This is me.Not a highlight reel.
Neurodivergence. Ex-Counsellor turned Lawyer Headhunter. Hockey. Music. Fatherhood. And somehow, a career I was built for all along.
Junior Hockey & Start of University
I graduated high school and stepped into university at UFV, unsure of what I truly wanted but following the path I thought I was supposed to take. At the same time I was fully immersed in junior hockey — a world of speed, discipline, and relentless competition. Balancing the rink, school, and a growing social life was not easy. This is when the partying began. Those years were a collision of expectation and identity, but the grit and pressure I faced on the ice built the resilience I would rely on later in life.
Early Career & Life Shifts
My competitive hockey days were behind me. I was offered a partial scholarship to play at the University of Utah but I chose partying instead. I bounced through blue-collar jobs before landing at the City of Abbotsford as a Utility Worker. But beneath the surface things were unravelling. My drinking escalated from lifestyle to dependency and by 2011 alcoholism had taken full control. On paper I looked functional. Inside I was lost.
Alcoholism and Recovery Journey
Total chaos. Failed relationships. Broken friendships. I was losing everything including myself. My last drink was April 3, 2015. I woke up outside my apartment door in the hallway — a neighbour checked if I was still alive. That was my bottom. Two days later I entered the Orchard Recovery Center on Bowen Island. Sobriety did not start with clarity — it began with collapse. Recovery was not linear or glamorous but it was real. These years taught me vulnerability, resilience, and the truth that healing is not erasing the past — it is learning to live with it.
New Beginnings
After years of darkness this was the start of rebuilding from the ground up. The chaos had quieted, replaced by clarity, purpose, and a fragile sense of hope. In 2016 I met my wife Van at LAX — sober, present, and without the mask. For the first time I got to meet someone as myself. In 2017 I finished my schooling and founded BMR — a counselling practice for youth and young adults facing mental health and addiction struggles. I thought I had found my calling but deep down something still felt missing.
Career Pivot, Growth and Family Expansion
Launching my counselling practice was meaningful but something felt off. I was still carrying trauma I had not fully faced. By 2019 a pivot was inevitable. Then I met Warren Smith. He saw something in me before I did and that conversation sparked a fire. Legal recruitment. I had no idea what I was doing at first so I did what I always do when the stakes are high — I worked. Studied late into the night. Learned practice areas, firm structures, and markets. It was not starting over. It was starting stronger.
Growth, Music, Diagnosis, Life Balance
In 2022 music re-entered my life in a profound way — a way to give shape to emotions I could not always put into words. That same year I received a diagnosis that made everything click: AuDHD. It gave me language for lifelong struggles and permission to approach life differently. Van and I welcomed our second daughter and our family of four is thriving. Life is loud, messy, beautiful, and full of love. Sober, creative, loving hard, living fully, and helping top-tier lawyers find their place in a world that often forgets the human side.
The hardest decision I have ever made. And the best.
A standard night for me was a 26-ounce whiskey followed by 6 to 8 beers. Every night. Seven days a week. I was not drinking to unwind. I was drinking so I did not have to think about why I feel the way I feel. My last drink was April 4, 2015. My neighbour found me passed out in my doorway, covered in vomit. She thought I was dead. Twenty-four hours later I was admitted to Orchard Recovery Center on Bowen Island. What followed was not a clean transformation. It was slow, unglamorous, and built one day at a time. Putting down the bottle did not give me a perfect life. It gave me a real one.
Last Drink — April 4, 2015
Was literally on my death bed. That was my bottom.
Orchard Recovery Center
One day at a time. Quitting began with collapse, not clarity.
Over 100 Pounds Lost
A nervous system finally settling. A body learning to be present.
11 Years and Counting
Not on a timeline, not in a straight line. Still going.
When everything hits at full volume and you have no off switch.
For longer than I can remember I was prescribed a pill to fix what someone decided was a "chemical imbalance". They were wrong. It was not a mood disorder. It was a brain that experienced the world at full volume with no way to turn it down. The chemical imbalance theory has since been debunked. What was left was a generation of people medicated based on a story that was more useful to pharmaceutical companies than it was to patients.
Figuring out my true self gave me language for who I have always been and permission to stop performing a version of normal that was never mine.
Diagnosed at 35
AuDHD — Autism and ADHD. A diagnosis simply made my life made sense.
Masking
For decades I mirrored others, suppressed instincts, and performed normalcy. It worked — and it cost everything.
What Changed
Everything and nothing. The diagnosis gave me tools, language, and permission to stop pretending.
AuDHD is two nervous systems in direct conflict. One craves sameness. The other cannot tolerate it.
The autistic nervous system relies on predictability to regulate the amygdala. Routine keeps it calm. The ADHD brain habituates quickly — familiar things stop generating the response needed to sustain attention.
So routine soothes one system while starving the other. The conflict is not a character flaw. It is two documented neurological needs that genuinely contradict each other.
You have been exhausted by yourself your entire life. Now you know why.
You make a routine. Follow it for days, weeks even. Your brain decides it is unbearable. You blow it up. You tell yourself you are lazy. You start again. You blow it up again. This has been happening since you were a child.
You were not sabotaging anything. You were living inside a neurological contradiction with no name for it. Every time you built something that worked, your own brain dismantled it.
You were not too much and also not enough. You were running two operating systems on one device with no manual and no support. The exhaustion makes sense now. All of it does.
Skates. Bruises. Brotherhood.
A career on the ice — and everything it taught me off it.
The game taught me how to show up, fall down,
get back up, and keep going.
Those lessons did not stay on the ice.
Recruiting is not just about sourcing the best resumes.
It is about pattern recognition. Energy. Risk. Timing. Human behaviour.
Loyal, direct, and paying attention in a way most people never will.
That is what you get.