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Episode 90: The Unseen Side of College - Drugs, Alcohol and a Quest for Self Identity · Voices for Voices®

• 0:00
  Justin Alan Hayes: Chapter 5.
• 0:02
  Justin Alan Hayes: College.
• 0:03
  Justin Alan Hayes: My college years were hectic and chaotic.
• 0:07
  Justin Alan Hayes: For a brief period of time, as high school was coming to an end, I attempted to join the military to find some direction.
• 0:16
  Justin Alan Hayes: My parents had talked me out of it.
• 0:18
  Justin Alan Hayes: In my transcript, sat and ACT scores could only get me into a few select schools, and so, at Akron University it would be.
• 0:30
  Justin Alan Hayes: Even though I could commute to campus, I chose to live on campus.
• 0:35
  Justin Alan Hayes: I continued not to fit in and I admittedly still was not surrounding myself with friends that would help me come into my own and thrive personally and academically.
• 0:47
  Justin Alan Hayes: On top of this major missing link in my life, I had also lost touch with my faith, my spiritual needs being grossly unmet and leaving me with a moral compass that was severely lacking.
• 1:01
  Justin Alan Hayes: True north sometimes, as many colleges and universities do, akron specified that incoming freshmen were required to live in dorms that did not allow cars, since a couple of the people I knew who were also attending Akron were commuting, not living on campus.
• 1:21
  Justin Alan Hayes: My roommate was selected by the university according to shared interests on the new student form we all had to fill out over the summer.
• 1:30
  Justin Alan Hayes: Eventually, I realized that my new roommate was a thief, had a gambling problem and was a drug dealer.
• 1:38
  Justin Alan Hayes: It would be a common occurrence for me to return to our dorm and witness him actively completing a drug deal or gambling with friends.
• 1:47
  Justin Alan Hayes: Once, when I had found numerous brand new boxes of shoes on his side of the room and no receipt to show they were actually purchased from the store, I confronted him about my concerns.
• 2:00
  Justin Alan Hayes: This had all gone too far and I was supremely annoyed, uncomfortable and scared for my safety.
• 2:08
  Justin Alan Hayes: All of this fell upon deaf ears, up to and including when I took my concerns to the university for help to remedy the issue.
• 2:18
  Justin Alan Hayes: I ended up withdrawing from school shortly after the fall semester of my freshman year.
• 2:25
  Justin Alan Hayes: With my limited selection of colleges I was accepted into.
• 2:29
  Justin Alan Hayes: It was no way to enroll before the next fall semester.
• 2:33
  Justin Alan Hayes: I had a lot of time to think.
• 2:35
  Justin Alan Hayes: Even with all that time to think and prepare for Youngstown State University the following fall I continued down my destructive path that included drugs and alcohol.
• 2:47
  Justin Alan Hayes: I was still underage at this point.
• 2:50
  Justin Alan Hayes: That did not matter.
• 2:52
  Justin Alan Hayes: It was a way for me to fit in, to be accepted by others in a quick way, to fit into the social scene, to fend off boredom.
• 3:01
  Justin Alan Hayes: No relationship with a girl lasted more than a few weeks.
• 3:05
  Justin Alan Hayes: I wanted acceptance so bad.
• 3:08
  Justin Alan Hayes: I tried everything, tried to be everything to everyone.
• 3:12
  Justin Alan Hayes: My plan was backfiring at every turn, though, leaving me to wonder why I couldn't control myself and the situations I found myself in.
• 3:21
  Justin Alan Hayes: By the time the transfer to Youngstown State University was official I was a follower I still did not know what I wanted to declare as my major.
• 3:32
  Justin Alan Hayes: I turned to my sister's major of accounting because I was familiar with it and she was having so much success in her studies.
• 3:41
  Justin Alan Hayes: I was good at math, but had little idea of what accounting was and how I would use it in the real world.
• 3:48
  Justin Alan Hayes: After graduation, I moved into my new dorm the weekend before classes started and, of course, I made plans to go to the bar by myself, the one that notoriously served underage students.
• 4:01
  Justin Alan Hayes: Apparently, all we had to do was to show our YSU student IDs and they would serve us.
• 4:09
  Justin Alan Hayes: On my walk to the bar, I passed a girl sitting on a bench by herself.
• 4:14
  Justin Alan Hayes: I stopped to ask if she knew the best way to get there.
• 4:17
  Justin Alan Hayes: She said yes and said she was on the way there to herself and I could walk with her if I wanted.
• 4:24
  Justin Alan Hayes: So here I was, a single guy at a new school.
• 4:28
  Justin Alan Hayes: On my way to a bar where I would be undoubtedly drinking alcohol, probably getting drunk with a girl on her way to do the same, I thought to myself this is what college is all about.
• 4:42
  Justin Alan Hayes: Right, this night set the stage for a good amount of my future.
• 4:47
  Justin Alan Hayes: In college there was no middle ground.
• 4:49
  Justin Alan Hayes: These activities became the new normal.
• 4:52
  Justin Alan Hayes: I could not stop my behavior.
• 4:55
  Justin Alan Hayes: It became like a drug I relied on.
• 4:57
  Justin Alan Hayes: I needed it.
• 4:59
  Justin Alan Hayes: Luckily, during my second semester I started limiting the party into Friday and Saturday only.
• 5:06
  Justin Alan Hayes: I stopped the party and during the rest of the week, but I did not limit the girls.
• 5:11
  Justin Alan Hayes: This behavior was maybe what some college kids did, but I took it to the limit, which was unacceptable and dangerous from a sexual health perspective.
