Author Description

Taylor did not write this book because he had answers. He wrote it because he survived something he did not understand and needed to tell the truth about what it cost him. Tooth and Nail is a memoir about curiosity taken too far, about psychedelics, identity, and what happens when your mind cracks open before you’re ready to put it back together. It starts with a reckless decision made as a teenager, one night that fractured his sense of reality, and follows the long, uneven aftermath of living inside a mind that never quite felt the same again. This is not a cautionary tale told from a distance. It is lived from the inside. The confusion. The fear. The strange calm. The moments where he could not tell if he was alive, dreaming, or gone altogether. And then the years that followed, trying to build a normal life while carrying something invisible, something heavy, something not one person could see. Carrying something that was hidden behind an iron mask. Inside these pages, Taylor talks honestly about substance use, panic, dissociation, ego, shame, marriage, fatherhood, discipline, and rebuilding meaning when your old framework collapses. He does not dramatize it. He doesn’t clean it up. It is told the way it happened… Raw, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes darkly funny, always real. Tooth and Nail is for anyone who has felt lost inside their own mind. For anyone who chased insight and found chaos instead. For anyone who has had to fight – quietly, stubbornly – tooth and nail, to come back to themselves. He made it out. Not unchanged, but still here. And this is what that road actually looked like.