Growing up my father always told me I was a follower, not a leader. On an almost daily basis he would say to me, “Boy, you have got to forge your own path in life, instead of fooling around with those knuckleheads you call friends.” He was, of course, correct, but when I was a teenager that kind of wisdom went in one ear and out the other. In my mind I was invincible, I knew everything, and I could get away with anything. I was wrong. My friends and I fucked with the wrong person. I spent two years in a psychiatric facility and am a shell of the person I was before. In High School I fell in…