Ep. 61 – He Heard “You Are Worth It”—and Everything Changed | Bryan Blackmon

Welcome, survivors, seekers, and thrivers.

I'm your host, Shari Leigh Roberts, psychic medium, energy healer, and living

proof that you can transform your pain into power.

Each episode, we dive into trauma healing, developing your intuitive gifts,

and reclaiming your life. Get ready for real stories, deep wisdom, and

a little laughter along the way.

Hello, Bryan Blackmon from sunny Huntington Beach, California.

You have those guitars behind you, and I am wearing my most tropical, sunny

shirt today for this amazing conversation.

You are the founder and operator of the CRAB Crew.

Correct.

I cannot wait to get into that.

Thank you for being here.

Let me begin with you leaving Texas and heading to California for a dream.

So much of your story aligns with mine in so many ways, starting

with you being in Huntington Beach.

One of my brothers lives there too.

Really? He is out there on the ocean surfing every morning, probably when you

are out there doing your meditation.

He is in the music industry.

He is a prodigy and a graduate of UCLA's music program.

He is out there working huge stages.

You may know him: Christopher Roberts.

Christopher Roberts. Not off the top of my head, but I'm sure if I

ran into him, I might know who he is.

He is currently working with Doja Cat and has worked with Stevie Wonder, Cyndi

Lauper, and a host of others.

Welcome, and thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm really, really excited to be here.

Thank you.

How about we start with you telling us about your California dream?

What was your dream?

Well, I grew up watching MTV when I was a little kid.

You know, I was five, six years old, roughly, when I had my first,

like, real memory of, you know, that age.

And I was watching MTV with my dad, and I heard and saw

the Quiet Riot bang your head video.

Now, seeing this.

Guy all going crazy and hearing these guitar sounds.

And I grew up in a musically inclined family.

My mother's side of the family, they're all musicians and artists.

And I just immediately had this, oh my gosh, what is happening feeling?

And this sense of just, I have to know what this is.

That's what I wanted to do.

I want a guitar. I want to be a guitar player.

I want to do music right now.

That's all I cared about.

My dad told me that it was a pipe dream.

One in a million will make it, and I will not be that one.

Without me knowing at the time that that was the seed that was planted,

that it pushed me to prove him wrong.

Yeah. But I didn't know that.

No.

What age were you? Six, maybe seven.

Wow. Okay.

All these 80 hair metal bands on MTV, I found out that they were

in Los Angeles on the Sunset Strip, and that's where it began.

I just wanted that lifestyle.

I want everything that that lifestyle encompassed, the sex, drugs, and rock

and roll. Without even understanding what all that was, I knew that that's

just what I wanted. And then as I got older, of course, I started

understanding what that lifestyle entailed.

I lived it up to its fullest.

I started getting in trouble really early when my parents got a divorce.

I think I was 12, 13, roughly something along those lines.

I just went wild. I was already kind of wild from the get-go out

of the mother's womb, to be honest with you.

But when that happened, I really went wild.

The dream began, you know, like I said early, but it took me until

I was 42 to get out here.

So I spent, you know, my life in Texas playing guitar in local bands

and just partying and being addicted to drugs and alcohol from a young age

and lots of rehabs, jail, prison, literally just poisoning myself my whole

life. And it was a lot of fun in the beginning.

I had a lot of fun.

Don't get me wrong. I had a lot of fun.

I survived things that most people will never get to do or experience,

and I'm very grateful for it.

But then it just became a way of life, and it was all I

ever knew. Internally, I believe that that's just who I was.

Nothing more, nothing less. That's just who Bryan Blackmon is.

And then I moved to – I packed up my stuff one day.

Go ahead. Do you have a question?

Were the people around you the same?

Yeah. That's all I hung out with.

I didn't hang out with people who were making straight A's.

I didn't hang out with people who had college plans, white picket fences,

and kids.

I got along with everybody, and I could mingle with everybody, but those

aren't the people that I was hanging around with.

People with the older crowd and doing things that people my age weren't doing

and just had this moment. I'd spent the year before that.

Planning out everything that I needed to do to get to California.

Let me show you something.

This brand new spiral notebook at the time, I've always been a big writer

and I've always journaled. This was a brand new spiral notebook at one time.

Wow. And I had written down everything that I needed to do to get

to California. Bryan was front and back and I wrote.

California needs you. California awaits you.

California needs you. California awaits you.

All the way around it.

And all around the back end.

Then I wrote $100 million down here a bunch of times.

I don't know why. I don't know where all this came from.

But I just started making a plan.

And I went a year scratching items off of this list.

