Comedian Tim Dillon has lived a lot of life in his 31 years. “I was a child actor,” he tells guest host Chris Gethard. “I started doing coke at 12. My mother’s a schizophrenic. I was a closeted homosexual. I’m politically all over the map, though I lean conservative. I was in the mortgage industry. I idolize hucksters, thieves, cons and cheats. My dream is to be a traveling salesman through America. And if comedy works, that’s nice too.”

Around the time that Tim says he began experimenting with drugs, he also began to notice that his mother was starting to talk about being followed. She was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, and had a mental breakdown when Tim was twenty years old. She’s been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since then. As an adult, Tim says he feels a growing responsibility to care for his mother, but he’s also come to terms with the fact that no amount of money will “fix” her. “That’s the amazing thing about mental illness,” he says. “If I had a million dollars, and I had a home, and I could move her in and pay all her bills, she wouldn’t be better.”

Tim did in fact once own a home, in his early 20s. He started his career selling mortgages—including those of the subprime variety. “I didn’t know how bad it was going to get,” he says. “I took one myself.” He bought a $570,000 house that, as it turned out, he couldn’t afford after the subprime mortgage crisis hit and he lost his job. The bank foreclosed on his home, and Tim says his credit is still suffering today.

But the economic downturn did push him to make a dramatic career change. Tim started doing stand-up comedy about six years ago. And that same year, he decided to come out to his family. “There was no like, ‘We love you,’” Tim says. “There was none of that. They’re funny, acerbic people.” Tim isn’t dating much, though. Right now, he says he’s focused on building his career as a comic, doing two to three shows a night. But, he says, he might slow down “if I fell deeply in love with somebody…I’m not saying that that even would slow me down, I’m just saying that could.”