This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
I was at the University of South Carolina from 2002 to 2006. When I arrived, my physical body was in good shape. Even though I played a lot of video games, I also stayed active. I played sports with friends, went to the gym, lifted weights, and went for runs. I loved playing tackle football casually—just messing around with friends. I never played organized school sports. I tried out once in tenth grade for football, and that first (and last) practice absolutely kicked my ass. I wasn’t in good enough shape for that level. Still, by the time I got to college, I weighed around 180 pounds, had decent muscle, and generally felt good in my body. Physically, my parents had done their job. I had been well cared for. I was healthy, in shape, and honestly, a good-looking guy. On the physical level, everything was in place.
Mentally, though, it was a different story. I was heading into college carrying anxiety, a clear potential for alcoholism, deep shame wrapped around my sexuality, and a growing video game addiction. All of that made me extremely vulnerable. I didn’t know it yet, but I was primed to spiral. At first, though, things started gently.
I moved into a dorm that wasn’t just freshmen. There was a freshman honors floor where I lived, but the rest of the building had sophomores and juniors too. That meant I had a little more freedom than most freshmen, which felt exciting. When I first got to college, I was committed to not drinking. I remember saying over and over at parties that I didn’t need alcohol to have fun. I even remember being the designated driver at one party, and the moment we arrived, I realized something important: I could act completely insane and get away with it because everyone else was drunk.
So I did. I walked up to random girls saying the most outrageous things as an introduction, acting loud, throwing things, being obnoxious. I was acting crazier than most of the drunk people there, and I was completely sober. I loved it. I went to parties, talked to girls, went to dances, and threw myself into it. There was a First Night Carolina event where I was just grinding with girls nonstop on the dance floor. I’d never been in an environment like that before. And I did all of it sober. I didn’t hesitate. I just jumped in. We used to go to this club called Banana Joe’s—everyone called it Banana Ho’s—and I’d be in there dancing my ass off. I had an incredible time dancing sober. I was present. I was aware of what was happening. I felt alive. Going out dancing became one of my favorite things to do.
At the same time, though, my video game use got even worse. I realized I could play until seven or eight in the morning if I wanted to, and no one could stop me. My Counter-Strike kill-death ratio would get over three sometimes. I was often near the top of the servers I played on. I played a massive amount of Counter-Strike and a massive amount of World War II Online. The freedom of college didn’t just open social doors—it removed every remaining guardrail around my gaming. Back at home, my parents had been strict about media. I only watched movies they approved of and was careful about what I did on the family computer because I didn’t want to lose access. In college, that restraint was gone. I didn’t really recognize it yet, but I was already sliding into a pattern: intense stimulation, little regulation, and no real awareness of where it was all heading.
My relationship with porn also changed dramatically once I got to college. With unrestricted internet access, curiosity turned into habit, and habit slowly became something darker. What started as casual and unexamined use began leaving me feeling uneasy and ashamed afterward. Instead of stopping, I kept pushing further, convincing myself that what I was doing was normal. Over time, it created a growing sense of secrecy and self-disgust, like I was living a private life I couldn’t talk about or reconcile with who I wanted to be.
At the same time, something else shifted. I started trying to pick girls up constantly, which still surprises me when I look back on it. I don’t know what changed exactly, but everywhere I went, I was getting phone numbers. This was before cell phones were a given. I didn’t have one. I had a shared landline in my dorm room, an answering machine with a blinking red light, and a roommate who could listen to my messages if he felt like it. So I’d get numbers and tell girls where my room was, what building I lived in, and hope for the best. For the first few weeks of freshman year, though, I was still painfully inexperienced. I was a full-on virgin. I’d had a girlfriend senior year of high school, but we never actually had sex or even got past first base. We barely even made out. Whatever the reason, it didn’t happen, and by the time I got to college, losing my virginity felt like the primary mission. It was the thing I thought I needed to do to become someone else, someone more legitimate.
