UNFORTUNATE EVENTS THAT LEAD TO MONEY

Guest Writer: S.A. Shriner

About the Author

I am not your typical blogger. I’m also not your typical author. However, circumstances come and go which both define us and redefine us — as individuals and as a group. Extenuating circumstances have led me to where I am today, far from the dark origin story that taught me how to survive and, more importantly, how to succeed in life.

Before I share my life lessons with you — and how I went from the verge of homelessness to owning an $80,000 home — I want to explain my background and why I ended up destitute in the first place.

Some may be able to relate to my story; some may even feel bad for me. Don’t feel bad for me. I set out with a simple goal in mind, and I achieved it. In my mind, I won the game of life — a little late, albeit, but I lacked the guide to success.

I can’t promise this will solve all of your problems, but if you are half as dedicated to changing your fortune as I was, I have faith in your success. After all, it is what you make it.

The Unfortunate

Every series of unfortunate events boils down to that one defining moment when things seemingly take a turn for the worse.

For me, it was a car ride to the doctor’s office. I was maybe 13, sitting behind my mother as she drove us kids in a tiny Chevy Citation she was given by my uncle.

I was so eager to tell her the light was green that it echoed as a guilty memory in my head ever since the accident. She followed the line of cars through the intersection, and I never saw the driver barreling down the hill — nor when he blew the red light and hit us.

I remember the sounds of metal and glass breaking and spinning uncontrollably until the car rested in a yard. The man initially had hit us right behind my door, but the inertia was enough to break my mother’s neck and spine.

That is when The Unfortunate happened.

Losing Everything

She was a single mother of six kids, proud to be paying ten times the value on a land contract in a horrible part of the city, proud of everything she’d overcome, proud to make it on her own.

I remember her crying in the night in pain that, at that time, I could never have related to.

We lost our breadwinner, our car, and the house was next. Food was scarce, but she made sure we ate — even if it was beans and ham bone. I watched her forfeit her meals so there would be more for us kids. Eventually, I started to do the same.

We watched the utilities go off one by one. I remember being helped, and I remember being shamed. We were the poor now.

The First Hustle

One day, I wanted to go to the county fair. My mom didn’t have any money. I went to the neighbor who was about to mow his yard and offered to do it for him.

He paid me my five bucks, and I went to the very next door, and the next, and the next — until I had enough for the fair.

I came home, and my mother said, “I can’t let you go without your brothers and sisters. That’s not very fair.” She always had little rules like, “Don’t bring home candy unless you’re going to share with the other children.”

So now I needed more money. I was young, aloof, and completely undeterred. I didn’t have a mower, but I was willing to use theirs and do it for the price of a pack of cigarettes then.

I came home that night with enough money to take the whole family. My mom asked where I got that much money from, and when I told her, she cried.

She had shame in her eyes. The kids hadn’t had dinner, and the electricity was to be shut off the next day. She never needed to be ashamed; I was proud to give her all that I had.

That night we ate like kings, the power stayed on, and the next day I did it again — and we ate pizza and paid more bills.

Before too long, I had my own mower, and cars would pull up to my mother’s alley and honk to have her send me over when I got home from school.

I mowed my entire side of town for three years until my mother lost her house to an insurance scam.

By that time, I was making so much loose change that I was buying cars, cigarettes, weed, and alcohol. No kid should have that much money, but most of it I gave to my mother anyway.

School and the GED

I was mowing all day and working in a bar all night when my principal and teachers paid me a visit at work.

Apparently, one of my teachers frequented the bar every day after work and told me if I didn’t tell anyone, I got a free pass. Mum’s the word.

What he didn’t know was that his class wasn’t the only one I wasn’t present for — he was the only one marking me there.

That caused some questions and uncovered my scheme of showing up for midterms and finals and doing my make-up work the last two weeks of school, kicking my grades up to a passing C.

I was advised that night to drop out, get my GED, and go to college. There was little to learn from high school that I didn’t already know, and I tested at a second-year college level in the sixth grade.

I had done my sister’s homework for her since I was seven, and my mother had collections of dictionaries, medical encyclopedias, and law books in the attic that would inevitably become my own Shangri-La when I wasn’t navigating the internet looking for friends — some of whom I still have to this day.

I did drop out and get my GED. I did enroll in college for pre-law after we moved to the country.

I took bad advice about not accepting student loans, which left me with a $5,000 per-semester debt, and I was running out of gas trying to get to class.

The Navy Dream

I had given away my landscaping clientele, quit the bar, couldn’t find a job while doing 15 credit hours, and was helping my mother pay for a land contract far away from the city.

When I found out that I wouldn’t get my course credits, I dropped out and signed up for the Navy.

I had to “save the farm” and wanted to fly helicopters, so I went to my local recruitment office — and the Army and Marine guys were out for lunch that day.

They sent me home with a bumper sticker that said “Proud Parent of a Navy Sailor,” and my mother yelled at first, but she proudly put that sticker in the front window of her house.

A Navy ship had just been rammed by a boat that then detonated in the Middle East, so she was nervous to say the least.

I was that same young, aloof, and completely undeterred kid when I had left for basic training.

Then, The Unfortunate happened.

The Injury

I left for Great Lakes NTC just after New Year’s — my mother’s wish for one last Christmas.

I had my GED and no college credits, so I got put in with the other dropouts.

