EP. 1 - "Pain to Purpose" with #NoStigmas Founder, Jacob Moore
Join the conversation as we talk with Jacob about the loss of his father at an early age, his journey with mental health throughout his life, and what lead him to found NoStigmas all those years ago.
Be sure to tune in right here every Wednesday at 2 PM Eastern from here on out for more REAL talk with REAL people. We are survivors, thrivers, advocates, and Allies. We see you. We love you. BE UNSILENT 💚
SHOW NOTES:
Eli:
This week's episode contains content that may be triggering for some listeners. There's mention of suicide. Nothing graphic of course, but it plays an important part in today's story. It's okay if you need to skip this one. Do what's right for you.
Jake:
I couldn't keep up doing so much, just producing everything in an attempt to try to feel better, to hide, or to cover it up. I just couldn't keep it up.
Eli:
This is Unsilent: a speak series from NoStigmas that champions mental health advocacy, and challenges the stigmas that prevent people from getting the help they need. To kick off our first season, I'll be having a conversation with NoStigmas’ founder, Jacob Moore. We’ll hear about Jake's loss of his father and how it immensely reshaped his life. But we'll also see how Jake turned his pain into a mission to help others. If you want to learn more, or contact us, visit nostigmas.org. Don't face it alone. Be unsilent.
Jake:
I struggled so much when I was young, feeling like I was alone. Like I was in this world that I was different because of mental health challenges losing my father's suicide and I hid it for so long. I wore this mask and I just pretended that everything was okay and that ended up costing me so much. When I got to a point in my recovery, that I had the strength to be able to start to give back to others, I wanted to create that space where people could feel like they could just be themselves and not be judged. And the name NoStigmas came out of that desire out of that effort, you know.
Jake:
My childhood was pretty interesting because we had this interesting dynamic in our family where my grandfather was, is, still a pastor of a Bible Church. And he was basically doing like missionary work in Arizona. He was going to the American reservations and doing work there and had a foster home that he and my grandma ran. And so my mom was like, you know, a pastor's daughter. And then met my father, who was someone who grew up with abusive, alcoholic parents. He was addicted to alcohol, and had a lot of run-ins with the law was in jail a lot. And they fell in love. And so at 19 years old, got married, got pregnant with me, and had me when she was 20.
Eli:
Wow.
Jake:
Yeah, so my sister came a year and four days after me and then my brother came like a year and a half after that.
Eli:
So they got married and then like, “All right, we're ready to go.”
Jake:
Well, I mean, but part of the challenge was my mom was raising us a lot on her own because of what was going on with my dad, you know, because he would get arrested or be drunk or be in rehab. He was the kind of guy who, like he had so much heart and so much love, so much charisma and resourcefulness, but he also had this, trauma and addiction, and things that he didn't have the skill sets to be able to overcome. His addiction was so bad that my mom had to buy beer before she could buy groceries. It was rough, but then the whole family up and decided to move to Michigan, which is where everybody's originally from. And, I think that really just disrupted a lot of things for my mom in ways that were good because she kind of understood the dynamic that was happening with my father and understood that needed to change and so she took some action around really setting some boundaries with the relationship. Which led to my father- he just didn't have, like I said, the skill sets or support to be able to take care of himself,and things went pretty quickly downhill for him.
Jake:
When I was six years old, he ended up dying by suicide. So it was just devastating for for all of us. I absorbed a lot of that energy. There was just a great deal of anxiety and I think maybe just a sense of unsettledness, or lack of safety, that any young person is just going to absorb that, you know? I knew how he died pretty soon after he died. So, of course, when I was a kid, I thought of it as a decision, and something that he did to us. That it was weakness, or somehow him being a bad person or weak or something like that. And of course, as I've gotten older, I’ve come to understand what suicide is and how someone gets to that point. My views have changed and I've come to peace and come to terms with that, but, I mean, there was a long time where I really resented him.