Early freshman year, a girl I barely knew showed up at my dorm late one night, drunk and impulsive. What followed was chaotic, confusing, and deeply uncomfortable for me. I was inexperienced, anxious, and completely unprepared for what was happening. Instead of feeling excited or connected, I felt rushed, exposed, and overwhelmed. When it fell apart, I didn’t understand why. I walked away feeling ashamed, rejected, and convinced that I had somehow done everything wrong without knowing what I’d done at all.
After that first encounter, I kept going out and picking up more girls in the same way, almost accidentally, like I’d stumbled into some parallel version of myself that suddenly knew how to do this. I picked up another girl at a club one night and gave her my phone number. Throughout freshman year—before I ever started drinking—there were multiple girls who would call my dorm room late at night, usually on Fridays or Saturdays. The calls followed a familiar rhythm. “Hey Jerry, what’s up?” “Hey, how’s it going?” “What are you doing?” I’d tell them the truth: nothing, just hanging out in my room, playing video games. Then they’d ask about my roommate, casually, like they were probing the perimeter. “What’s your roommate up to?” I’d answer honestly, confused, and then they’d pivot. “You can have girls over, right? What’s your visitation policy?” And I’d say yes, because technically I could. What I couldn’t do, apparently, was recognize what was happening in real time.
One night stands out more than the rest. A girl I’d picked up at a club—beautiful, hot, blonde—called me. I’d danced my ass off with her at the club, got her number, and felt like I’d done everything right. When she called, I was in the middle of playing World War II Online again, driving a tank. I had the receiver crammed between my shoulder and my head, one hand on the joystick, the other trying to manage throttle and steering, fully convinced I could multitask. She was calling to see what I was up to, clearly testing whether she could come over, and I wasn’t really listening. I couldn’t give her my attention because I was too focused on the game. Eventually she hung up, realizing I wasn’t present. Almost immediately after that, my tank got blown up. That’s when it hit me. I realized, you absolute fucking idiot. This was exactly what I wanted. She was trying to come over, and I couldn’t put the joystick down for one second to pay attention because I thought I could do everything at once. I was furious with myself. I called her back a while later but it was too late. She was getting high with her friends, laughing when I invited her over. From her perspective, she’d already put herself out there, gotten rejected, processed it, and moved on. From mine, I’d just nuked the moment for no reason. I was wrecked.
All of this probably sounds like a series of disconnected stories unless you understand the backdrop: I still hadn’t started drinking. I’d gone to college with a pretty solid internal barrier around alcohol, even though lots of people around me drank. My roommate did, aggressively. One night, while a friend and I were playing Axis & Allies until seven in the morning, my roommate came home completely fucked up. At some point during the night, he got out of his bed and pissed on mine like it was a toilet. I didn’t see it happen. The room was dark. All I knew was that when I finally went to lie down, my bed was wet. I remember thinking, why the fuck is my bed wet? I wondered if there was a leak or something wrong with the ceiling. In my infinite wisdom, I grabbed the comforter and rubbed it all over my face, trying to identify the mystery substance by feel and smell. After a few seconds of that, the realization landed: this was piss. Human urine. I looked over at my roommate, utterly confused, because I didn’t understand alcohol yet. I couldn’t wrap my head around why someone would get so drunk they’d piss on another person’s bed. I stripped the sheets and started washing everything around 4:00 a.m., then finished the Axis & Allies game at about 7:00 a.m., went back to playing World War II online, and only then went to sleep. Even after all of that, I still didn’t drink.
I stayed away from drinking because, at the time, it looked pathetic to me. I genuinely believed people who drank were losers. Meanwhile, all around me, these failed hookups kept stacking up. I was going out, picking girls up, collecting phone numbers, and watching opportunity after opportunity slip through my fingers. Girls were clearly interested. Some were outright trying to sleep with me. Yet something invisible kept blocking me from having a real sexual experience and actually losing my virginity. I couldn’t name it at first, but I could feel it.