Next thing I know, I was packing up my little car.

Having dinner with my family.

My parents and my grandparents got in my car and started driving and drove

to Venice Beach, California. And I knew one person out here that I came

and visited a year before and met him in Venice Beach.

And that's when things, now I'm in L.A.

Right, now I'm in L.A.

And now I can really take my life to another level.

I'd just gotten a degree in audio and video production from the Art Institute

of Dallas. What I came out here to do, I don't know.

I just wanted to be in L.A., and here I am.

That's when things took a turn, and I took it to another level.

You knew one guy. Take us through that.

Yeah, it was interesting. There was nobody on the streets.

There was nobody out and about.

Yeah. The only people driving into California, if there was anybody out

and leaving California. Yeah. Yeah. So, we got a house together, and we were both

using a lot, and I was drinking heavily.

What?

Methamphetamines, pills, mushrooms, DMT, weed.

Were you using all of that in Texas?

Yes, ma'am. Oh, okay. When I got out of prison, I was just turning

30.

I started using meth again and started everything back up.

I started drinking again. The pills were still going.

The meth started back up.

The drinking got pretty heavy.

All of that continued the entire time.

When I got to California, things took a turn for the worse.

We had a house together, but we couldn't get along.

The drugs and the people coming in and out were out of control.

So crazy and a lot of homelessness.

My roommate was friends with a lot of homeless people and so they were

coming in and out of the house and here I am trying to start

my life over and it just exploded into the rock and roll lifestyle

in a different way. It was more like the really poor fight or flight mode

rock and roll lifestyle.

It wasn't like the Lamborghinis and Ferraris and mansions.

Until I did some partying in the Hollywood Hills.

Then I thought I'd really made it.

Those days were fun, but I wasn't living there.

I ended up in a tent and bouncing around between a couple of hostels

in Venice and Santa Monica.

And then I lost all my money.

I was sleeping in my car and in a tent, and things got really

scary. I went from Venice to Santa Monica, Culver City, Woodland Hills,

and Canoga Park. I was really struggling.

The plans did not happen the way I thought they would.

What did you think would happen - that you would continue to play venues

and become a star?

My friend, the guy I'd moved in with, was working at a studio

in Malibu with a lot of musicians.

I just thought somehow, some way, I would end up using my degree

in the audio and video production kind of world and just meeting people.

I've always been really, I just meet people easily.

I can put myself in situations that meet this person to meet this person.

More or less hopeful.

I thought I would figure it out.

There wasn't really a set goal.

get to California, get in with these people, and things will take

off from there. And that wasn't happening.

Keep telling us what went on.

You were homeless. Yep.

I bounced around from all these places and kept meeting people that wanted

to help me or give me an opportunity to get off the streets, and I

just kept blowing those opportunities, in other words.

So I was guided to Huntington Beach, California, and ended up homeless out

here, sleeping in my car on the PCH Pacific Coast Highway.

I'd gotten a job in the audio and video production world as a stagehand.

I was working for three different companies at the time, driving back

and forth from LA to Huntington Beach and working.

I'd saved up some money, but it was really difficult finding a place out

here because it was either so expensive or the people that I would meet

that had a room for rent, I was walking in smelling like alcohol, looking

In a bad way. So things just didn't work out with these individuals that

I met. And so I started just going up and down the streets, calling

people that had signs out in front of their yard for rooms to rent.

And like I said, none of them worked out until I met Elaine, who

is, she was 85 at the time and had a sign out in front

of her yard.

And we met. She told me a little bit about her story, showed me

the room she had for rent.

And she was just here by herself and needed a man, if you will,

you know, to kind of help out around the house and help her

with some things. And she loves to garden and, you know, she's not too tech

savvy. So, you know, it just became this.

Person that was put in my life for a reason without me knowing what

was happening and me and her life for a reason.

But she took a chance on me when no one else would.

And at that time, she got me off the streets.

And when she did that and offered me this room to rent, like I

said, I've always been the life of the party.

I've always been the fun guy that you can get things from, who knows

this person that can get this, that can go do this.

We'll leave and go follow a band all across, you know, wherever to go

and watch them. Not worried about a job or anything like that, you know,

just living life. When I moved in with Elaine, things got really dark

for the first time in my life.

That was the first time I'd ever secluded myself from the world.

And so it was about, I don't know, roughly a little over a year,

maybe a year and a half of me living here.

I woke up one morning.

So things that happened that kind of wanted me to get sober or had

this idea of, man, what would it be like to change your life?

For instance, I would be walking down the street and I would notice men

and women that had this glow about them, right?

They didn't look like they were in fight or flight mode.

