How Do You Live With the Childhood You Survived? with Chaz Holesworth

Chaz Holesworth grew up in Kensington, Philadelphia, a neighbourhood gutted by poverty and an opioid crisis that hasn't let up since the 1980s. His father was a heroin addict for over 20 years. His mother, overwhelmed and unsupported, pulled the family into a fundamentalist born-again church that cut them off from the outside world, banned music and movies, and taught Chaz from age four that he was one sinful thought away from hell.

In this episode, Chaz talks about what it was like growing up in a condemned house with roaches and rats, dodging drug dealers and police raids on his own street, and how, underneath all of it, a stricter kind of damage was being done: guilt, fear, and an OCD compulsion to "cleanse" his own thoughts before he was allowed to pray.

We talk about the moment a random kid at an arcade played him R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" and how that song, and the ones that came after, became the closest thing he had to a way out. We talk about his father's addiction, his own careful relationship with alcohol as an adult, the sister he lost to cancer, and the breakdown in his 20s; he says he still doesn't know how he survived.

Chaz has now written his story into a memoir series — Life and How to Live It — with each book named after an R.E.M. song. He talks candidly about why putting it on paper did what years of therapy couldn't, why he doesn't believe you get to "move past" your childhood so much as build a life alongside it, and what he'd say to anyone still carrying guilt for things that were never their fault to begin with.

This is a raw and honest conversation about poverty, religion, addiction, music, and what's left of a person once they've survived thier childhood trauma.

Find Chaz:
Website: chazholesworthbooks.com
Books: Life and How to Live It series, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

Content note: This conversation includes discussion of childhood trauma, poverty, heroin addiction, controlling religion, bereavement, OCD, suicidal thoughts and alcohol use.