Bowsite.com

mn_archer, aka, Michael O'Brien, has started a GoFundMe plea (see the link) for a fellow Bowsiter who is going through some very tough times.

I know Joe personally and Michael and I have been friends and hunting buddies since 2004. So this is the real deal, not just something that's a copy of a copy of a copy someone sent you in an e-mail!

So far $3,400 has been raised and in addition, TSI, a Bowsite Sponsor, has given a 100% donation for an awesome bear hunt in New Brunswick! ALL proceeds will go to help Joe and his family get through these most difficult times.

In addition, a couple of hours ago, I put forth a challenge to my fellow Bowsiters as a matching contribution for Bowsiter's donations.

See this link for that thread: http://forums.bowsite.com/TF/bgforums/thread.cfm?forum=1&threadid=459349&MESSAGES=1&FF=CMT

Joe is a great guy and is suffering horribly from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome as a result of his service to our country in the US Navy.

Please see the links and give! Give 'til it hurts!

Thank you,

Kyle Meintzer, Reno, NV

C'mon, everyone. Let's get this done and make me pay!

Here you go.

https://www.gofundme.com/help-the-rareys-battle-ptsd#

Thank you!

https://www.gofundme.com/help-the-rareys-battle-ptsd#

Four-and-a-half hours to go on my challenge. Make Me Pay!

Thank you!

An anonymous donor just laid a cool $1,000 on the table. I can't tell if the donor is a Bowsiter or not, but who cares? Certainly not the Rarey family!

So now we're over $5,000

God bless.

Yoop

Mark

From what I can tell, all but one donation that's come in since I threw out the challenge yesterday is from our fellow Bowsiters. The other one is from a friend.

ANOTHER $500 just showed up!

$6,517 and counting!

Nva, sounds like a few Bowsiters were eager to call on your match - a generous offer, btw.

The fundraiser had slowed to a crawl, so I was simply hoping to get things going again. Fortunately, it seems to have worked, thanks to so many here who chipped in.

thanks for resurrecting!

Mark

Hopefully things will be better in 2017! Merry Christmas

Let's finish the job, fellas!

Thanks for posting this. Don't know him or his family but I am glad to help a veteran in true need who's served for our freedom. Donation made. Come on guys keep it going!

Auction ends Christmas eve so please check it out on the bear forum for all information.

Thanks for all your support

We're at $6,862 down, $3,138 to go.

Let's finish the job!

Does this include the contributions from the TSI donated hunt?

The GoFundMe site will not be handling the proceeds from this auction, so while the proceeds will end up in the Rarey's checking account, they will not show as counting on GoFundMe.

So the answer to your question, is 'No,' but that's simply a bookkeeping matter.

I'd hope we'll go over the $10,000 figure on GoFundMe, then have the auction proceeds go on top of that. The $10,000 will clean up their bills. I'd like to help them get a little cushion beyond that.

They are living in a camper on a friend's property and have two little children. So they could certainly use whatever we can raise here. I talked with Ann Marie for over half-an-hour yesterday afternoon and it served to help me better understand both Joe's situation as well as the family's need. I later sent her a Toys 'R Us gift card to make sure Santa would be sure to show up on Christmas Eve.

What else can go badly for this family?

Was anyone hurt?

Micheal let's me know if they need any construction help . I will take my whole crew over for a week. It is only 3. Hours away ! Thanks for helping ! Hunter

That's an amazing offer! God Bless you!

That's an unbelievable offer, but they have a contractor buddy, Joes uncle, and cousin over there now working on it. I have always admired you on this site, and you have always been one of my favorite posters. That mountain goat hunt will live in my mind forever, but just went up a notch in my book, and you were already up there pretty high!

You guys are showing me there still is some hope in this world. I find myself being incredibly selfish at times, although I try not to be- I guess its human nature. Ever since having our first child 6 years ago ive started to look at things differently, from a different perspective. Ive always wanted more, or thought I needed to have more. Now with 2 kids and the most supportive wife that's ever lived I look around here and wonder where all this shit came from.

When this is over, and Joe has hopefully gotten the help he needs I have a couple ideas I want to work on. I might be back here asking you guys for some ideas or assistance in the near future.

For now, the only thing im concerned with is getting him the help he needs so he can get back on his feet and move forward. Ive learned a lot from Joe, and I know its only a matter of time before we hear of him doing bigger and better things. He is destined for something great- its just who he is and how he lives his life. I really wish you guys could have seen him a few years back, he truly is one of the greatest men ive ever met and he will get back to that place again- I know it.

