my son convinced me that it would be fun to take an ATV tour. I agreed to go, but when I got there, I chickened out at the last minute. Thankfully, the guide, Noah, said I can ride with him while he followed the others. As we were making our way through what was to me jarring bumps and steep drop offs, I needed to talk. So, I brought up Wisdom Shared and heard Noah softly say that his mother had challenges raising him and his sister. I asked him what kind of challenges and he just said that I should interview his mother. Little did I know that this casual exchange would lead to two Wisdom Shared episodes, one about a mom who struggled with addiction while raising two kids, and the other of a young man’s struggle with prescription medications, pain, and withdrawal.
The interview with Noah’s mom is called Addiction to Sobriety, A Mother’s Journey, Season 2, Episode 14. Today, we will hear from Noah, a courageous, sensitive young man with a passion for board sports. I think we all need to hear this cautionary tale. Let’s now hear what Noah has to say.
What attracted you to skateboarding?
[00:02:23] Noah: I like board sports, something just in my blood, I guess. Like surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding. I grew up watching a bunch of skateboarding videos. It’s just the people I was surrounded with. It was just raw and rugged. As a kid, you know, skateboarders are rebellious. So you’re like, oh, we’re gonna go skate this spot, you know, they’re gonna kick us out. Just fun stuff like that.
[00:02:46] Carole: I think of skateboarding as it’s like the jazz of all sports. Improvisation and from the outside, it’s hard to understand because you see the kids or the people on skateboards doing things that you’re like, why are they doing that? And they do it over and over again.
[00:03:01] Noah: I guess it’s mastering the craft and finding the fun in that. Once you land that trick, it’s just like the best feeling ever.
[00:03:11] Carole: I’m trying to get to know people that have this inner wisdom from experience.
[00:03:17] Noah: Right, yeah. Yeah, I definitely have gone through some things that probably not a lot of people do go through and I’ve learned a lot from the things I’ve done. And I’m still learning. So it never gets easy and you just have to be true to who you want to be and really make tough decisions in life sometimes and yeah, you gotta learn from them. Otherwise, you just get stuck doing the same stuff.
[00:03:39] Carole: I asked Noah why he agreed to talk to me, a complete stranger.
[00:03:43] Noah: If anything that I say could help anybody, that’d be cool by doing something like this.
[00:03:49] Carole: Noah’s candidness about his self-described addictive personality sheds light on the complexities of addiction.
[00:03:55] Noah: I have a very addictive personality, so I love to have fun in all circumstances. And so what I’ve really learned too is that just learning to say no more, especially. One thing I had a terrible problem doing is never saying no. For me, it started in high school and you start taking drugs and stuff and I started smoking weed and then, you know, in high school people start partying so now you’re drinking and smoking weed.
[00:04:26] Carole: Like many teenagers, experimentation with drugs began in high school. What started as casual use of marijuana and alcohol soon escalated to a more dangerous addiction to pills.
[00:04:36] Noah: None of these things ever were like, a crazy problem, and then, I think, what it is, like, my vice was pills. So, pills are a slippery slope, and addiction in general is something that you have to learn to manage. But, definitely the thing that got me was pills in high school, when I started taking them, and then, yeah, I just liked them, and so, throughout high school, you would get them, whatever you get. In high school, it was way harder to get pills, so it’s mostly smoking and stuff like that and partying a lot.
[00:05:09] Carole: What were your pills that you were taking in high school?
[00:05:12] Noah: High school was more Vicodin and Norcos, just like pain pills like that your friends would get, because one of them broke their leg skateboarding and he gets sick from them, so he just gave them to me. So that’s how you like get them back in the day. There wasn’t like somebody selling them, really. The reason why I first moved to Hawaii, what actually got me to move there was, first of all, my friends moved back. It was their winter break, so they had just a few weeks, and so they were going back to school there.
[00:05:39] Carole: Noah’s spontaneous move to Hawaii was a pivotal moment. It was a chance to escape the stagnation of his hometown and find solace in a new environment surrounded by supportive friends.
[00:05:50] Noah: My buddy says hey, I don’t have a roommate anymore. If you want to come and live with me on campus, dude, you should move into my room. I don’t think they’re going to give me a roommate. And then my girlfriend had just broken up with me. I was like, my girlfriend broke up with me, I’m going to quit my job. I’ll sell my car. I’m going right now. So I just fricking bought a plane ticket that night.