Jake:
I very much think I took on the role of the little man of the house. The responsibility, certainly like the anxiety, the worry that I took on. My mom would often say, “You’re always worried about adult problems”, or “You’re worried about things that like are aren't yours to deal with.” And, I think that was just that coping mechanism, you know, at a young age to just try to fix or try to do or try to control what I could. I didn't get to be a kid. Now, I kind of pride myself in being pretty goofy, and like, doing dumb stuff and running around and making a fool of myself because I didn't do that when I was a kid. I was very serious. And so now I'm like, “Oh no.” I've purposefully introduced play into my life to be able to have that childlike perspective and mentality. Because I didn't get that, I didn’t have that when I was a kid.
Eli:
So far we've really talked about, this is very young, like six, seven. I’m curious how this pressure and this mounting anxiety starts morphing and changing as you start to hit middle schoo andl high school. What do those times look like for you?
Jake:
It looked like a lot of acting out. I just always had a lot of energy. I couldn't sit still. I was not great in school. There was just gaps in memory. I feel like I time-traveled through a lot of that period of my life. So it wasn't really present in school, like emotionally, mentally present. There's just chunks of basic arithmetic and grammar and spelling and things that I just didn't learn growing up because my brain was just checked out, or somewhere else. I wasn't being engaged that way. And so I just acted out and I got in trouble a lot. I was a kid who was sent out in the hallway and out to the principal's office and expelled. I was just always getting in trouble
Jake:
From middle school to high school, there was this opportunity to reinvent myself. And this is when I say I really started to put on this mask and pretend. I I really sort of curated this image, this persona of Jake. Eventually it just caught up to me. I couldn't keep up the grades. I couldn't keep up the persona. I couldn't keep up doing so much, just producing everything in an attempt to try to feel better or to hide or to cover it up. I just couldn't keep it up.
And so I was like I don’t have a lot of options. The best option for me was trade school. I couldn't get scholarships to go to school. I didn't have the grades to get in. So all my friends are applying for college and looking at they're going to do with their lives and I was like I don’t know. I have some things that are interesting to me but…I was directionless. And I think that plus the long Michigan winters and things being unaddressed for so long just caught up to me and I got really depressed. I stopped caring. I stopped taking care of myself. I stopped going to school and I just kind of checked out. And eventually I just stopped caring whether or not I lived or died.
It was like this apathy just took over me. And I just was in so much emotional pain that I just wanted it to end. That was a really dark and scary time because it was the first time that I really understood what my father must have been going through and really realize like, oh, if he was in half as much pain as I was then of course he didn't want to live anymore. Who would want to?
Eli:
If you or someone you know is experiencing a crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255, or visit suicide prevention lifeline.org for support via live chat. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, please call 911. Other resources are linked in the show notes.
Jake:
But I'm really, really fortunate because my mom was there and she recognized what was happening. She'd seen it before right? Now, she had the skill sets to be able to do something about it, to be able to intervene, to be able to take positive action. She literally picked me up and took me to the doctor and helped me get the help that I needed. If she hadn't, I wouldn't be here today. It was a long steady march out of that. It was a lot of taking meds and going to therapy and trying different tactics and enrolling in community college and dropping out and getting a job and losing it and starting a relationship and ending it. And I mean this was basically my 20s. During that whole time it was just trying to figure my stuff out. And was during that time I saw a dozen different therapists 33 different combinations of pharmaceuticals. I had a bunch of different diagnosis. Everything from seasonal affective disorder, to panic disorder, to, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder. They just threw the whole DSM-IV at me. It was like, it was such a tumultuous time and I had so many rollercoaster experiences and emotions during that time. It was a lot, so it was a super angsty period of time, but there were also these beautiful moments of clarity as well where I could just see the truth of something and understand what why.
Eli:
Those moments are so valuable to a mental health journey because it's really like an anchor point, something to kind of hold on to of, alright, I see who I can be. I see where I can go.
Jake:
Yeah.
Eli:
In the midst of it all, you gotta hold on to those.