They looked like they were enjoying life and just living.

I saw that people didn't have circles around their eyes or their face being

sunk in or being bloated from all the alcohol.

And so I started kind of wanting that.

Some things happened. I tried to get sober.

I would go like a week, relapse for a couple months, went nine days,

relapse for a few months, and then I woke up one morning.

I was brushing my teeth, and silence came over my entire body.

And four words rang out that I can still hear to this day,

and I heard, you are worth it.

I didn't question what I was worth.

I wasn't thinking, am I worth a better car, a better job, a better

girlfriend, life, or wife? It wasn't any of those things.

I believed I was worthy of a better life.

Was that the first time you knew you were worth more?

It was that very moment.

Nothing before that moment ever made me feel that way.

The reason why is because that was a voice that was deep inside me.

That wasn't my own chatter.

It wasn't my own chaos inside my head.

That was from a deeper knowing that something inside me, not outside of me,

something greater than me was speaking to me.

Call that God.

Christ, Jesus, love, source, creator, whatever you want to call it.

Yeah. It was something greater than myself that was speaking to me.

Yes. I just believed it.

That was it. There was no questioning it.

There was no asking for things.

It was just that knowing and that belief that I was worth a better

life. It was.

It was, for you, like me and millions of others, the first time you

were validated and encompassed in divine love - when you knew, 'Damn.

Oh my God. The light.

The love.'

That's exactly what it was.

Nothing more, nothing less.

I don't know. I just – I knew that this was going to be

difficult, and it was going to be hard because I'd already tried.

Yeah. I just knew that I could do it this time, and it wasn't

for my mother, who I love more than any person on this planet.

It wasn't for – and I grew up in a really amazing, supporting, loving,

kind, Southern Baptist Christian home, and I just was the black sheep from

the get-go, like I said earlier.

But I didn't do it for any of them this time.

It wasn't, I didn't, I cared what my mom thought about what was going

to happen, but she was so, everybody was so far removed from this decision,

meaning this was for nobody else but deeply inside for myself, not for anybody

else. And when that happened, I knew that it was possible.

Because I wanted it. Like I wanted it more than anything I wanted

in this world. There was nothing that I wanted more than to just not be

dependent on drugs and alcohol anymore.

Your landlord took your hand and helped you.

We all need someone in this earthly realm, even when we initially connect

with God, to say, 'I've got you.

You're on the right track.

Go. Do.'

I hid it from her really well because I was a professional, right?

This is what I'd done my whole life.

She didn't really know who she had living in her home.

Oh. She had no idea.

How long had you lived there?

I still live here now.

It was about a year and a half before things changed.

Before that moment, I'd been living here for roughly a year and a half

in a really dark spiritual place.

There was no light left within me.

I was just a shell of a human being at this point.

So I tried to get help.

I tried to go to a sober living home.

And I was there for three days when I noticed a bunch of people

relapsing in front of me.

So here I am trying to get help, and it was still being done

right in front of me.

So I checked myself out, came home.

Now, Elaine and I always have daily interaction, right?

So when I came home, I locked myself in my room and went through

the withdrawals myself. It was about 15, 16 days roughly, halfway through

the first 30 days. I had seen her a little bit, but she still didn't

know what was going on.

And I went downstairs, you know, afraid that she was probably going to kick

me out when I told her what was really going on.

I was terrified of what was about to happen, but I knew that she

knew something wasn't right with me.

So I went downstairs and I told her the truth and told her what

was going on. Her words to me were, Bryan, you're like my family now.

I love you. I want you to be here.

I want you to get through this.

So go back upstairs and take care of yourself.

You know where I'm at if you need me.

a day after my birthday. Really?

Yeah.

So you toughed it out alone.

None of your compadres - no one came to help?

I had already secluded myself from everybody.

The only people I talked to when I moved to Huntington Beach were

the people I worked with, and I was partying with them.

I wasn't hanging out with people.

I was a loner for the first time in my life.

No one came to my rescue.

Elaine told me she would be there if I needed her, but I went

through it on my own.

Tell us what happened through that detox.

Well, it got so bad that I was praying to God that I would

just be taken. Like, I remember, like, on my hands and knees clawing

the carpet so hard in tears.

I wasn't sure that I was going to make it, in all honesty.

Like, I just, I didn't think that.

When I say I didn't think I was going to make it, I didn't

think that I could do this anymore.

And I didn't think that I would physically be able to do it anymore.

I didn't think that if I did make it, I wasn't sure that I

wanted to. It was brutal.

And I've been through many withdrawals in my life, but this one was by

far the worst.