And then, thankfully it worked out. I ended up moving to Hawaii and that was the first time I moved there. Stayed on campus with them and just lived the college life without having to go to college.
[00:06:17] Carole: How old were you?
[00:06:19] Noah: I’m 19 or 20, I think. I needed to get away from my hometown because it just gets really stagnant. And so it’s really easy to get bored here. And that was just a huge problem for me. And I like to have fun. It just becomes a problem. Like, you know, idle hands are the devil’s playground.
[00:06:35] Carole: So what did you say?
[00:06:37] Noah: Idle hands are the devil’s playground.
[00:06:39] Carole: I haven’t heard that.
[00:06:41] Noah: Oh, really?
[00:06:42] Carole: Yeah. So tell me, what does that mean to you, that expression?
[00:06:45] Noah: If you’re not doing something productive, if you’re not doing something you have idle hands. If you’re bored, you know, you’re not doing anything are the devil’s playground, like he’ll give you something to do. I’m so bored, now I’m just trying to party and then partying just gets deeper and deeper and then there’s nothing else to do. Like continue partying.
And so now I stay busy. I’ll do yard work. I’ll go on a bike ride. I’ll work out. Just the goal is to stay busy. The second you get bored, you start. Yeah, just doing whatever you think is going to be fun. So I moved out to Hawaii too, just cause I needed to get away from everything.
That was really a lifesaver for me at that point in time. Otherwise, I don’t know. I feel like it would have been bad, but it was good because I moved with my best friends and they really care about me. We just really take care of each other. So it’s important to have good people around you.
[00:07:36] Carole: It was two really good friends of yours, and they happen to be in the same school in Hawaii.
[00:07:41] Noah: Yeah, exactly. Two of my best friends, yeah.
[00:07:43] Carole: Did you ever have any desire to go to that school?
[00:07:47] Noah: No, they went to the university and I would have only gone to community college, which I actually did. I ended up going to the community college, but this was three years later after I had moved back there. So I went to that community college just for a semester. And then I ended up dropping out. I think that’s when I went to Washington the first time.
[00:08:07] Carole: Noah’s decision to move back to Washington was driven by a desperate need to escape his environment and the people who enabled his addiction. It was a courageous step towards reclaiming his life. But an accident while snowboarding in Washington marks the beginning of one of Noah’s darkest periods.
[00:08:25] Noah: I worked at a ski resort there, so I was working in a rental shop and had a great time, was there for two months. My best friend had got me the job because he moved from Hawaii to Washington. Once I moved there, and then that’s where I actually broke my back. I was snowboarding there. I just overshot a jump and landed straight to flat ground and just crunched and broke my back.
It was bad. It was not a good time. So that’s basically what started off one of the worst parts of my life. When I broke my back, Covid happened, and now I couldn’t move back to Hawaii. I was stuck in California again. The opioid epidemic, so they wouldn’t give me any, anything strong or any more Norcos. They were giving me ibuprofen for my broken back.
So I was like, okay, I’ll just go get Percocet from off the streets. I’ll go get some from one of my friends. So I started getting these Percocets because I didn’t have anything else. And then obviously you just start liking them, start taking them, keep buying them. But it turns out the Percocets ended up being laced with fentanyl.
And so that was the first time that I knew that I was doing that. And it’s weird because you hear about how bad fentanyl is, but you don’t think about how bad it is when you’re doing it because it’s a pill. You’re not like thinking, oh, it’s like, this terrible drug, you’re just like, oh, it’s just another pill.
It’s terrible. That drug is crazy because so it’s man-made and it’s made to attach 100 percent of itself to your opioid receptors. So you’re getting the maximum high versus heroin only attaches like 80 percent to your opioid receptors. So it’s like also easier to get off. So it’s super easy to get addicted to the man-made manufactured pill.
I ended up buying them, I was doing them all the time, and then I found out what was in them, and I’m like, well shit, like, I’m already doing them, I guess it’s fine, it’s not something I wanted to do, I wasn’t going out to buy fentanyl, but it’s a slippery slope. So anyways, I did become addicted to those, I have a little addiction, and it just starts getting bad, you get really depressed, and I was doing it because, like I said, I was bored, I wasn’t doing anything at home, I had broken my back, it was Covid, I wasn’t getting money or anything for any help, I had to end up in a job like early, and I don’t know, I was just really unhappy and thinking that this was solving my problems, but it was just adding fuel to the fire.