Thanks again, you have no idea how much I appreciate all your generosity.

michael

What a relief to hear that!

When you posted on the tree thing, I was picturing a big tree trunk cutting all the way through to the flooring. The pictures look to me as if the damage is fairly minor and easily fixed. YEA!

A reminder, however: We're still $3,088 short of the GoFundMe goal. Let's hit that and then blow it away!

a bump and a link to keep this going

Ann Marie has seen the bear auction post and she is pretty overwhelmed with the support you guys have given them.

This is the last family picture that they took together

Michael

We still need another $2,500 to hit the target!

Thanks for organizing this for the family.

100% of the credit is because of mn_archer.

All I'm doing is helping promote it.

Come on everyone...with all we spend on bowhunting we can all afford a little. Even $10 would help make the goal and give him a chance to get his life back.

Only $1,870 to go! Click on link provided to donate.

Thank you, Jake Ensign!

It's too cold this am to work on the squirrel exclusion I have scheduled so I'll get posting on social media and emailing some contacts again.

With a little luck we will push past the goal in a couple days aND I can then concentrate on getting the best bids we can for the bear hunt

Thanks again

Michael

Only $1,265 to go!

thanks so much guys!

michael

Check out the thread in the bear forum right here on Bowsite

Thanks to Bowsite, TSI, Mark, and everyone else who donated and bid- You all earned a special place in my heart.

Michael O.

First off, from the depth of my heart, thank you for helping my family and I with your support. Michael, Kyle, TSI, the rest of you… just thank you.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. So long that I no longer remember the email account tied to my original username and so had to make a new username to respond here. I’m not able to keep up with much anymore. It took several days to write this with editorial help from my wife.

This is a long post. It’s very personal and unfortunate. I share it not to get sympathy or encouragement or aid of any kind. You’ve already done that for me and helped save my family from worse than we’ve already experienced and we are forever grateful. Intense shame and guilt almost killed me. I had passed through experiences in my life I couldn’t face until all of my capability was taken from me by PTSD. I couldn’t run anymore. I was drowning, and pulling my family under with me. You played a part in stopping that. I’ll share below what happened, don’t feel obligated to read through it. My hope is that you will and after processing it, maybe you’ll recognize others who are trapped on their own ridiculous hell ride and put this in front of them. And thank you for everything.

*****Reality Warning, uncomfortable, adult content below*****

After breaking down and finally asking for help on social media the first week of December, I was admitted into St Joe’s hospital in Tacoma, WA because the effects of PTSD had put my life and the life of my family into intense crisis. Living in a small RV, isolated, on welfare we are at the end of our rope.

My hope to simply die and unburden my family from my disfigured personality and complete incapacity had passed a dangerous threshold that coincided with a comprehensive nervous breakdown. I had reached the bottom and was faced with either looking into the abyss or killing myself. I was struggling with that decision and so I was admitted to the hospital for some much needed care.

The hunt I shared here on the Bowsite in 2008 was a brief apogee in my trauma induced orbit before my return journey back to reality, back to terra firma. My fall over the intervening years has offered an increasingly insane, e ticket ride through hell all culminating in biblical fire & brimstone as my massive and deformed ego blasted back into the atmosphere. There wasn’t going to be a perigee this time and the very real terror of the impending impact screaming for me to ‘DO SOMETHING!’ was only exceeded in intensity by the humiliating agony of what the light from the growing inferno revealed about the truth of who I was and being completely helpless to stop it.

My daily ‘walk around town’ mental state had become that of a gravely wounded and semi-conscious pilot, trapped inside a burning plane that is spinning out of control. It’s a tossup at this point if you are going to burn to death, die of your wounds or die from the imminent impact, but it’s fatal any way you slice it and it is really hard not to punch your ticket at this point. To not pull out your revolver and end it. The flames are agony, the lack of control is excruciating and the ground is rushing up to meet you. The reality that has to be faced is so unwanted, so revolting and so painful that death becomes the only escape.

Jung says that ‘people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. I know what he means.

You helped me to be still. To let go. To face the shame and get help. To surrender to the fire. I’m posting this because there are 22 veterans a day who are leaving behind families and friends because the pain and terror of the fall that is PTSD are just too much to bear. My hope is that by sharing this, veteran or not, those who are experiencing something similar will see that it’s ok to discuss the incapacity, the disfigured personality and irrational anxiety. It’s okay to discuss WHY and it’s ok to get help.

