Outlaw Regrets

Outlaw Regrets

For the last couple of years, I have found myself returning again and again to a song called “The Ballad of an Outlaw” by Seth Anthony. It is one of those songs that does more than sound good to me. It reaches into a place inside me that most people cannot see.

The song is about regret. It is about addiction, jail, the people a man has hurt, and the consequences that follow him. But it is also about redemption. It is about a man looking honestly at who he has been and still believing that he might become someone better.

I keep the song in a Spotify playlist I named Redemption Songs. That playlist is not filled with songs pretending the past never happened. They are songs that acknowledge the wreckage while still leaving room for hope. They remind me that a life can go terribly off course without being permanently lost.

One of the lines that has always hit me the hardest is, “You never know your strength till you know the struggle.”

Man, that lyric just hits hard.

You really do not know how strong you are until you find yourself in a battle you are not sure you will survive. It is easy to imagine yourself as strong when life is going according to plan. Strength becomes something different when your life has fallen apart, when your name has been dragged through the dirt, when people have seen you at your worst, and when you cannot undo what you have done.

Sometimes strength is not conquering anything. Sometimes it is waking up and facing another day when you would rather disappear. Sometimes it is sitting in a jail cell and learning to survive one minute at a time because thinking about the next five years is too much. Sometimes it is making one phone call. Sometimes it is admitting that you need help. Sometimes it is taking the hand of the person reaching toward you instead of insisting that you can pull yourself out alone.

Another line in the song says, “All these scars got stories for all of y’all.”

I think that is what people often fail to understand. A heart becomes scarred over time. Every hardship leaves something behind. Every abandonment, humiliation, loss, betrayal, and failure cuts into us in some way. Eventually, those wounds close, but they do not disappear. The scars remain, and every one of them has a story.

When people see the outlaw, the criminal, the drunk, the troublemaker, or the monster, they usually see the final scar. They see the worst night, the arrest record, the mugshot, the headline, or the thing that can be explained in a few sentences. They do not see all the years that came before it. They do not see the wounded child underneath the grown man. They do not see the fear, the loneliness, or the desperate need to belong.

That does not excuse anything.

I want to make that clear because I have spent enough of my life explaining things away. Pain can explain why someone began walking down a particular road, but it does not excuse the people they hurt along the way. My scars are not a pardon. They are part of the story.

For much of my life, I have identified with being an outlaw. I have called myself a nomad, a troublemaker, a misfit, a rebel without a cause, and a man who lived somewhere out beyond the boundaries of respectable society. There was a time when those descriptions felt romantic to me. They made me seem dangerous, adventurous, unpredictable, and free.

The truth is that I started out as a pretty good kid.

I was sensitive. I felt things deeply. I wanted to be accepted, and I wanted to believe that I belonged somewhere. But I also grew up carrying experiences I did not know how to explain to other people. I learned shame long before I had a criminal record. I learned what it felt like to believe that something might be wrong with me at my core. I learned how to hide hurt because I did not have the language to describe it, and I did not believe anyone would know what to do with it if I did.

There was a wounded child inside me who had been conditioned to wonder whether his existence itself was a mistake. There were times I felt like the scapegoat or the whipping boy, the person on whom anger and frustration could safely be placed. I did not understand those experiences as trauma then. They were simply my life.

When I went to college, I entered a world populated by people who seemed normal to me. They were young and exciting. Many of them came from good families. They appeared confident about where they belonged and where they were going.

I wanted to be like them, or at least to be perceived as being like them.

Alcohol helped me build that perception.

When I drank, I could become cooler, funnier, louder, more daring, more rebellious, and more adventurous. I could turn myself into the person everyone wanted at the party. People seemed to like that version of me, so I gave them more of him.

My antics became widely known. I was the wild guy. I was the party animal. I was the fun guy—the person people wanted around when they wanted the night to turn into a story.

I was also sociable when I was sober. I knew a lot of people on campus, and I think most people genuinely liked me. But drinking gave me something more than sociability. It gave me an identity. It allowed me to hide the lost and hurting person underneath a character who appeared completely fine.