I was doing it for a year and a half. I’m like a very productive high. So it’s dangerous because I would be able to do it all the time, and you wouldn’t be able to tell. It doesn’t affect me. I’m not sloppy or going crazy with it. But it’s a problem because I’m still doing it every day. But it does change you.
You get more depressed. You get lazier. You start spending all your money on it. And, yeah, it just changes you. But I realized, I was literally spending all my frickin’ money on it. And I was like, I have to leave. I need to get away from this. Because I’m surrounded by people too that are doing this. So there’s no incentive for anyone there to help me quit.
I had no reason to and I had nobody to help. Not nobody to talk to. Nobody knew about this. I knew what I wanted to do and I knew I wanted to quit. I knew I didn’t want that to be me. So that’s why I ended up going to Washington again after I broke my back. It’s like, okay, you know what? This is the opportunity to get away.
I know what I’m going to be doing there. I already know how it is. I liked it. I’m going to go. I need to get away. I ended up moving back to Washington, and then that’s when I ended up going through withdrawals while I was there. And I realized, holy shit, I was actually, like, addicted to this drug. The withdrawals were the worst thing that I’ve ever gone through in my entire life.
I couldn’t eat for, like, five days. Anything I ate came out. For two weeks straight, I was just pooping, and then you just can’t sleep, you’re tossing and turning, your body aches, it’s just literally the worst experience of my life. And I don’t know, I’m grateful for every experience I’ve been through and learned because through going through that stuff, and going through a withdrawal makes you never want to do it again. It’s like, I’m not going through that again. Yeah, it’s pretty insane.
[00:12:41] Carole: Is that what they call dopesick?
[00:12:44] Noah: Yeah, yeah, going through withdrawals when you’re dopesick, it’s because they don’t have the drugs so their body starts going through withdrawals, you get like cold chills, you get just anxious and start sweating.
[00:12:57] Carole: Did you go through that with your friends, did they support you through that? I mean, or were you by yourself?
[00:13:03] Noah: So my friends in Washington, they didn’t know about it. When I moved there the second time, I went by myself.
[00:13:08] Carole: So were you doing the withdrawal all by yourself?
[00:13:11] Noah: I had to go through it by myself. Thankfully, the first two weeks that I got there, the mountain wasn’t open, so we didn’t like have to work. But yeah, I didn’t leave my room for like four days.
[00:13:21] Carole: And I’m guessing that you didn’t have any drugs to tempt you.
[00:13:25] Noah: No, I had nothing.
[00:13:27] Carole: You put yourself in a position where you couldn’t get it.
[00:13:31] Noah: Exactly. I isolated myself. I was like, I’m going to get away from all this. This is the only way, this is how it’s gonna go down. Either it’s now or later. And there’s no later for me, it’s now. But yeah, it was tough. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever gone through. It was, yeah, not okay.
[00:13:50] Carole: And then what happened after that?
[00:13:51] Noah: It’s tough for a while, like the first few weeks, but you really just got to stay busy and stay focused. And after you break a certain point of not being on that stuff again, you feel so much better and you notice how much better you’ve gotten and you don’t ever really want to go back. So the idea, is that who I want to be again? No. But you have to stay busy. Doesn’t mean you don’t think about it. It doesn’t mean you aren’t tempted.
And it’s. oh, just really important about the people you keep around you to support you. If you’re around people that are going to be doing that and not care if you do it, then you’re much more likely to just slip and do that. But if you have people around you that care and you can talk to about it, that then they’ll support you. Takes a lot of support for sure. Cause it is hard.
[00:14:46] Carole: So it sounds like you figured that out on your own. Like the part of you wanted to stop so badly and you figured it out that being around people that aren’t going to tempt you is one way to conquer the addiction or the, at least the temptation. That takes a lot of courage and also a lot of insight to even be in the thick of it and realize that you have to get yourself out of it.
