From Foster Care to Forgiveness: Ryan Stream’s Journey of Healing

When I talked with Ryan Stream, he laid out a life that reads like five different people’s biographies stitched together. Homeless shelters as a kid. Adopted in second grade. War in Afghanistan. Drug addiction. Jail. A coal mine. Four businesses. A psychology degree he’s finishing in August. He’s five foot four with his shoes on, and he told me that on the podcast like it was a punchline he’d worked out years ago.

This conversation went places I didn’t expect. I want to walk through what Ryan actually said, because the specifics matter more than any frame I could put on them.

A Mother He Refuses to Blame

Ryan was in ninth grade when his mom took her life. He’s studying mental health now, which is part of why he can talk about her the way he does.

“My mom was raped twice by the age of 12 years old, both of her parents died by the age of 12,” he told me. “So how could I blame my mom for anything? How could I? My mom took her life. She’s no longer here.”

He was clear that his first instinct as a kid was to ask what he could’ve done differently. He never landed there. He said his mom hugged him, his mom loved him, his mom was there the best she could be. Studying the biology and chemistry of the brain gave him a frame for what she was up against. He doesn’t excuse anything. He just refuses to judge her.

That’s a posture I don’t hear often from people who lost a parent that way at 14 years old.

Adopted in Second Grade, Then the Slide

Ryan and his two older brothers were adopted when he was six, going into second grade. The people who took him in had a piano, and a motivational speaker came through his school around the same time and told the kids they could do whatever they wanted. Ryan believed him. He went home, sat at the piano, and started writing music. He told me music became “the bridge between understanding and expressing my emotions.”

He was also the kid who had to come to school early to learn how to read and write. Learning was hard for him. Kids were rough on him because he was small. His defense was his mouth. He told me a story about two kids rapping at him to make fun of him, and he walked up and started rapping back until the whole school was laughing at them instead.

Then, at 17, the slide started. Honor graduate in the military. Homecoming king. Modeling jobs in the nearest city. And underneath it, drugs. By 19, he was 30,000 dollars in debt, sued twice, living in his car, and he’d assaulted a police officer. His best friend, who he got addicted with, is dead now.

The Judge Who Sent Him to Afghanistan

Ryan had been through eight different courts. Hit and run. Assault on a police officer. No insurance. No registration. Suspended license. There was a unit deploying to Afghanistan, and he wanted in.

His adopted dad was a judge. His adopted mom was the teacher who had taught him to write his name before they became his family. The police officer who adopted them knew his birth dad from jail. Ryan would call his adopted parents in the middle of the night, high, convinced people were there to kill him.

He stood in front of the last judge and broke down. “Your Honor, I’m lost,” he said. “The only way I know how to get better is I have to, I have to change.”

The judge stepped down off the bench and hugged him. Told him he was going to learn more in Afghanistan than he’d learn in that courtroom. Five years ago, Ryan spoke at that same judge’s conference.

August 28, 2010, and an Egg

Ryan’s first night in Afghanistan was August 28, 2010. His unit was ambushed at FOB Salerno. Taliban members in American uniforms got onto the FOB. Apaches firing everywhere. Of the 32 he was with, around 23 were blown up at some point during the deployment. One was killed in his unit.

His job was finding bombs placed in the route. About 7 percent of the military sees actual combat, he said, and his mission was combat.

But the story he wanted me to sit with wasn’t about the ambush. It was about an egg.

He’d been told not to get out and play with the local kids because the Taliban had started strapping bombs to children. One day a boy of about 10 and his little sister, about 5, came up to his vehicle asking for food and candy. Ryan was in a foul mood. They’d just been ambushed. He’d hit his head on the door of the RG. One of their leaders had just been killed.

His sergeant told him, come on, just throw the kid a piece of candy. Ryan opened the door and tossed one out. The older brother grabbed it first. In that village, Ryan said, he’d seen little girls beaten for grabbing candy because women had no rights. But this boy turned and handed the candy to his sister. Ryan and his guys jumped out and loaded the two kids up with as much food and candy as they could carry.

