Hello to all who may enjoy reading about who the person behind the keyboard is.
My name is Chad Hansen and I am a 31 year old student/artist/business owner/non profit board member/father and many other things. I am what many call the jack of all trades but the master of none.
I have had a rough life, almost as rough as a 1st world country citizen can get. I was homeless at the age of 12 and spent about 12 years on and off the streets. I hitchhiked around the western coast of America and have went as far as Arkansas and Kansas. I lived in many different cities under bridges or on a kind souls couch or floor. I have worked many jobs from street urchin to an 06 electrician (telecommunications technician) to a student for computer programming (currently self employed and a board member of a new non profit) I have been through a lot. Dealt with substance use disorder since before I was homeless and currently have been sober from booze since August 25th 2019. Still dealing with my anxiety with medical cannabis but have been slowing down and been focusing on gaining my breath back as well as proving to myself that I do not need to be dependant on a substance to be free from stress. I am a Buddhist and I love to meditate and to spread as much joy and enlightenment my worried soul can muster.
Above is me and my son right before we went on the ferris wheel in Seattle. We are both recognized Tlingit natives who are descendants of the children displaced by the "kill the Indian, save the child" campaign in the 1930s where my grandmother was kidnapped from her parents by the United States government and was brought to a catholic boarding school where my heritage was stolen and was replaced with the knowledge my grandmother Vivian Friberg needed to survive in these stolen lands. I hold no anger for any descendant of the immigrant colonizers who call turtle Island home. I just wish they would see the hypocrisy in their hatred for those who wish to come and rest on our shores seeking amnesty. My grandfather Donald Friberg was a son of a German farmer who came here from Germany to live in Leavenworth and to teach the local Anglo-Saxons how-to farm on this soil as the region is similar in climate. My grandfather was the first of his family's name to be able to go to college after the industrial boom and prosperous era post WW2 of the 1940s allowed for his father to pay for him to become an engineer. I dont know what happened first but my grandfather got a job at Boeing and married my grandmother in the 1950s and was an engineer on the team that built the very first 747 which is a cool fact that I enjoy telling as it is still in use today. I never met Donald, as he somehow died in the 1980s and I still do not know what happened. My grandmother was an amazing women who was stunned when I refused to eat salmon when she met me at the age of 4 at her home in Magnolia, Seattle. I still remember her saying "You're a Tlingit, how can you not like fish. My lord, a Tlingit who doesn't like fish" she housed us for a while while my mother got into an apartment. She grew bonsai trees and I remember her showing me one that was 200 years old. She is from Tenakee, Alaska and she died in 2007 in that same apartment. I wish I could have seen her more and I still remember when I last saw her in 2002 she almost cried when she seen my hairs curls and she said "You got his curls, your grandfather Donald's curls" I was the only one in my little family that didn't have straight hair and it was then I started to begin to realize that his genes must have skipped a generation.
I have two brothers one older named Micheal and one younger named Dimetrious and a younger sister named Natasha. My older brother and sister are white and the youngest one our baby brother is from a Latino heritage. We all have different fathers as our mother Cheri had a hard time adjusting to adulthood because of the abuse from her father who was a veteran in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam. His name was Fred Hansen and he was quite the badass but sadly was not the greatest of fathers as his abuse tainted our childhood and made our mother go through strife that caused much of my troubled upbringing. When I say I was homeless much of my time was by choice and it all happened when my mother left me at a rest area when I was around 10 years old. It was in-between fifth and six grade in the summer of the millennium. After that I lived with my aunt until the age of 11 when I my mother was able to get custody of us again. I tried to commit suicide at 12 and was stopped by my brother who was always gone for weeks doing crime and selling drugs but somehow had enough insight to come home and catch me in the act where we ended up fighting for hours. Still to this day I have never fought harder and longer with anyone. Soaked in tears and blood the fight ended with my brother throwing the knife on the ground in front of me where he cried "Fuck it, just fucking kill yourself. I dont care anymore" and he stormed out in tears. The reason I tried was because I truly felt as if no one cared for me at all my dad came around for only a few weeks and built a computer with me with recycled parts hooked me uo to the internet(free network called NoCharge) but left back to his drugs and booze and my mother never was around nor listened to me. But when my brother said that he doesn't care anymore, I knew that my brother cared and I sat their crying with the knife in front of me and when I picked it up I bursted into tears and I couldn't do it as my reasoning stormed out and I felt selfish for wishing to leave my brother and sister behind. My mother was informed of my attempt and I was sent to a judge where I was ordered to take antidepressants and to attend counseling. My mother scolded me for trying and I shamed for my manic behavior. That made things much worse as I truly only wanted attention and a hug and reassurment of care. I started to fail in school from being a college level reader and honor student to miscreant who started to hang with the wrong crowd. I was pinned for burglaries which I was used as a scapegoat by people I thought were friends. The rest of my childhoodnwas in and out of juvenile hall and was rife with horrible times meth, meth smoking at the age of 12 and the witness to my 12 year friends selling their bodies. It was really horrible and I only am saying these things to help you understand the types of adversity I have faced and overcome throughout my 31 years.
I apologize if it is too much and I do not glorify any of the mistakes I made in the past. Fast forward to when I was 14 and in juvenile hall I told my public defense about my so called friends and he must have read the statements from my past crimes cause he then told me that st any time I can request all of the statements from any of the people charged which I then requested and two or so weeks later he came back and I found out that I was set up by my so called friends and that I was a fool for defending them as they all threw me under the bus with the identical story that was very much a collaboration. I was completely distraught and felt as if I had no one. The community hated me, my family was broken and I just was backstabbed by my only friends. I was lucky to find a friend named Tyler Apodaca my classmate Drew introduced us and I stupidly stole some money from him. He stole a porno from me that I stole from my older brother but instead of hating me like I expected he befriended me and got me started on smoking cannabis. We both loved heavy metal and he told me he didn't care about the money that he just didn't want me out running around smoking meth. He became my best friend and one day after finding some extras pills in a paper on the ground that me and another friend traded for mushrooms we decided that homework was dumb and parents suck so we were told to follow the railroad track from a bum under a bridge causenit led to California. We'll we only made it like two miles before my other Friends grant and drew decided to go home and that they were just high. Well the next day I went to Tyler's super bummed cause I was serious about leaving and when I told him he grabbed me by my shirts scruff near the collar of my neck and said "I've been waiting my whole life to hear someone say this". It took us a few months but we had hiking backpacks and girlfriends and we set off to olympia to catch the mythical CAP bus to Vancouver.
This is going to take more than this one post and my battery is getting low on my phone so I will continue this a little bit later. I hope you guys are enjoying my horribly put together bio. It gets a lot better there is so much to expand upon if you want specifics I can get very deep into the details.
All pictures are created by me and will be or already are NFTs