[00:15:10] Noah: Yeah, it gets bad. To the point, you know, where you’re questioning, like I was literally spending all of my money on it. And yeah, at some point you’re just like, this has to stop. And how is this going to stop today? Otherwise you just keep making excuses to find a reason to do it later. Now’s not a good time because this. If you want it, you got to get it. And now. So, it’s the only way.
[00:15:34] Carole: Were you ever afraid that you were going to die?
[00:15:36] Noah: I wasn’t afraid to die, but it could have been a possibility. And I should have been afraid. I should have been afraid because I’ve seen a bunch of people overdose and I ended up overdosing too, but when you’re doing that stuff, if you’re addicted to it, you’re not in a happy place or state of mind. And so you really don’t care.
[00:15:58] Carole: What was it like to overdose?
[00:16:01] Noah: It was nothing at first, but it’s everything that happens after when you’re thankful that you’re alive and you realize what was I doing? But when it happened, I didn’t even realize, you know, I thought I was just closing my eyes.
[00:16:21] Carole: When I met Noah in Alaska, he appeared to be in good health and hadn’t been taking prescription medications for some time. So when he mentioned experiencing an overdose during our interview, it caught me off guard. The revelation left me with many unanswered questions about the circumstances surrounding this life-threatening event.
In the following segment, Noah will take us through the harrowing details of his near-death experience. He’ll recount the series of events that led to this critical moment, shedding light on the factors that made him particularly vulnerable. Noah’s story serves as a stark reminder of how a single misguided decision and one counterfeit pill can have devastating consequences.
[00:17:02] Noah: So I had been not doing drugs at all when I saw you I was totally fine and I ended up talking to a friend who told me that they got them shipped to themselves. So they’re like, yeah, I could ship them to you. And then I was like, fine, let’s just get a few, try it out again. And then, yeah. And then the first day I got them, I overdosed. What happened is I was staying the night with this girl and pretty much my girlfriend at the time and she didn’t know I was doing it and I had just gotten it.
I hadn’t done it in a long, long time. And then I ended up doing it again. It’s literally just the classic story of, you know, I put it down for a long time, tried to beat all these temptations, and then you do it one time, and it’s the first day I got it, and the one time. I did it in the room while she was in the shower. I was like, I’m gonna do a good amount, because I don’t wanna get high, and just relax.
And boom, so I go, I wait in her room, and the one time I did that, then she gets out of the shower, and I thought I’d just close my eyes to wait for her to get out of the shower, but then she came into the room, and said that I wasn’t breathing, and that my breathing was really low, and like, grumbling, trying to breathe, and then that I was blue, and so, she ended up giving me CPR for, I don’t even know how long, but while she gave me CPR, she also had to call somebody and one of our friends came running up and then thankfully there’s another girl was in the medical field.
So she knew CPR also. So she started doing CPR until the ambulance arrived. And then the ambulance Narcan-ed me and then woke me up. And when I woke up, I was just like, whoa, what the, I don’t know. I was just lost. I was like, just so confused. What just happened? Why are there all these people here? And then I realized I was like, shoot. I overdosed, that was one pill.
[00:18:57] Carole: And it was laced with fentanyl.
[00:18:59] Noah: Yeah, it’s crazy because all the pills are like laced with fentanyl nowadays and I thought because I had done it before, I was addicted to it, and when I was at the worst part of where I was at, I would do 10 of those a day. Yeah, and so people die from doing half of one of those pills or a quarter of one of those pills. Like I died from doing like, a little more than half of one. Yeah.
[00:19:29] Carole: You’re taking a pill. You don’t really know what’s inside, right? But they’re, the dealers are telling you this is Percocet, but you don’t really know, right, what you’re taking. Is that true?
[00:19:39] Noah: Technically, yeah, you don’t know because they’re just man-made, they’re pressed and made, but the fentanyl ones are the M30s and they’re the fake M30s, which is like this blue pill that says M on one side, 30 on the other, supposed to be a 30 milligram Oxycontin or Percocet, but they’re all fentanyl. But yeah, you can’t see, you don’t know what it, you don’t know what fentanyl looks like, and I don’t know what the regular powder for the other one looks like either.
[00:20:01] Carole: You’re actually taking it in a pill.
[00:20:03] Noah: Right. They press it to make it look like whatever the actual pill is, the counterfeit.