One month. I was back home in one freaking month.

Some jerk hole who liked to do cartoon voices in the night and get us in trouble was ahead of me in the drill hall. In the middle of a blizzard, he had gotten us in trouble, and we were forced to march until we got it right — and he was deliberately screwing us up.

A tug from my raincoat preceded the words, “Tell him to knock it off. We’re getting sick of it.”

I relayed the message, and the son of a bitch stuck his foot back and tripped me.

The kid behind me grabbed my shoulder to try to lift me and was pushed by a line of marching drones.

He pushed on the small of my back as I scrambled to my feet on the wet, slushy gymnasium floor — and that’s when I heard and felt the pop!

The Cover-Up

I thought maybe I had slipped a disk in my lower back. Several of my shipmates tried to help me for the next few days until an officer from another division saw me dragging my right foot.

I was sent to Sports Medicine instead of the base hospital.

I sat in a hallway and talked to everyone, most likely — one hand tucked behind me to support my back and ease the throbbing pain.

A tall black man appeared and asked how I was. I told him I hurt my back, and he reassured me I would be alright.

He was so wrong.

The tall black man was the base commander, and the angry guy giving me the death stare after the encounter was to be my doctor.

It was not a warm welcome. It was more of an interrogation than an office visit.

I was scolded for talking to the tall black man, informed of who he was, grilled about why I was there, and then things got very dark.

The Assault

I was accused of faking an injury to get out of my contract.

I was forced to strip down and do physical exams, exercises, lift weights, strip completely, do more stuff, and then after six hours of what my psychiatrist calls torture — it got worse.

While asking me repeatedly if I was still hurt, the doctor did a medical exam that is legally classified as sexual assault.

When he was finished, he said, “There’s nothing else I can do to you.”

Then he sent me to the basement to get x-rays. He said to “take the stairs.”

The radiologist forcibly yanked and twisted me and at one point asked, “What are you going to do when they find out there’s nothing wrong with you?”

When finished, I asked what it said, and he told me he wasn’t qualified to read the x-ray and to take the elevator up.

I knew right then something was wrong.

The Aftermath

The doctor about jumped me for stepping off the elevator.

He slammed me down into a chair and yanked the folder out of my hand. He started stabbing at the x-ray on the screen with his pen and then, clear as day: “Holy shit!”

My L5 vertebra was broken clean off, and I was still walking.

I was interrogated in a much nicer fashion after that — told different examples of how I may have done it on a bicycle or at another time, but not there.

I just sat there quietly staring at a pen in his pocket, trying to understand the urge to plunge it into his eyeball.

By the time I made it back to my barracks with a bed chit, the blood vessels in my eyes had ruptured, and I was bleeding elsewhere.

Falling Through the Cracks

I soon found out nobody wanted to hire someone with a broken spine that no doctor would touch.

My mother lost her house, and I became homeless.

When I applied to the VA, they asked me for my medical records. The last time I saw them, they were in a trash can when they sent me home.

They said I was never there. It never happened.

“Go home, heal, get a construction job, and claim the injury on them instead.”

The kid next to me said, “That’s not right!” — and in the can they went, and almost us.

We were waiting to be taken to the brig when I was told to get on a bus and don’t look back.

My DD214 had been uncrumpled and given back to me.

I couldn’t stand the sight of that damn sticker in my mother’s window after that.

The Years That Followed

Fast-forward through years of working under the table and failed relationships.

I took every job that came my way and did whatever I had to for my kid to have a place to go when he came to see me.

I got into a relationship with a girl from my past who would spend the next 10 years cheating on me with her coke-dealing ex-boyfriend, all while making my life a living hell.

She would get caught, I’d throw her out, she would come back from his place a week or two later, lying about where she’d been and having spent the rent and whatever.

I had to do whatever it took to keep my kid comfortable; he was a good kid.

That meant selling my car, repeatedly. And my motorcycles. And anything else of value that I owned.

And having to let her move back in.

After a while, everything of value belonged to her, and it appeared I wasn’t allowed to have anything at all — or else it angered her.

She became physically abusive after my first spinal fusion, punching me in my spine repeatedly on one occasion while the bandage was still fresh.

She screamed like a monster and always started with this sharp bark-like noise that would cause an instant anxiety attack.

It was enough to break down a strong, masculine guy like me over time.

It was a constant power struggle over who was the man of the house, but in the end, I got out alive.

The Rebuild

I learn things from my experiences — from sleeping in my car to watching people lowball me on a car only to repost it an hour later for three times what they got it for, to having to free myself from the financial dependence of an abuser who literally wanted to crush my soul and enjoyed it.

We all have our story, but we have the unique ability to change the narrative.

I encourage — I implore — you to do just that if you must. Write about it.

Where have you been?
Where are you now?
Where do you want to go?

I finally opened up about my past, and it gave me something else to focus on — my future.

I got out of that relationship and ended up in a shack with no heat and no water and a landlord that wasn’t willing to fix either.

My goal was to buy a house and use whatever resources I could to make it my home.

I did just that, and it was so easy that anyone can do it.

Nobody believed in me until after I did it, but if you want to learn my strategy and how I went from nearly homeless to owning a beautiful home with no mortgage or loans, this guide is for you.

Above all, set your goals and see them through.

I believe in you.