The more people responded to that character, the more committed I became to playing him.

Eventually, the antics began escalating. I broke windows out of a building. I drove drunk, I crashed a piece of heavy machinery into a fence. I did reckless things that could have injured or killed me or someone else. At the time, I explained it as college behavior. That was what people did in college, I told myself. We were young. We partied. We made mistakes.

In reality, the beginnings of my alcoholism were probably already there. I simply could not see them because the behavior was being rewarded socially. As long as other people laughed at the stories, I could pretend there was nothing underneath them worth examining.

My first arrest came during the summer after I graduated from college. I was arrested for public intoxication in my college town. I remember almost being proud of it. I thought I had finally become the guy we all joked about—the man who had such a wild night that he woke up in the drunk tank.

They let me out the next morning. It felt like a slap on the wrist. I could not wait to tell people that I had gone to jail the night before. I believed I had earned the best story of the weekend.

It is strange to look back at that moment now. Something I considered funny, harmless, and almost worthy of celebration turned out to be the beginning of a long road. That first arrest was not an isolated story. It became several public-intoxication arrests in different states. It became drunken-driving arrests. It became crashed and wrecked vehicles. It became promises that I would never drive drunk again, followed by more nights when I did exactly that.

Eventually, it became the night I assaulted an Uber driver while intoxicated.

I was not driving that night, but alcohol still drove my life completely off the rails.

Many of those incidents occurred during my years working on the pipeline. There are a lot of good people in that industry—men and women with strong morals who work incredibly hard to provide for their families. But there are also darker parts of life on the road. Nearly any drug, vice, or desire a person wants can be found. People work hard, travel constantly, live away from home, and then find ways to escape the isolation and pressure.

When I was young, I fell into that world easily.

Once again, I was trying to fit in somewhere I did not feel entirely comfortable.

I arrived as the shiny college kid who had never done that kind of work. I had worked with my father growing up, mowing lawns and helping him install air conditioners. I knew what physical work was, and I probably worked harder than many other kids my age. But I did not understand the level of physical and mental endurance pipeline work would demand from me.

Pipelining taught me things I am still proud of. It taught me how to endure unbearable heat and bitter cold. It taught me to keep moving when I was exhausted. It taught me patience with tedious work where one mistake could affect the entire day. It taught me to remain calm under pressure while people questioned my decisions and waited for an answer that could determine what happened next.

I became stronger out there.

But I also learned how to party with the people beside me.

The pipeline can be a world heavily dominated by masculine egos. Strength becomes part of your identity, and anything resembling fear or vulnerability can be interpreted as weakness. The truth is that most of us were probably afraid of more things than we admitted. We simply learned not to show it.

I did not want anyone to see that I was scared. I did not want anyone to see the kid beneath the hardhat who still wondered whether he belonged. Drinking created camaraderie, and I wanted that camaraderie. I wanted to be accepted by the people doing one of the hardest jobs I had ever known.

So, I became wild with them.

The problem was that I almost always went too far. I could not reliably stop once I started. I was arrested in towns along the road, leaving pieces of my life scattered across places where I had temporarily worked and lived.

There were warning signs everywhere. There were incidents after which I should have gone to rehab. But I remained in denial. Every event could be explained away as a fluke: wrong place, wrong time, too much to drink, bad luck, poor judgment, unfortunate circumstances.

I told myself I was not like the people who really needed rehab. Those people had royally fucked up. They had crashed a vehicle everyone knew about. They had lost everything publicly.

My own crashes, arrests, and close calls remained known only to smaller groups of people, so I could keep pretending I was different.

As the offenses accumulated, though, something began changing inside me. I started to believe there was not merely something wrong with my drinking. I began believing there was something wrong with me.

I did not think I was a person making harmful choices. I thought I was a bad person whose choices were finally revealing what had always been hiding underneath.

That belief connected with something much older in me—the childhood fear that I was bad at my core. Every arrest seemed like additional evidence. Every mistake became another piece in the prosecution’s case against my own humanity.

