(Written by Todd Nixon)

What is a warrior? My personal definition of a warrior was created because I became a warrior myself. I had to learn how to defeat my struggles and pains, or I would have been swallowed up by depression.

I want to start this article with a quote from the hip-hop preacher Mr. Eric Thomas. Eric states, “Pain is temporary. It may last for a minute, or an hour or a day, or even a year. But eventually, it will subside. And something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it will last forever.” To me, this quote is the essence of life. The people who get through their pains are warriors!

I believe a warrior is a person who has the mindset that they can conquer any pain in their life by never giving up and believing in themselves. My personal definition of a warrior was created because I became a warrior myself. I had to learn how to defeat my struggles and pains, or I would have been swallowed up by depression.

I want to tell you the story of how I fought the adversities of life and became a warrior!

Before I start explaining my journey, I want to say I am grateful for every event that has happened in my life and I’m blessed to be molded from these events.

My name is Todd Francis Nixon. I’m from Milton, Georgia. I go to Georgia Southern University (Go Eagles!) and majoring in Mechanical Engineering. I have lived a life with many pains and many victories. The first pain that I ever encountered in my life was the day I was born. I was born on November 7th, 1992 in Northside Hospital.

When I was born, it was a happy a day for my family. My Dad and Mom were happy to have their second boy and third child but when I came out of the womb the doctors noticed I wasn’t breathing right. They rushed me into another room and found out that I had a bacterial infection that affected my breathing. Thank God they found out I wasn’t right or I might not be writing this article.

At a very young age, I was already figuring out the hardships of life. While I didn’t know what was going on I had started to learn what life had to offer.

Warriors are strong and fearless people but every warrior has a weakness that they have to overcome. My weakness was that I have a learning disability. At the age of seven I was diagnosed with auditory processing disorder. People who have APD don’t recognize subtle differences between the sounds in words, even when the sounds are loud and clear enough to be heard. They can also find it difficult to tell where sounds are coming from, to make sense of the order of sounds, or to block out competing background noises.

This gave me a lot of trouble when I was young. I was taken out of the school I was attending to go to another school because they didn’t have a program that could help me. I was put in special needs classes to help me learn how to conquer it. It was hard because I was different from all my classmates. I couldn’t read like them or write like them. My other classmates saw I was different and didn’t want to hang out with me.

I started getting ridiculed for my disability. I hated my learning disability and myself. All I wanted was to be like everybody else and not be someone with a disorder.

I began to convince myself I was stupid and I was never going to be able to read like everybody else. My parents would get me tutors in the summer so I wouldn’t get farther behind the other students. I didn’t like it because I was putting in so much more work just to catch up with everyone else.

I didn’t notice this at the time but I was starting to create a warrior’s mentality by the hard work I was putting in. One thing I did have that helped me get away from my disability was sports. I was talented at basketball and football. I fell in love with these sports. I wanted to be the best and I had dreams to play in the NBA and NFL. It was good that I had an escape but I learned in life you can never run from your problems because they will eventually come back to bite you in the butt.

This struggle got worse when I transitioned from elementary to middle school. I thought if I was in classes with normal students everything would be fine but I was wrong. My classmates were now seeing my disability in person and the bullying started to happen. I was the butt of all the jokes and I was getting beaten up too. The main bully actually lived in my neighborhood and he would pick on me all the time. I started to get depressed and I didn’t know what I was living for anymore.

I was trying to make friends. I was getting accepted by some people but that didn’t help much because I was miserable.

A good of example of that were my neighborhood friends. I was accepted by them and we had great times but I couldn’t feel happy because I felt like our friendships weren’t real.

I didn’t think I could be friends with anybody because I was just afraid that I would get ridiculed by them. It was horrible and it brought about a sense of depression. I used to write down how I was feeling in a journal so I could try to get my troubles off my mind but sadly it didn’t help much.

I would always write “God, what is my purpose and why am I here?” Also, I tried to hide my depression from my parents. I didn’t want them to see their youngest son in so much pain but it’s difficult to keep it away when you just look sad all the time.

They sent me to a psychiatrist and he gave me great advice about standing up for myself and believing in myself but I wasn’t able to really apply his points because of how scared and sad I was, it was like I was constantly hitting a wall.

My depression was just getting worse and worse. Not even sports were helping me. I had no self-confidence anymore. I was in a deep, dark emotional hole and I felt like I would never get out of it.

All warriors go through a state where they feel that they don’t have hope to fight and conquer the hardship but then a terrific event happens that changes their life and gives them the belief to be strong. This mindset change happened to me after one night.

I was hanging out with a couple of my neighborhood friends and my bully showed up with his cousin. They started to mess with me, fooling around with a switchblade. Then all of sudden I was pushed against a fence by the cousin and he looked at me and said,

“I could cut you right now.”

He put the knife to my throat. I was terrified.
He could have accidentally moved his hand and cut my throat. He let go of me and both of them were hysterically laughing at how terrified I was. I ran back to my house crying and shaking from the situation. I went into my room and sat on the floor. I was devastated. I just wanted to run away and never come back. So, I ran out the door and started walking.