[00:20:09] Carole: In the past, they weren’t as strong, so you could take more and you didn’t overdose, right?
[00:20:15] Noah: No, in the past, I was just doing more, so my tolerance was way higher. So I thought, oh, this won’t do anything to me, because my tolerance was high, but now it was zero. And so that little amount, boom.
[00:20:30] Carole: And then going back to when you were revived, that Narcan really brought you back to life, right?
[00:20:36] Noah: The Narcan, yeah, that stuff saved me. Yeah, I have no idea how I made it back, honestly. They told me my pulse stopped for a minute. Pretty lucky to be here for sure. And they told me when I was in the hospital that three other people had overdosed. And, just from around the area and one of them died and the other one was brain dead. Yeah. And I was totally fine, but I wasn’t fine. I ended up getting pneumonia. I was in there for five days, but yeah.
[00:21:04] Carole: How do you feel now?
[00:21:06] Noah: I feel a lot more healed from that. Cause I still have temptations and thoughts before. It’s just really an eye opener. It was like, oh, first time you got them, you thought you were a big boy. You can do this again. It’s not what you want to do. Like literally died and then didn’t. So it’s just a sign that I’m not going to get through that again, so don’t do it again.
[00:21:28] Carole: It’s like a Russian roulette.
[00:21:31] Noah: Right, exactly.
[00:21:33] Carole: Your mom was very open with me about her struggles. And I remember you telling me in a very positive way, how your mom did a turnaround and was able to change things up. And I got the feeling, I don’t remember exactly what you said, but I got the feeling she was interested in wanting to help people.
[00:21:49] Noah: Yeah. She did a big 180 for sure.
[00:21:51] Carole: Are you close with your mom now, or do you feel like it’s still really tough?
[00:21:56] Noah: It was tough growing up because she was going through her stuff too, and so she wasn’t always there too much, but I’m just grateful for every experience that I lived, even whether they’re good or bad, because it builds you into who you are today.
I’m happy with who I am today, and it’s all because of all the things that have happened in my life. And for my mom, we just weren’t ever really too close until I moved out, moved to Hawaii. Once I got away, I was able to be on my own. And then she was able to work on herself and not have to worry. Things just got better and better. But yeah, we don’t, we talk sometimes now. I don’t get like deep conversations with her about stuff, but we’re nice to each other. We’ll go to dinner.
[00:22:37] Carole: And you have a sister.
[00:22:38] Noah: Yeah, I have a sister.
[00:22:40] Carole: Are you close with her?
[00:22:42] Noah: Yeah, I’m really close with my sister. I talk to her, not really about my struggles, but everything else. But she just lives down the street. So we’re hanging out too.
[00:22:50] Carole: What about your dad?
[00:22:51] Noah: My dad, he was never around. He was never in my life. I met him a few times. He didn’t do a lot of great things, I’ve heard. But I’m also grateful for that. If he was around, I don’t think he would have been a good influence on my life. So I’m grateful for being raised by my mom, my sister, and my grandma too. My grandma’s always been around and she’s a huge help. She’s definitely the reason our family is like a family.
[00:23:15] Carole: Any advice to kids that are in high school?
[00:23:18] Noah: Yeah. To kids that might be going through stuff like that, it’s tough because life is tough. You’re going through things, but it’s really important to find somebody who you can talk to and that you can feel like, you know, can relate or can listen to you, but you can find people that you can relate to.
Obviously, that’s really important because then you can find people that understand your struggle and usually there’s always some of your friends that are going through the same things and it’s just important to talk about things. Find things that make you happy. Your drive, you know, like what you want to do.
And find a way to stay busy and find a way to stay happy by being busy. Like I said, idle hands are the devil’s playground. So it’s just really important to stay busy and productive and learn to find confidence in where you are and what you’re doing. If you’re not happy with something, figure out a way to address it and just take it step by step to achieve that goal.
[00:24:12] Carole: And what about advice for parents or moms or dads out there that are trying to raise their kids? What do you wish that you had maybe that you didn’t have, or what do you see would be helpful for kids?
[00:24:25] Noah: It’s important to be able to be open and to allow your kid to feel comfortable to talk to you and to be open with you so you know how they’re doing, what they’re doing and then you’ll be able to notice if there’s anything different and then you can talk to them and that way they’re comfortable, but it’s probably hard as a parent to get close to your kid without being overbearing to where they’re like sad, or don’t want to talk to you.