One day I noticed a girl who lived down the hall. Sober, she was often cold and standoffish—dismissive, not very talkative, barely acknowledging my existence. But when she drank, she transformed. She became warm, friendly, open, almost magnetic. Watching that shift hit me hard, because I suddenly realized the uncomfortable truth: that girl sober was me. I was an uptight, tense asshole, and that rigidity was probably the reason I couldn’t have sex. I wasn’t relaxed. I wasn’t present. I was trapped in my own head, locked up by shame and anxiety I didn’t yet understand.
Not long after that realization, my friend set me up with a girl from my dorm. She lived a few floors up and she was a junior. She was hot and confident, with a strong presence. He told me flat out that all I had to do was get her down to my room. On top of that, she already knew about me because my friend had told her I was cool and desperate to get laid. This wasn’t a cold approach. This was a warm lead, practically pre-approved.
That’s when the idea to drink finally took hold. I thought if I bought a six-pack of beer, we’d both loosen up and I’d finally be able to have sex. I hadn’t pulled that idea out of thin air. It had been programmed into me relentlessly. By the time I was eighteen, I’d probably seen thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of messages telling me that alcohol leads to sex. Every football game my dad watched meant more beer commercials filled with hot women magically appearing. Movies reinforced it. College culture reinforced it. Even without ever drinking, I believed deeply that alcohol was the missing ingredient. It also made emotional sense. Every attempt at sex up to that point had triggered intense shame and discomfort in me, feelings I wouldn’t fully understand until much later in AA. I’m foreshadowing here, but once you see the whole picture, it all clicks.
I knew exactly who to ask for help. A guy who lived diagonally across the hall, demonstrating the social geometry of dorm life, had a fake ID. He was also friends with the same group I played Axis & Allies with. We went to the gas station, and I picked out Miller High Life because I thought it sounded classy enough and might not taste as much like piss as I’d been warned beer did. He dropped me back at my dorm with my precious six-pack. The girl came down, and I felt proud just having the beer, convinced it made me look competent, adult, and ready.
For the first and last time in my life, I split a six pack. I had exactly two and a half. After that, I was already feeling it, enough that I poured the last half of the beer down the toilet and pretended I’d finished it while I was in the bathroom. Looking back, that’s a pretty funny detail—the first time I ever drank, I was already hiding how much I’d consumed. Something I didn’t expect happened next. After those two and a half beers, I felt incredible. Too incredible. We were lying on my twin bed, jammed against the wall. She was on my right, I was closer to the edge. She was right there, clearly expecting me to make a move, start making out, take control, make her feel wanted the way I had with other girls before everything derailed.
But I didn’t care anymore. Not about sex. Not about impressing her. I felt completely content, like I suddenly didn’t need anything at all. The desire that had tormented me for months simply vanished. Earlier experiences flashed through my mind—like the twenty-one-year-old girl I’d had up in my room who stopped me when I tried to move too fast, telling me she didn’t know me well enough yet. With this girl, it was the opposite problem. Drinking didn’t free me; it sedated me. It killed my sex drive instead of unlocking it. Eventually, she got bored. It was obvious I wasn’t going to do anything. Whether the alcohol dulled her desire too or the whole vibe just collapsed, the result was the same. Nothing happened.
The next day, I was left staring at the situation in disbelief. I’d gotten the beer. I’d had a girl who was older, attractive, and clearly open to sleeping with me, lying in my bed. And somehow, it still didn’t happen. Sitting with that confusion, all I could think was, what the fuck just happened? I started thinking maybe I just hadn’t drunk enough. Even as the thought crossed my mind, part of me recognized how fucked up that logic was, but I pushed past it anyway. What actually excited me was the idea that I could finally drink at one of those parties I’d already been going to sober. I’d watched everyone else loosen up while I stood on the sidelines, and now I felt like I had a ticket inside. I knew girls from my dorm were going to this guy’s parties.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.