I don’t have PTSD from watching my buddy die in combat or from crawling across too many dead and decaying Iraqi soldiers while under AK47 fire from terrorists. My disability is complex, messy, embarrassing to the point of being shameful and ridden with guilt, confusion and an incredible capacity for self-denial.

I was enlisted in the NAVY from 88 to 93. I was a naval aircrewman on P3 Orions. During my active service and while deployed to Diego Garcia in support of the gulf war I was medevac’d to Japan as a routine physical had found blood in my urine and my flight surgeon didn’t have the necessary equipment to rule out bladder cancer.

I would later pass a very painful kidney stone, but while in Japan, during a battery of tests that thankfully ruled out cancer, I was sexually assaulted by a male navy doctor while alone with him during an exam. The doctor sought to teach me a lesson about “keeping my dick in my pants while on deployment” and conducted the exam in the most abhorrent manner.

The assault left me in a great deal of pain, feeling ashamed, punished and deeply violated. This proved to be a very destabilizing experience as I began to have intense and intrusive flashbacks and nightmares suggesting that this was not the first time I had experienced this combination of emotions at the hands of an angry male authority figure. It was terrifying and I ran from it. The assault was compartmentalized as degrading punishment in the guise of an exam and I locked it away and tried desperately to return to my life.

After returning home from deployment, I began to withdraw from friends. I took myself off flight status claiming that I had noticed more blood in my urine, but the truth was that I was in a near state of panic all the time and I felt like I night snap from it. Almost overnight I developed debilitating target panic and could no longer shoot my longbow, something that had always been effortless before. But now I was starting to unravel, unable to face the shame of the reality before me. Of what the doctor had done and the overwhelming waves of terror that would seize me upon waking from a nightmare and having a sickening sense that it wasn’t a dream but a memory.

Like a vision of something happening in a dark room glimpsed through the keyhole of a locked door. Your looking provides the light and what it illuminates is the truth of what happened. That this isn’t a bad dream. Something really bad happened a long time ago and it’s all right behind this door. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, I was just trying desperately to keep my sh** together and distract myself from this destabilizing insanity until I could get to the end of my enlistment a few months away.

By the time I was honorably discharged from the service, I was suffering greatly. It was as though a boil had been pricked. I couldn’t stop the flow of effluent that was leaking out and poisoning my life. And I couldn’t get away from it either. I desperately needed help. But I was terrified, confused, intensely embarrassed and depressed. Very similar in condition to what I’ve been currently going through, though less in intensity. Within a few months of discharge, my increasingly compulsive and erratic behavior led to me causing an accident while street racing my car (a new and compulsive pastime). The collision killed two elderly women returning home from church on a Sunday morning. There was no alcohol involved, I was just being reckless and got distracted and didn’t see them until it was too late. I was 24 years old.

After the accident, I broke pretty comprehensively. In the months that followed I had extremely intense (re-experienced?) recall of being handcuffed and violently raped by my best friend’s uncle when I was 7 years old. I had fought depression most my life, I barely made it through school, never really fit in, and here was the infection. Here was what had caused it, I was starting to see it, but the accident was everything. The guilt I felt flooded over the pain and I wouldn’t / couldn’t face it in the light of what my irresponsibility had just done. I wrote my apology letters to the families, plead guilty to vehicular homicide, went to jail and did my community service. I was deeply depressed for a number of years, my mom passed suddenly on my 28th birthday (you can’t make this stuff up) and I was just at a very low spot, but I never stopped fighting or pushing. I was humbled but defiant.

In 1999, I was able to push it all down, get on top of it and attack life. I surged. I broke free. I got a job with a bottled water company willing to take a chance on me as a $10/hour night loader and spent the next 10 years climbing up the ladder until I was running the production facility earning close to 6 figures. Got my sh!t together. Lost 50 pounds, started racing ATV’s on the pro line. I started shooting my bow again and dove deeply into backcountry elk hunting. I was fearless, exhilarated, sexy and confident that I had achieved escape velocity. All that sh!t was in the rear view mirror baby. I was ok. But I was desperately obtuse, selfish unaware. Without intent I had become a real douchebag. Arrogant, ignorant, high strung, brash and unmaliciously disloyal. I was self-absorbed and completely blind to the suffering I was causing. My actions weren’t malicious, there just weren’t too many relationships that I carried into the black. I was very thick. People were in my way. My behavior was rationalized and justified because there was a point to all of it. The end justified the means and there were WAY worse people than me. I was a pretty funny, decent guy to most…

In 2009 Ann Marie and I married and I had to take a hard look at my behavior. What end was I trying to achieve exactly? And who the hell was I? That’s the apogee. That’s the start of the return back. The fall. The turn inward. It wasn’t a pretty view. Then we had Thomas.

