Kyle Hubbart had it all: Athletic talent, good looks and a 4.0 GPA in college. He lived in the best party house on campus and had lots of pretty girls vying for his attention.
“Everything I did I seemed to succeed at. I did think of myself as better than other people,” he says.
But beneath the party lifestyle was a lost young man seeking desperately to keep up the image that he was perfect, and perfectly happy. He wanted nothing more than every person he met to “believe all the things that I had portrayed and put out there.” He says he woke up every morning with fear and dread that everyone would find out how “lonely and hopeless” he felt on the inside.
Just as Kyle feared, he couldn’t keep up his image. As we all do, he had a moment of failure—this time, a college test—and the boy who strove for perfection simply crumbled in the face of failure. “It was the first time I had ever failed at anything,” he says. And it devastated him. Kyle was so fragile on the inside that this ONE failure caused his house of cards to completely crumble and his life to spiral out of control.
He immediately turned to alcohol. He thought, “If I’m not successful, my life is worthless.”
After two years of depression and drinking over a liter and a half of hard alcohol EVERY day, Kyle says, “I knew this would be the thing that killed me.”