You just gotta be open with your kid, make them feel comfortable. I had friends, their parents were their best friend, and I was always jealous. How are you best friends with your parents? I hide from my mom. But now we have a great relationship obviously, but that was before. And yeah, it’s just important to just love them and let them know how important they are and support them with their goals and just be there.
[00:25:10] Carole: What do you want your mom to know about how you feel about her?
[00:25:14] Noah: I think she knows. I’m proud of her. She’s done so much. Made a complete 180. Insane. I definitely look up to her. I think about trying hard in life and what I need to be doing. I’ll think about how hard my mom worked to get what she wants. Yeah.
[00:25:29] Carole: This is all sort of cliche, but I’m working on it myself, but they say if you can be your own best friend and just be as compassionate to yourself as you are to your best friends, that’s. It’s not so easy.
[00:25:40] Noah: Right. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And if you can learn to love yourself. You can’t learn to love anybody else until you learn to love yourself. So if you can be happy alone, you can be happy doing anything. And it’s your life. So you got to be happy.
[00:25:53] Carole: Did you ever go to support groups for helping with addiction?
[00:25:57] Noah: No, I didn’t. I know some people do and that really helps them, but I just have never found a good connection. I went to one, one time and I was just like, eh, I feel like I don’t really need it. The people I talked to about the stuff I need to talk to about, it gets out just enough and I don’t need a support system for being a drug addict. I don’t think I’m like that much of, and I can’t say that much of an addict because I was doing like a terrible drug for a long time and I have an addictive personality, so I feel like I know the answers to the questions I have, but if I do need to ask somebody, I know there’s certain people I can ask.
[00:26:36] Carole: Are you shy?
[00:26:37] Noah: It depends. There’s like things I don’t talk about, like this, I don’t ever talk about to anybody. I have only a few people, but it’s beneficial to get out there because when you’re going through an addiction, you don’t tell people about it also, too, because people can’t understand it. People are not going to understand it. And so.
[00:26:56] Carole: Yeah, it’s a lot of stigma, right? So that’s why, yeah, I can’t thank you enough for doing this and that hearing your story is going to touch somebody because it’s just the truth. And I think once people start just telling their truth, it helps other people feel less alone.
[00:27:13] Noah: Definitely, yeah. Yeah, it’s crazy. I appreciate it. Yeah. I’m glad I’m able to talk a little bit about it. Good to be able to reflect on it too. It helps you put it in more in the past.
[00:27:27] Carole: I do think that in high school, people are fairly vulnerable to doing what their friends do, so it is a risk.
[00:27:34] Noah: Yeah, especially in high school. Like I said, too, that’s one of the things I had to work on is saying no, because I just love to have fun. Yeah, especially now, if somebody’s like, sniff this or try this pill, you don’t know what’s in it. And especially now, you can frickin’ die from it. From literally, it sounded cliche before, oh, this kid did this drug once and he died. What? But no, you will literally die. You could die your first time doing it. So. you just gotta be smarter, you gotta be confident in who you are, don’t let other people’s judgments sway yours.
[00:28:09] Carole: I know you’re trying to help other kids and other parents and sharing what you’ve learned. I don’t think there’s much more that’s as noble as that.
[00:28:17] Noah: Thanks.
[00:28:17] Carole: So thank you. Thanks a lot.
[00:28:19] Noah: I appreciate you reaching out and yeah, having me talk about it too. It’s an experience, so thank you.
[00:28:29] Carole: Thank you for sharing your powerful story with us today, Noah. If you or anyone you know is struggling with opioid use disorder, you can call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration at 1-800-662-HELP for free, confidential 24/7 treatment and information. For more resources, please check out the show notes.
Remember how I met Noah? I ended up in his ATV because I was too scared to drive myself. Just goes to show how you never know who you may be sitting next to until you strike up a conversation. I’ve learned that’s how connections begin and how wisdom is shared.
Thank you so much for listening to Wisdom Shared. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to check out all the other episodes. Go to caroleblueweiss.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you like what you’re hearing on Wisdom Shared, please spread the word and share this podcast with your friends. Leave a review and subscribe so you can receive wisdom every month. Thanks for listening.