I started noticing physical symptoms; night sweats, my sleep deteriorated, I would sometimes wake up screaming in a tiny, strained voice. I started freezing in stressful conversations. I also stopped returning phone calls and let some projects, and most of my relationships slide. If a situation passed a rapidly falling stress threshold, I would just become paralyzed. My decaying focus was an increasing issue and I was diagnosed with ADD and given Adderall which helped for a time, but I recognized with growing alarm that I couldn’t do my job anymore.

I resigned in 2009. After 10 years I just gave them my 2 week notice. I had no plan, I just knew I couldn’t stay. This initiated an increasingly panicked number of failed attempts to regain my footing, clinging to the belief that I simply wasn’t aligned with my purpose and desperate to find out what that was. I had the accelerator pegged in my search. I figured that it must be passion that I lacked and it would hopefully be there for me at the next venue. I remained optimistic as I failed utterly, running first from Washington to Georgia and then from a professional disaster there to stay with my wife’s family in Arizona in May of 2014.

While passing through Albuquerque, NM in a U-Haul, my Father-in-law died of a massive heart attack. It had been just he and I and his adult son caravanning our load to sanctuary, to figure out what the hell was going on. To try to figure out where the wheels had come off. Instead we landed into one of the most tragic and chaotic circumstances imaginable.

The stress and intensity of this traumatic event again precluded my own concerns. Buried them once more. My wife was in agony, my 3 year old son was coming to terms with the concept of death and how that might apply to those he loved and we lived for two years with my wife’s mother who was battling her own inconceivable hell that, combined with my own instability, created an increasingly hostile and unhealthy environment to be in.

I helped at the world’s tiniest contract post office with no bathroom for 4 hours a day. I could tell now that I was getting worse. I couldn’t stay with a thought anymore. I couldn’t remember or recognize things I had written down the day before. Trying to focus was like sitting on a remote control with the channel changing about every 8 seconds and it’s always something awful and the volume is on 11.

The stress was overwhelming. My beard hair fell out in splotches that left behind perfectly smooth patches of hairless skin for months and though I was pretty sure that the agonizing pains in my chest were panic attacks (mostly because I wasn’t dead yet) the feeling of imminent doom pervaded my waking hurricane of thoughts. I was becoming aware that the insanity I had been running from was me and I was helpless to stop it and it was getting much worse.

My irritability, eccentricity, and irrationality had reached a peak, or perhaps it was my awareness that peaked, or a combination. Either way I could not hide from it anymore. My deformed personality was short circuiting. Coming to pieces. I was finally diagnosed with PTSD/MDD in April in Arizona. Unfortunately, the living arrangement with my mother in law had deteriorated to the point where we are now staying in an RV on a friend’s property near my home town in Washington State. The combined effects of these symptoms and increasing level of life chaos have left me isolated and completely incapacitated. The battle isn’t with getting a job, it’s with getting out of bed. It’s with facing what an a**hole I’ve become. Facing how bad this is screwed up and seeing why. It’s coming to terms with being overly sensitive and impatient. Of seeing and accepting how I’ve left people hurt, unintentional or otherwise. It’s accepting an exponentially diminishing amount of capability while expending debilitating effort to do even simple things. Like help with the groceries, mow the lawn, or to be responsible and alone with the kids for 15 minutes. It’s a complete inability to put on a mask for anything and yet loathing your reflection in the mirror and not being able to do anything about it but accept it.

This is PTSD and I ran from it, I couldn’t face that this is who I was. That I could be so weak as to let this break me. And it had to completely break me for me to seek help. I didn’t want this reality, but to stay I had to let go completely. Surrender completely and face this. This is the ‘impact’ If you’re still following the comet analogy, the explosion and complete annihilation of the structure that housed it all. It was only then that I was able to see the depth and effect that this trauma has had on me and why I’ve not been able to face it and therefore not able to get help until now.

Currently we get food stamps and are somewhere within the bureaucracy of the VA and State DSHS for whatever disability benefit we qualify for. My wife and I were both raised by proud, hard working parents and navigating this process has been hateful and degrading. We are 3-6 months out from notification of approval or rejection for our claim.