• 5:22
  Justin Alan Hayes: This narrative continued through freshman year until I started to receive poor grades.
• 5:27
  Justin Alan Hayes: I thought I wanted to be an accountant, like my sister.
• 5:31
  Justin Alan Hayes: So my academic advisors set me up to begin taking the required prerequisites, and so, by thinking I already knew all the answers, I layered on the advice from other students about how to do the least amount of work in attending the bare minimum number of classes I could.
• 5:50
  Justin Alan Hayes: I was trying not to raise suspicion of my professors so they would not be able to place me on administrative withdrawal.
• 5:59
  Justin Alan Hayes: This advice was being given by a couple of the other students.
• 6:03
  Justin Alan Hayes: I was skipping classes and driving around smoking marijuana with Looking back, this behavior is certainly laughable Trusting these people to give me sound advice.
• 6:15
  Justin Alan Hayes: In fact, one of those students talked me into driving him almost an hour away for him to complete a drug transaction.
• 6:23
  Justin Alan Hayes: Little did I know he was a marijuana dealer and I could have ended up being arrested had we been pulled over, with this being discovered, since it was my car and I was driving, I think.
• 6:37
  Justin Alan Hayes: After this encounter I reconsidered my friend group.
• 6:40
  Justin Alan Hayes: With this development and with parents that could very well cut me off and stop supporting me, I came to a profoundly serious and very real conclusion.
• 6:50
  Justin Alan Hayes: I could skip classes, do drugs, have mediocre grades and therefore not have a good chance at a respectable job if I dropped out, or I could decide from this day forward that things in the classroom would be different.
• 7:06
  Justin Alan Hayes: I think some of this earlier behavior was an extension of what had happened in high school, a continuation into being an outcast.
• 7:15
  Justin Alan Hayes: I do not know if I did not want to mature or if it was simply an issue of not surrounding myself with support of people.
• 7:23
  Justin Alan Hayes: It was foreign to me to even fathom thinking professors had my best interest in mind and to take them up on office hours to begin building positive academic relationships.
• 7:36
  Justin Alan Hayes: It was at this point something resonated inside of me.
• 7:40
  Justin Alan Hayes: The change in mindset in the classroom was a welcome shift.
• 7:45
  Justin Alan Hayes: This does not mean I would ease through the remainder of college with straight A's surrounded by the best people, but instead I would start combing through my academics with a renewed purpose.
• 7:58
  Justin Alan Hayes: Up until this point, for me, college had absolutely nothing to do with the education and classes themselves.
• 8:05
  Justin Alan Hayes: It was partying and girls, with academic performance as a distant third place option.
• 8:11
  Justin Alan Hayes: I began taking my academics seriously, even though I may not have had the best plan of what I wanted to do after graduation.
• 8:19
  Justin Alan Hayes: When I started attending the classes I was enrolled in, I looked for ways to gain an edge in the classroom.
• 8:26
  Justin Alan Hayes: Eventually I crossed paths with another student, an exercise science major and former member of the US Armed Forces.
• 8:35
  Justin Alan Hayes: An older and nontraditional student.
• 8:38
  Justin Alan Hayes: He started to lay out his ideas for how to be mentally sharp in the classroom with increased energy and stamina outside of class.
• 8:48
  Justin Alan Hayes: This methodology was fueled by eating lots of salmon and daily supplements like flaxseed oil, sea salt dissolved in water and apple cider vinegar.
• 8:58
  Justin Alan Hayes: My acquaintance gave me the daily amounts of each to take, and so I ran to the nearest health food store and purchased the ingredients.
• 9:07
  Justin Alan Hayes: Immediately, I began to see results.
• 9:10
  Justin Alan Hayes: I was more alert in class, remembering what the lectures were about.
• 9:15
  Justin Alan Hayes: I even started performing better on exams quizzes and even started to take the lead on group projects.
• 9:23
  Justin Alan Hayes: My faith and trust in my new regimen and acquaintance put me in a good place.
• 9:29
  Justin Alan Hayes: This quick fix mentality would continue throughout college and beyond, even until today, where I would research vitamins, herbs and minerals that could potentially keep me operating at a high level.
• 9:42
  Justin Alan Hayes: It gives me an edge up on others.
• 9:45
  Justin Alan Hayes: I would even use this edge against others in class at job interviews into my professional career and later into my entrepreneurial career.
• 9:56
  Justin Alan Hayes: While certain regiments seemed to work in college, I would not remain satisfied.
• 10:01
  Justin Alan Hayes: I was always looking for something else to add to my regimen.
• 10:04
  Justin Alan Hayes: The best and most reliable quick fix was to eat less, because I wanted to keep a certain image, and being thin seemed like the best way to keep friends, especially girls.
• 10:16
  Justin Alan Hayes: This was a powerful flaw that I was starting to believe as truth, a truly distorted way of thinking.
• 10:23
  Justin Alan Hayes: For sure, I had little in terms of spiritual food nourishing me, so with that lacking, I only had what I felt others liked to guide my decisions.
• 10:34
  Justin Alan Hayes: However, despite all these new regimens and diet, or lack thereof, my mindset about alcohol and partying went completely unchecked.
• 10:44
  Justin Alan Hayes: I went overboard by thinking that if I walked to parties, I was doing my body some good by staying active.
• 10:51
  Justin Alan Hayes: Walking to and from gatherings was not necessarily a bad choice at first, but it slowly transitioned into a negative situation when I added drinking prior to leaving, when the distance to the party was short.
• 11:05
  Justin Alan Hayes: This behavior continued even after graduation, when my alcohol abuse would become the center of my life.
• 11:12
  Justin Alan Hayes: Thank you,