After 30 days of locking myself in my bedroom, I started going to AA

meetings at 7 a.m. The only energy I had was enough to get out

of bed, go to a meeting, come home, and go right back to bed.

It was brutal. It was rough.

What prompted you to go to AA?

A.A. Excuse me. Right before I got sober, I was coming home from work

one day in L.A., and I stopped by Ralph's grocery store, and I was

in bad shape. I had been drinking all day at work or taking little

airplane shots and smoking meth and the porta-potties or whatever show I was

at in the bathroom.

It's just out of control.

My favorite car is a Lamborghini.

I walked out of this Ralph's one night, and there's this beautiful blue

and yellow Lamborghini underneath the streetlight or the lamp in the parking lot.

It was just glowing. As I walked by it, this older gentleman was getting

out of it, and I just had commented.

I was like, oh my God, that's a beautiful car.

It's my favorite car.

We started talking. He shared a little about the car and let me look

inside. Then he told me it was a gift of his sobriety.

Wow. Dude, what? How? I started wondering why he was telling me that.

Well, he probably smelled my breath.

He probably saw that I was very unhealthy.

No. And it was just that another seed that was planted, right?

And so he told me about an AA meeting that he had been going

to for 25 plus years.

And it was right down the street from me in Huntington Beach, in Seal

Beach, actually, which is just right next door to Huntington Beach.

And he told me where it was, and I drove by it all

the time. I just...

You know, didn't know what it was or didn't think too much of it.

So it was like the 30th day, you know, I decided, you know what,

I'm going to go to a meeting.

And now prior to this, I'd already shown up to the meeting a few

times, but I was not in the right mind.

I was just going and I didn't really talk or say anything at first.

And I just started meeting a couple of people.

Right before I started going, I saw that same guy there.

He told me that I was waiting to get a bed to go

to this sober living home. I was waiting for a bed.

I was just still not in a healthy place.

People were so excited to see that I had 30 days.

I kept mustering enough energy to go every morning, and I did that

for six or seven months. I just kept going.

My dad did that too.

He died just after reaching ten years of sobriety.

You are a warrior rockstar.

Tell us how you got out of homelessness and into the beginning of where

you are today.

Well, like I said, Elaine was the one who got me off the streets.

So Elaine got me off the streets.

I was living here, you know, doing my thing and then had that moment

of, you know, wanting to get sober and just continued.

And now, so what I started doing about six months into my sobriety, I

started making TikTok videos about Elaine and I, right?

You never know what she's going to say or do.

And I was already making TikTok videos, but this to me was a different.

I found this lady wonderful.

You never know what she's going to say or do, so I started making

TikTok videos about our life, and they gained a little traction.

When did you start that?

What year?

or seven months later I started doing the TikTok videos.

Tell me what that looked like.

I made a video one day of her hosing down some young men coming

from the beach.

These young men were walking back from the beach covered in sand.

Elaine and I were sitting on the front porch.

She asked if they wanted to use the water hose to spray off

the sand, and they said, 'Sure, why not?'

They wanted to use the water hose to spray the sand off of them.

And they said, sure, why not?

And she grabbed the water hose and proceeded to hose them off herself.

But she wasn't really aiming at so much the sand as she was their

private parts. And so I started videoing it and laughing.

And I posted it. And next thing I know, it just...

It blew up. It went super viral.

I kept making videos about who Elaine and I were, and my entire TikTok

account went nuts overnight. It literally changed my life overnight.

Wow. Is that when you created the CRAB Crew?

Yeah. A lot of people reached out and said I should start livestreaming

and sharing my story.

I had no desire to do so.

It really wasn't something I was interested in.

I just kept receiving messages from people saying, dude, you ought to really

start doing this. I'm live streaming and this would be so cool to just

share your story. One day I did and it was a lot of fun.

It was a way for me to just kind of start telling people about

Elaine and I and who I was and what was happening.

Like I said, the videos were going so viral at the time, I kind

of had a little bit of traction.

At first, it started with like seven people watching me, and then I just

kept showing up and doing it, and more and more people kept showing up,

and then the same people kept showing up day in and day out.

I just realized that there was something that was happening, and it kind

of started developing into this family, this community.

On the livestream, people started sending me crab gifts.

I would yell out their names and ask them why they gave me crabs.

Then I started receiving packages from all over the world at my P.O.

box - crab bubblers, blankets, shirts, keychains, socks, boxes, everything.

You know, getting that internal voice again saying, hey, you should research

crabs and try to figure out what's going on here.

So I did, and I realized that there's something called the crab mentality.

And when crabs are put in a container, they try to claw out,

and other ones will claw them back down.