During my runaway, all I could think about was the knife almost cutting my throat. While I was thinking back more and more on the situation, I started to like the idea of the knife almost cutting my throat. I didn’t want to live anymore. I couldn’t handle living a life of misery. So, I decided to turn around and go back to my house.

I walked in and went straight to the kitchen. I opened up the drawer and took a steak knife out. At that moment, I stared at the steak knife and thought about how I would take my life. I thought about cutting my wrist or neck or stabbing myself in my heart. Then all of sudden my dog Willy walked into the kitchen. He was looking at me with a happy look on his face and whining almost questioning what I was doing. He wanted me to pet him and play with him. Then all of sudden it hit me. If I took my life, my family would be devastated and they would miss me terribly. In addition, my bullies would have won.

I realized then I shouldn’t care what people think about me. I should live my life to the fullest and be successful! I was on a new journey now and I was going to make it the best.

After I had the realization that I was going to be successful, I started to change my life. I see success as a person that becomes a warrior in their own way. I knew it was going to take a long time, but I was determined to change and be great at everything I set my mind to. I began to examine myself.

I started off every morning by praying and saying compliments to myself to help my self-confidence. I did this because your perception of yourself is what reality sees. If you have a bad perception of yourself then reality sees a weak and depressed person. The opposite goes for a good perception.

In addition, I started to change the people I was hanging out with. Instead of the people that were hurting me. I decided to hang out with people that had similar mindsets and personalities. If I was confronted by my bullies, I would turn the other cheek and not listen to them. The next change was my work effort with school.

I decided that I wasn’t going to let my disability hold me back anymore. I had to learn that learning doesn’t come naturally to me. So, I decided that I would go seek help from my teachers and would study every night. This helped me out tremendously because my learning disability became less and less of a problem and I fell in love with learning. My hard work ethic also spilled over into my football career.

I wanted to be the starting tight end for Milton High School. I’m not the biggest guy and not the most talented but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I had an up and down career but in the end I became the starting tight end. I was so happy when I completed this goal and it was sad when I had to hang up my helmet but I knew that my life was still going to move on and get better. One of the last things that I changed was how I viewed my future.

I started to map out what I wanted to do. I found out that I had a passion for math and science. So, I decided that I would major in mechanical engineering. I knew that it was a hard major but I didn’t think about that. I told myself that I am going to become a mechanical engineer and nothing is going to stop me. I am proud to be saying this because next May I will be graduating from Georgia Southern with a Mechanical Engineering degree!

The last pain I want to discuss is the pain of growing and never looking back.

My college life has been an up and down road. I have joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity “AEKΔB” and have made many friendships that will last forever. In addition, I have become very successful in school. However I have had some bad moments. I have lost four people in my life during my college years.

I lost Keller Zibilich who was one of my childhood friends. I lost my grandma last summer that I was very close to and loved very dearly. I lost one of my coaches to cancer. I miss you Coach Scott. Then very recently I lost one of my old teammates Mr. Dai-Jon Parker. I know all of these people are in heaven hanging out with the most loving person in the universe but it was still very rough losing them.

It was hard to get over their deaths but I realized you can’t morn forever! Those people wouldn’t want me to be depressed. They would want me to keep on moving and living my life. Celebrate people’s lives that have passed away and go live your life for them!

So, one morning I woke up and had a vision in my mind that I was standing on stage and speaking in front of thousands of people about motivation. This vision gave me a new purpose in life. The new purpose was to inspire and serve millions of people by using my story.

This vision wasn’t created out of the blue. It was created by an opportunity. I was blessed with an opportunity of a lifetime to become part of a network marketing company that has made me healthy, wealthy and developed my love for personal development.

In addition, this company has introduced me to inspiring mentors. I just want to say to all of my mentors. I am thankful for all of the wisdom that you have given me and being great friends too.

My love for helping people grew in the field of network marketing because to be successful in network marketing you have to teach and help people grow into successful network marketers. I read books like Think and Grow Rich, How to Win Friends and Influence Them, The Richest Man in Babylon and etc. I loved how these books and people were inspiring others to become the best versions of themselves.

This is what manifests the vision in my head because I wanted to motivate people like my mentors did with me.

So, I came up with Hell Yeah Saturdays! This is a motivational podcast I do on every Saturday where I talk about a certain topic by using knowledge that I have learned and life events that will help motivate people to their fullest potential. I want to show people that everybody goes through struggles but struggles don’t last forever. You can change your life in a second into the life you want. You just have to put in your mind that you are a warrior and say to yourself, “I believe I will conquer the pains of life and I will be successful no matter what!”

Go after your dreams and goals. Be hungry for knowledge that will grow your mind. Never stop moving forward and get excited for what your future has in store for you! I’m excited because I know I will be successful because I am a warrior. I will never give up on my dream and I believe every day that I’m getting closer and closer to this dream being fulfilled. So, become a warrior like me and fight for a life worth living!

Thank you for reading this article. If you want to contact me at all, here are my social media pages:

Instagram: toddfnixon, Facebook: Todd Nixon, twitter: ToddFNixon and youtube: Todd Nixon.