When I was first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I actually didn’t tell anybody other than my wife and one or two really, really close friends. I didn’t tell any of my other friends. I held onto that up until the time that I made the announcement in 2013. I held onto that information for roughly fifteen years.

The reason that I did that is because I didn’t want anybody to treat me any differently based on the diagnosis. I wanted to know that any love I was getting, any lookouts that I was getting, was purely based on my own merits and not based on somebody feeling sorry for me or feeling bad that I had this disease.

So it was something that I kind of just pushed into the background, and I went on about my business as an artist, as a person. I wanted people to just deal with me on a regular, normal level. And that’s pretty much what happened.

After being diagnosed, my wife was very nonchalant about it — and that’s how she is with stuff. What I mean by that is she was very quick to be like, “That ain’t no big deal. That ain’t stopping nothing. Just keep doing what you doing.”

I asked her opinion on if I should share it with the world or not — she was like, “When you feel like it’s time, that’s when you do it. If you don’t feel like it’s time right now, then you wait.” She just supported me in those kinds of decisions and just definitely always kept an upbeat attitude about it like it’s not the end of the world.

That’s just how she is, though. You could have something worse than that and she’d be like, “Whatever. We good. We gonna get it through it.”

When I did share it with my friends, it was accidental. I was on tour with Stricklin and Marco Polo in Europe, we got pulled over in the Czech Republic. They basically searched the entire car and pulled everything out of every suitcase and they pulled my medicine out.

After everything was over, the question kind of was brought up like, “What was that stuff?” It definitely wasn’t on the terms that I wanted to tell them, but I told Strick, Marco Polo and the tour manager. I asked them to keep it under wraps, and they respected my wishes.