Meanwhile, I watched friends from college move into professional careers. Some became lawyers and doctors. Others built respected lives in their communities. One even became a famous country singer.

And there I was, still on the pipeline, doing work I sometimes considered beneath my intelligence despite the tremendous skill it required. I felt inferior. I believed everyone else had moved forward while I had been left behind with an arrest record, a hardhat, and a trail of stories I was becoming less proud to tell.

I leaned harder into the outlaw identity because it was easier to claim it than to admit I was ashamed.

Maybe this was simply who I had always been. Maybe I belonged out where the wild things were, among other misfits, drifters, and people whose histories made ordinary society uncomfortable. If I could convince myself that I had chosen exile, I would not have to admit how badly I wanted to be welcomed home.

For a while, I did break away from the legal problems. During my marriage, I went years without another alcohol-related encounter with law enforcement. That did not mean alcohol had stopped disrupting my life. It still created problems within my home and my relationship, but those problems were private.

Near the end of my marriage, my wife and I both stopped drinking. I remained sober for approximately eight months. I began going back to school because I believed education might provide a way into the professional world I thought I was supposed to inhabit.

Then my marriage began collapsing.

Divorce was not simply the end of a relationship for me. It felt like a death. I lost a person, but I also lost the trajectory of the life I thought I was living. I lost a home, an imagined future, and the belief that I knew where I belonged.

As everything fell apart, I started drinking again.

At the time, I did not consciously tell myself I was numbing pain. I did not pour a drink and say, “This is how I am going to avoid grieving.” I drank because I wanted to feel better. I wanted to feel something other than loss. I did not know what to do with what was happening inside me, and alcohol had always been waiting with an answer.

I eventually earned the degree and got the professional office job I believed would prove that I was not trapped on the pipeline. It was not an especially high-paying job, but it was respectable. I had an office. I had a title. I had apparently made it into the world where I believed my college friends had gone.

And I was absolutely miserable.

The job was boring and unchallenging. Every day I sat there biding my time until I could go home. I had spent too much of my life outdoors, traveling, working in extreme conditions, solving real problems, and making decisions with serious consequences. I discovered that I could not feel alive while sitting in an office handling mundane issues simply because that kind of work appeared more respectable.

The job I thought would make me feel better about myself made me feel worse. Combined with the divorce I was still reeling from, boredom and emptiness became dangerous. I began going home and drinking—not necessarily every night, but many nights each week—until I could sleep.

The old behaviors started returning. I began tiptoeing around drunk driving again, despite having sworn I would never do it. I drove drunk more times than I want to admit before the incident with the Uber driver.

I am ashamed of those things.

That shame is one reason I felt like an outlaw. Compared with most of my friends, I was the person with the list of offenses. I was the man with a trail of bad attached to his last name.

Then the worst of it became public.

My arrest was no longer a story known by a few people in a pipeline town. It was blasted through the media and social media. People from my hometown commented on it. People who knew one version of me—and people who barely knew me at all—were suddenly discussing who I was.

A complicated human life was reduced to its worst visible moment.

In some ways, it felt like the fear I had carried since childhood had finally been confirmed. I had always been terrified that people would discover something bad inside me. Then the mugshot appeared, and it felt as though the entire world had been handed the evidence.

I felt crucified in public. Some people seemed to gather around the spectacle as though they were watching to see whether I would fall completely. I wanted to know who would defend my name in rooms where I was not present. I wanted someone to ask what had happened to me rather than simply announcing what kind of person they believed I was.

But amid all that public condemnation, someone did reach out.

A good friend asked me about rehab almost immediately. Other people helped coordinate a place for me to go. I was exhausted enough to finally say yes.

Making that decision did not erase what I had done. Rehab was not a door through which I walked and came out innocent. It was simply the first moment when I stopped insisting that I could explain everything away. It was the moment when I admitted that alcohol was not a collection of unrelated incidents in my life. It was a destructive pattern, and I needed help breaking it.

That phone call was one of the first real steps toward becoming someone different.

I have written before that my life fell apart and that, in some ways, I burned it to the ground. I have also written about the fear that I am inherently bad. Those two ideas are connected. For a long time, every bad choice seemed to prove that the darkness was my truest self.