A couple hours later, only the boy came back. He had something behind his back, and he kept walking toward the vehicle. They yelled at him to stop. The gunner put the weapon on the child and fired a pin flare over his head. The boy stopped, then started walking again. They got the okay to fire. Ryan turned on the camera to document it.

Then the boy showed them what was behind his back. An egg.

“The third best gift I’ve ever been given was an egg,” Ryan told me. “And it was from that little boy and he taught me something. No matter where you’re at in the world, there is good wherever there is bad and there is bad wherever there is good.”

The other two best gifts, he said, were a box of raisins from two old men when he and his brothers were in a homeless shelter, and a pair of light-up shoes from the family that adopted him.

2017: Fired, Then the Coal Mine

Fast forward. Married, an eight-month-old he’d met for the first time when he came home from his second deployment. PTSD. Waking up at night searching the house for the enemy. Disappearing for days at a time.

In 2017 he got fired from a job for being a safety liability. He told me he had a plan to end his life on the drive home that day. His mom took her life. He takes the topic seriously. He’d been to suicide prevention classes. He didn’t go through with it.

His wife put her hands on his shoulders and told him she believed in him. That’s why she married him. He started showing up at the workforce services office before it opened and staying until it closed. For weeks. He called the coal mine five times before they hired him. He’d worked there right out of high school. He knew it was cold and dangerous and your skin turns black from the coal. They told him they weren’t even hiring. They gave him the job because he kept calling.

He sat in his car after the interview asking, why me. He’d served his country. He was a good person. Then he started thinking about it differently. “If you truly believe in God or the universe,” he told me, “oh, well, why would God do this? I believe God’s son, Jesus Christ hung on the cross. So if anybody has it that bad, shouldn’t it be God saying, why me?”

Building While Getting Hit

From inside the coal mine, Ryan went back to school. Got his first degree in 2020. He’s finishing a psychology degree this August. He flipped two houses. Bought an ice cream franchise. He’s buying a trucking company now, and he was honest with me that he doesn’t fully know how to run it yet. He’s going to figure it out.

He had three surgeries from the coal mine. His hand got smashed. A finger was amputated. On one of the house flips, his worker didn’t show up, so he built the inside himself on a property where he could’ve cleared 100,000 dollars. He sold it to a single mother with three kids instead because she reminded him of his mom.

His speaking career started with one engagement in 2016 that paid 400 dollars. He emailed a thousand people a month. Nobody wrote back. When the pandemic hit in 2020 and his coal mine job kept going, he poured money into his speaking business, wrote his first book, and made music videos that started winning awards. Last year he says he had 13 million views and spoke to around 200,000 students in Utah.

The quote he keeps coming back to is the one from Rocky Balboa about how it ain’t about how hard you get hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. Ryan calls his version “pack it on.” He learned it watching his older brother get knocked down four times in a fight in fourth grade and stand up every time until the other kid quit.

Five Steps, Starting With a Mirror

Ryan walked me through the framework he’s built his life on. Step one is an honest self-evaluation. He told me he wrote down, on paper, that he was dumb, slow, short, insecure, not confident. Then he went through the list. Dumb? Go get a degree. Short? Can’t fix it, but you can be extremely fit. Not confident? Get your butt kicked enough times that it stops mattering.

Step two is accountability. “If you are not where you want to be in life, it’s your fault,” he said. He cried at the VA Medical Center asking for help. He wrote everything down.

Step three is believing it’s possible. Step four is the plan. His first written goal was 100,000 dollars in a year. He hit it.

None of that is a poster. It’s what a guy who used to live in his car at 19 actually did to get out.

Ryan told me he’s not fearless. He said he’s scared right now, starting all this stuff, that the weights are heavy. He just decided a long time ago he wanted to see what he was made of. That’s the part of the conversation I keep thinking about.