Jake:
One of those major sort of anchor points for me was meeting someone who I came to think of as a mentor. Someone who shared their own personal experiences with me, and provided what I didn't know at the time, now I know, is peer support. And this gentlemen, we met on a plane. I was going Argentina and I, at the time had a lot of flight anxiety and so my solution to that was taking a sedative and drinking a few gin and tonics and that was how I tried to get through long flights. And this guy, we both lucked out, we were at the back of the plane and we both had a row to ourselves and sort of just, yeah. It was shortly after takeoff and he just looked over at me and he was just like, “I recognize you, I recognize myself in you and what you're going through.”
Eli:
And is he a stranger and at this point?
Jake:
He's a stranger. But I thought I had my stuff together, but apparently it was clear, especially to someone who had been through or gone through similar things, I think he saw it and he just called me out on my BS. But it was interesting because he shared, kind of unprompted, that he had had some similar experiences. That he had lost a parent to suicide, been through depression, and come out on the other side. And, hearing from someone firsthand, who had not only gone through it and just survived, but was now in a place in their life where they were thirving. Where they had peace. It was this lightbulb for me going off and understand, oh, well if they can do it, then I can do it too. I had to take ownership of what I was experiencing, and when I started to do that, everything changed. I started surrounding myself with more positive people, with mentors, with people who helped to lift me up. I started looking at, what am I putting in my body? How is it affecting me? How is it affecting my energy, my mood? Now I know that is Fuel, the second bridge. Anything and everything from the things we eat to the media we consume all have an impact on our system. And I started looking at, how does my exercise and physical fitness and my mobility play into this? That now I know is what we call Move, our third bridge. And what about my sleep habits and the routines around my resetting or retreat? What does that look like? So now that’s the fourth bridge, Rest. And now, how am I giving back? How am I contributing to society? How am I using the things that I've learned and the gifts that I've been given to help others? And that's the fifth bridge, that's Give, our positive output. And that's the one that led to NoStigmas and the Five Bridges, to be able to provide peer support and be able to help other people find their own paths and customize their own wellness because it's not something that you can do if you don't have a roadmap.
Eli:
As we wrap up and start to close, do you have any final thoughts on how we can help love others, and how we can create a space for them?
Jake:
I think we don't truly ever know what it's like until we go through it, or until we know someone who goes through it. But, if we can just suspend that disbelief and allow ourselves to just trust that someone is being honest and true about the way that they're feeling. No one would choose to be depressed, no one would choose to be anxious, no one would choose to go through and subject themselves to stigmas, or to judgment for people. Who would? Who would, if they had the choice to be positive and bright and cheery and never have any issues? Who would not choose to do that? Right?
Eli:
Right.
Jake:
So can we give them the benefit of the doubt? Can we give them a little grace, a little understanding. That, to me, is the greatest gift we can give anyone, is that non-judgement.
Eli:
Be willing to just go and suspend all, whatever personal things you've got going on, and just listen.
Jake:
Yeah. I think listening is one of the most challenging skill sets but one of the greatest gifts that we can give someone is just our time, right? That's a nonrenewable resource, is our time. And when we choose to give that to someone else, it is incredible what that can provide to someone. Just the understanding that someone cares, someone wants to know, or is willing to hear all the uncomfortable dark, dirty bits. That's just a huge gift.
Eli:
This is Unsilent. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was hosted and produced by me, Eli Lawson, Lance Bordelon, John Panicucci, and the rest of the incredible NoStigmas marketing team. Special thanks to Jacob Moore for sharing his story today and making this whole thing possible. To go beyond the show, connect with us on social media, or visit no stigmas.org to learn more about mental health topics. Consider leaving us a positive review wherever you listen to podcasts and sharing the show with your friends. We'd really appreciate it. You can expect a new episode of Unsilent every Wednesday from here on out and remember, whatever you're going through, you don't have to do it alone. Be Unsilent. We'll see you next week.
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