And that was my...

That was my experience during my healing journey.

I was a crab in a hot, boiling pot.

I'd claw my way up to the edge, and then other crabs would pull

me down. Hearing you describe this, and knowing this about you, I can relate

- as I am certain millions of people can.

I realized that being adaptive and resilient was completely different than

in my drug and alcohol addiction.

Because now I don't know who I am.

I don't know a sober Bryan.

I don't know who this guy is.

I'm having to relearn everything about me and everything about life and what I

thought I was, who I was, and this person that I had just known

my whole life was this drug and alcoholic, you know, drug addict

and alcoholic.

So, I was learning how to be resilient and adaptive and learning how

to pick myself up and learn about this new guy.

And so, when I started looking at all this, I just got this overwhelming

just drive to start writing out how I got sober, why I got sober,

and not only how I stay sober, but...

How do I maintain this joy and love for life now being sober?

And I realized that it was gratitude, right?

Gratitude for the little things.

The fact that I was given another chance at life today.

I've got a roof over my head, shoes on my feet, clothes on my

back, and food in my stomach.

And then I started thinking about, well, what could I do with the word

crab? And so I built the four pillars of crab, which is clean, resilience,

adaptability, and belief. Belief being the foundation.

That everything was stacked on top of.

Right? So I believed that I was worthy of having a new life.

I believed that I was worthy of being a better person.

I believed that I was worthy of all the wonderful things that life can

show and bring to us.

And so I built a website and then built a transformation experience because

it's not a course. It's not a course.

Courses have rules. Courses are led by people who give the...

To me, give the inkling of, if you don't do it my way, you're

going to fail. And I started realizing that I was just building daily

disciplines throughout my life that kept me in the moment, that kept me

grateful for the little things, that kept me in the now.

Not in the future, not being shameful in the past, not regretting the past,

not looking at the past as, oh my God, I wish I wouldn't have

made this decision. Why did I do that?

I wish I could change this.

None of that stuff. I let all that go.

I can't go back and change it, and I wouldn't go back and change

it if I could. It's made me who I am today, and I'm grateful

for who I am today, which means that allowed me to let go

of the past. So that's where I'm at today, and that's how the whole CRAB

Crew thing. We started calling ourselves on TikTok the CRAB Crew.

After the crab thing kept happening, we started calling ourselves the CRAB

Crew on TikTok. That became our nickname, and that's what it has turned into

today. I love that. You meditate each morning and livestream.

Talk about that and how you help and support your followers globally.

Like I said, it became a way for me to get the creative.

As you can see, there's guitars hanging behind me, and I'm a very artistic,

creative, musical person. And this live streaming gave me an outlet.

It was a way to let my creative side out, and I just started

having a lot of fun with it.

And it was a way for – I meditated in a sense – I

guess you could call it meditation.

Not on the live streams.

I wasn't meditating on the live streams.

I do that as part of my morning routine.

But in a sense, showing the sunrise and the surfing and the quiet walks

and the mornings and getting coffee and maybe eating a little breakfast

with the people that kept showing up, the CRAB Crew family, was a way

for me to, not was, is a way for me to not only, it became

bigger than myself.

I realized that this wasn't about just me anymore.

Yes, it's me showing up in front of the camera every day, but what

became so amazing is watching everybody else support each other.

So, for instance, somebody could come onto my live that we all know

and say, man, hey, good morning, everybody.

I'm really struggling today. Like, it's just been a really rough morning

with some things.

They're sick or maybe their daughter got sick or maybe their job's

frustrating, whatever, and they felt comfortable enough to share this

information with us. And then watching so many people show them support

and love and just letting them know that they're there for them became this thing

that was beyond my understanding.

It's truly a beautiful, wonderful thing.

And so, yeah, that's just kept a lot of us going and dependent upon

each other.

It has kept many of us going and depending on each other to show

kindness. How can people join that group and conversation?

Go to CRABCrewLife. All my social media is at the bottom, and it explains

a lot about the CRAB Crew, my life, and what I'm doing.

Come join us on TikTok.

My livestreaming schedule is at the top.

You can also join the CRAB Crew Discord, where there is a lot

of support from amazing people.

Thank you for listening. If today's conversation resonated with you and you're

ready to explore your own healing journey or intuitive gifts, I'd love to work

with you. I offer psychic medium readings, energy healing sessions,

and intuitive development guidance at shariroberts.org.

If you're not quite ready for a session but want to be part

of the conversation in a supportive community, join my private Facebook group.

The link is in the show notes.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

This is Shari Leigh Roberts.

Until next time, remember: you're never alone.