I was born with blindness as well as a rare heart condition (Wolfe, Parkinsons, White- 1 in 333,000 people have it.) It means that there was an extra vein literally growing in my heart, which has caused my heart rhythms to be speed up & my brain wouldn’t know how to slow them down. So often times they were twice as fast as a normal heartbeat. With all the doctors I’ve seen throughout the course of my life, not a single one of them cared enough to do an EKG on my heart to discover the heart condition & therefore I’ve been through more hell going in & out of doctors offices with so many different illnesses that I never even knew where to begin.

Depression was obviously a very familiar friend of mine during my life, and I was finally checked into a hospital for contemplating suicide at the age of 18 years old. That’s when the doctors put me on prescription drugs that made my mysterious heart condition and its complications even worse than they already were. At this point, I began to lose all faith in humanity because everybody I’d known had preconceived judgments on me already: that I was just lazy, depressed, unmotivated, & useless altogether. Everyone from my family to friends to teachers to religious leaders had no idea who I really was or what I stood for as a person, except for occasional glimmers of the real me from time to time. Even I didn’t know who I was or wasn’t.

Every relationship I have ever had in my entire life was strained and suffered because of my track record in the past & overwhelming physical setbacks, and I learned at an early age that I would never experience life like most of my friends and I would probably never have a stable & meaningful relationship with a woman that would last & endure my personal hell. I tried to live as normally as possible but because the heart problems were invisible and a constant mystery to me and everyone else, I accepted the fact that I was crazy and never planned on living past 35, even when I was just a young boy. Although my dreams had a family of my own in mind and a loving wife and children to call my own, my devastating reality stood in the way of such hopeful and far-fetched goals. I resolved that I was blind, crazy and was meant to be alone for the rest of my duration in mortality.

Eventually, in my early twenties, the heart condition reached fruition and was so unbearable that I couldn’t do much of anything most of the time but sleep. Yet I still always maintained steady work ethics & had to strive & press forward as a functional adult who didn’t want to use my disabilities as a crutch or excuse for failure in life. Those who stood by me or tried to had no idea of what I was up against, but we all learned eventually that I had heart problems beyond my control when I had a heart attack five years ago. That was when my life finally began.

It was June 3, 2005 and I was opening a business I had which was a full service cafe in a government building in SLC. I stood up from my desk to open the doors for business and felt an explosion in my chest like I can’t explain. I felt my pulse but there was nothing there because my heartbeat was at about 450 beats per minute and so I couldn’t tell what my pulse was when it happened. I could barely breathe and called a hotline to find out what to do, since I figured it must have something to do with anxiety, since that was a constant battle I fought through life. After trying to get my heart to calm down for over an hour, the hotline representative told me I better get to the ER, so I had one of my employees drive me there and at every stop light I would black out completely and then come to again once the car would move forward. I honestly believed this was my time to leave this earth forever. It seemed like an eternity before we finally reached the ER, and after they checked me in, I remember being hooked up to the EKG and having about a dozen people swarm me and start hooking me up to several different machines and injecting IVs in me very quickly. That was the most beautiful moment of my life up to that point. I knew at that moment I wasn’t crazy at all, and I would live.

It was the best day of my life.

Eventually I lost my business, but it wasn’t until about four years after the heart attack occurred. I tried to save it but I had so much debt and personal baggage and stress to overcome, I had to let something go that meant my financial stability and prosperity in the future, in order to find my physical health as well as mental and emotional foundation. I then walked away and was introduced to a book called, ‘The Secret’. That was when I learned that it was okay for me to want in life, and that happiness was my birthright. That was when I discovered that God didn’t hate me after all, and that I had every right to pursue happiness and meaning and success in life, no matter what I’d been through or what anybody else thought of me. I realized the destructive path I had been on was not just others’ fault, but was my own fault as well, and I took full accountability for every experience I ever had in life, good or bad. I now take the credit for who I am and I love myself for the first time ever.

I know now that the rest of my life is meant to be in the service of others, and I am meant to be free from physical pain and suffering, loneliness and despair, emptiness & nothingness. My life is my message to the world to never give up. We don’t see the whole picture, and it is our responsibility for the sake of ourselves & all humanity to be the light that we want to be, to change the lives of others. That’s all I want from my life at this point, and I rejoice in the obstacles and challenges that made me the man I am today. I still struggle with sinus problems and infections as well as blindness, but I am free! I thank God for every moment and I don’t take anything for granted. My life is my mission and I will exalt my purpose and my destiny upon this earth.

If my story is worthy of being selected to be viewed on this site or elsewhere, you be the judge. But to me, it’s the greatest gift I’ve ever known and my life has just begun. Thank You so much to all those involved in creating and producing The Secret. I hope to be a teacher of it, as well as a student. I’ve experienced how much it’s changed my life already, and it is beautiful beyond expression through words. It saved my life 😀

God bless & much love!

Yours Truly

-Hal