I do not believe that anymore.

I believe I am a human being with strengths and weaknesses, light and darkness, courage and fear. I have been a scholar and a criminal. I have been a loyal friend and a person who caused harm. I have been a husband trying to build a future and a man who helped destroy the future he was living in. I have been strong, and I have been desperately afraid.

I have been a good man and a bad man, sometimes in the same season of my life.

But I no longer think redemption requires me to prove that I was secretly good the entire time. It requires me to tell the truth about both.

I cannot change the past. I cannot reach backward and prevent every arrest, every dangerous drive, every hurtful choice, or that final terrible night. I cannot make the people who saw my mugshot unsee it. I cannot force everyone who judged me to reconsider their conclusions.

What I can do is refuse to let the worst thing I have done become the only true thing about me.

That is what redemption means to me now.

It is not pretending the wreckage never happened. It is standing in it, accepting that I helped create it, and deciding what I will build from what remains. It is understanding my scars without worshipping them. It is telling their stories without using them as excuses.

For a long time, I wore the word outlaw almost like a badge. It allowed me to turn shame into an identity that sounded stronger. It transformed rejection into independence. It made exile appear chosen.

There are still parts of that identity I value. I am independent. I have lived nomadically for most of my adult life. I have traveled roads most people will never see and worked in places that will never appear on a postcard. I do not want to live according to every expectation society places on a man. I still value the rebel in me who questions the status quo and refuses to live a life that feels false.

But I no longer want rebellion to mean self-destruction.

I do not want to think of myself as an outlaw, an outcast, a misfit, a leper, or someone permanently expelled from the human community. I have felt as though I was sent away from the world and cast into the desert. But underneath all the armor, I have always wanted to belong.

I have always wanted to be a decent human being.

That is precisely why my choices have caused so much guilt and shame in my sober life. If I did not care about being decent, I would not be haunted by the times I failed to be. My remorse is not proof that I am irredeemable. It is proof that some part of me still recognizes the man I want to become.

I do not necessarily want to call myself a good man or a bad man anymore. Those words feel too simple for the complexity of a human life.

I want to be a better man.

Better than I was yesterday. Better than the man who kept explaining away every warning sign. Better than the man who confused recklessness with courage and intoxication with freedom. Better than the man who thought being feared or talked about was the same as being seen.

I want to become the kind of man who reaches out when someone else’s life falls apart. I want to be the person who asks what happened before joining the crowd that condemns them. I want to remember the friend who extended a hand toward me and offer that same hand to someone else.

Maybe that is part of why redemption matters so much to me now. It is no longer only about repairing my own life. It is about what I will carry forward and what I will finally put down.

The outlaw was never completely false. He survived difficult things. He crossed long distances. He learned endurance in the heat, the cold, the loneliness, and the pressure. He taught me how to keep moving when life became unbearable.

But he was also armor.

Underneath him was a kid who wanted to be liked, a young man who wanted to belong, a husband who wanted to be loved, and a wounded person who did not know what to do with his pain. Alcohol allowed me to hide that person for a while, but eventually it exposed every wound I had tried to conceal.

Now I am trying something different.

I am writing the stories behind the scars.

I am looking honestly at the darkness without allowing it to swallow all the light. I am learning that I can take responsibility for the harm I have caused without sentencing myself to permanent exile. I am trying to make meaning from what happened and perhaps leave behind a map for someone else who believes they have gone too far to find their way back.

Maybe you really do not know your strength until you know the struggle.

I wish I had learned strength differently. I wish I had not hurt people or endangered lives. I wish I had listened to the warnings before my life had to collapse publicly.

But wishing cannot rewrite the road behind me.

All I can do is decide where the road goes from here.

I am not looking for a way to erase the outlaw. He is part of my history, and his scars have stories. But he does not get to write the ending.

For the rest of my days, I want to be a better human being. Not perfect. Not spotless. Not someone pretending he never wandered into the darkness.

Just better.

Better than I was.

And still becoming.