The hospital stay jumped started the med situation and the stuff they have me on allows me to sleep and reduces my anxiety to levels where I can be alone with Maggie or Thomas for about an hour a day. I took Maggie to the store yesterday by myself. This is the first time I have been alone with her for any meaningful length of time since she was born 16 months ago.

And while I have let go of everything or had it ripped from my grasp, my wife never let ME go. I can’t fathom how much of my weight she’s carried with patience. There were a few close friends and family, that, despite my increasingly difficult to comprehend behavior, continued to hang in there. And then there’s this guy I met one time bow hunting 7 years ago before my life completely jumped the shark. Despite my increasingly erratic posts, Michael kept following me on Facebook, saw me ask for help and engaged this community that only knew me at my best and brightest and, believing in THAT guy, you all helped.

I’m sharing this very personal complicated and messy story because this isn’t some deep dark hole I needed to be pulled out of to get back to normal. PTSD isn’t a group of symptoms in need of curing, it’s a birth canal that I had become stuck in because I couldn’t let go and accept the reality that I had unwittingly created.

I’m sharing this because everyone told me to ‘hang on’ to ‘keep fighting’ to ‘not let go.’ But this is the wrong advice. There are people in your life right now, maybe vets, maybe not, that are suffering from unhealed trauma the way I was. Hanging on is not good advice. Letting go is. “If you find yourself in Hell, keep going!” ~W Churchill. You cant effort your way out of that hole. It’s the opposite, you have to yield to it.

I’m sharing this because they are hanging on out of fear, as I was. They cling as I did, to the outer rail of a merry go round spinning out of control. Below them is the abyss. Fear of what people think, fear of who they are, fear that they are running out of time to change course, fear of their impending death. Tell them not to fear, but to trust. To let go of the rail. To become nothing. To be still during the fall and let this healing run its course. It takes time, not effort.

I’m sharing this so you wont tell them to hang on. Tell them, like you’ve told me, to let go. Tell them to trust the fall. Healing is on the other side of that letting go, but you’re going to surrender it all and die to self to get there. They’ll need your support. I know how close I came to checking out. To choosing that, even though I have the most beautiful kids, and the best wife, that I couldn’t stay. To being so disgusted at my inability to be the man, husband and father that they deserve that I simply wanted to end it because I thought I would never find the sanctuary, courage and support to finally let go of this burden and ask for help.

I’m sharing this because without my wife, family, kids, Michael, Kyle, Mark, TSI and the rest of you guys I wouldn’t be here.

I’m sharing this because there’s 22 veterans a day who don’t make it because they had less support than me, far worse trauma or guilt or maybe they were not deeply connected to nature and a meditative tool like archery to help them unravel the knot. Or maybe they just ran out of time waiting as we are on an excruciatingly long, degrading and uncertain VA and social security process.

I’m sharing because maybe this will get in front of them and they’ll see how ridiculous and socially horrifying my story is and know that shame can’t kill you, guilt can’t kill you, fear can’t kill you.

I’m sharing this because maybe they’ll recognize some of what I’m describing as their own experience and reach out for help instead of a gun. Maybe they’ll look at the 1% they got right in the day instead of the other 99% they screwed up and see it as a victory instead of more fuel for the fires. Maybe they’ll see this story and let go. I’m sharing this to apologize for all the stupid sh!t I did while I ran and to anyone unfortunate to run into me during the rough years.

And I’m sharing this to pledge whatever capability or resource I have left over in life to helping those families facing similar trials make it to the other shore. And I want to make archery, nature and a simple living a part of that support.

Thank you again Joe

I know in my heart you are destined for great things.

I look forward to sharing a camp with you again down the road.

Your friend Michael

I believe the worst is behind you. You truly have a great support team with Ann Marie as well as your family and your friends.

You supported me at the White River 50 in 2008. You inspired both Michael and myself during that elk hunt in Idaho in 2009. That's who you are and never forget it!

Think only of the good things, not the bad. Easier said than done, for sure. But looking forward with a positive 'can do' attitude works almost every time. I know you well enough to know it will work for you as well.

Kyle

You clearly have a lot of caring people around you, and a Bowsite family that is a part of that team. Thanks for trusting us enough to share what you're going through.

I'll keep you in my thoughts and prayers. I suspect that there are many chapters yet to be written, and I hope they include your telling of more back country adventures.

Thank you for sharing.

michael