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.
This period runs mostly from 2014 to 2016, and it really begins on April 22, 2014, the morning I woke up with a brutal hangover and finally saw my life clearly enough to admit it was completely fucked. I threw up blood, something that had never happened before, and that alone should have been enough to stop me cold. On top of that, I remembered gambling $500 online the night before, money I absolutely did not have to be pissing away. I was barely keeping my head above water, just managing to avoid interest on my credit cards, living in that narrow band where one mistake tipped everything into a financial free fall. My ex-wife had already told me she was going to leave me, that she was prepared to pack her things and go stay at her parents’ house, which made it obvious she was getting close to actually doing it. Standing there sick, broke, and scared, I had a sudden and terrifying certainty about where my life was headed. I believed, with total conviction, that my drinking was going to kill me and that there was nothing I could do to stop it because I had already tried to quit drinking so many times. Every attempt had failed. From where I was standing, sobriety felt impossible, and I felt absolutely hopeless.
In that state, I did something I never expected to do. I prayed, desperately, to a God I did not believe in. I said, “God, I’ll do anything to get sober.” The moment that thought left my mind, another one followed right behind it: going to Alcoholics Anonymous might be part of the “anything” I had just offered. I already knew of someone who had gotten sober in AA, and I remember ripping on him constantly because I couldn’t stand how he acted. I’d look at him and think, here’s this guy who’s sober, who goes to AA, and he’s still miserable to be around. What’s the point? In my mind, that proved AA didn’t work. If sobriety turned you into that, what were you really accomplishing? But desperation has a way of stripping away opinions. I was so out of ideas that I had to find out for myself.
At the time, I interpreted what happened next through the language people in AA use. I told myself this was God talking back to me after I prayed. The way I see it now is very different. That wasn’t God in any supernatural sense; it was my subconscious doing its fucking thing. My subconscious had absorbed massive amounts of data over my entire life, and in that moment I gave it a clear input, the same way you’d prompt ChatGPT. I essentially said, tell me how to get sober. It pulled from everything I had seen, heard, and experienced and generated a single answer: go to Alcoholics Anonymous. The real difference this time wasn’t the idea itself. I had heard of AA plenty of times before. The difference was that, for the first time, I was open-minded, willing, and honest enough to admit how hopeless I actually was and to let my mind search for any solution that might genuinely work. Before that, I had never really done that. I had always been holding something back, still convinced I could control it or outthink it. That kind of thinking is insanity. Thankfully, this time it worked, and it worked fantastically.
That morning was a Tuesday, and I could already see the future with eerie clarity. I knew I could stay sober through the lead-up to my dad’s memorial, but I was just as certain that the day we got back from it, I would drink again. That certainty is what finally pushed me to act. I scheduled my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I walked into an AA meeting held at a church just minutes from my house. The absurdity of it hit me eventually. This AA meeting had been sitting there the entire time, a five-minute drive away, available whenever I needed it. All those years of struggling, all those nights of swearing I’d quit, and the thing that might actually help had been right there the whole time. I just wasn’t interested until I had absolutely no other ideas left.
I remember the drive vividly. I was trying to find the church and got a little turned around, and somehow I pulled into a liquor store parking lot by accident. It felt like my subconscious was messing with me, as if it was asking, didn’t you mean to come here today? I caught myself and thought, no, I’m going to the AA meeting. I wasn’t trying to go to the liquor store, but there I was, sitting in the lot, staring at it. I shook it off, drove a little farther, and finally found the church. When I got out of the car, fear washed over me. I was terrified walking inside. I remember thinking how badly I must have fucked up my life that I was walking into a church on a Tuesday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. to attend an AA meeting instead of getting drunk and having what I still thought of as a good time.
When I walked in, my first impression was that everyone there was happy—almost unnervingly so. It felt less like a support meeting and more like I’d wandered into a family barbecue. I remember thinking, what the fuck is this? I wasn’t happy. I was hopeless, desperate to stop drinking, and genuinely terrified of where I was headed. So why did all these people look relaxed, connected, and alive? That contrast hit me immediately, and curiosity set in before I even had time to process it.
They asked if anyone was new to Alcoholics Anonymous. Because I had technically been to one AA meeting back in 2005, my silly ass didn’t raise my hand. Then they asked if anyone was coming back, and I stood up, introduced myself, and said I was coming back. The meeting focused on Step One, on identifying how hopeless you are—hopeless even when you’re sober, because you’re still planning on drinking. That landed in a way nothing else ever had. I didn’t take any phone numbers, but I did take a white chip, something I hadn’t done at my first meeting years earlier, and that small act ended up making a big difference. When they asked if I wanted phone numbers, I said no. The woman chairing the meeting gently suggested that she had tried to get sober without using phone numbers and that it hadn’t worked very well for her. Internally, my response was dismissive and paranoid: what does this old woman know? I figured they probably wanted to do some freaky shit or try to sell me something. I wasn’t about to give my phone number to a bunch of strangers.
I walked out with my white chip, got back into my Toyota Corolla, and sat in the parking lot. That’s when I started crying. I felt something I hadn’t felt in a very long time. I felt love. I felt my dad’s presence. I felt all the love and prayers people had ever said for me, like they had been hovering there the whole time, just waiting for me to finally be open enough to receive them. Sitting there in that car, I felt safe. I felt held. I felt like I was going to be okay. And I remember thinking, damn, I want more of this. I decided right there that I was going to keep coming back to these meetings, because I wanted more of that feeling.
Of course, my thinking was still completely insane. In my mind, I told myself I was only drinking about two days a week, which was optimistic at best. There were plenty of weeks where I drank three or four days. These weren’t casual nights, either. They were binge sessions. On the “lighter” weeks, I’d have two days where I drank for a minimum of ten hours at a time and sometimes as long as eighteen or twenty hours straight. Doing that twice a week was damn near a full-time job, and that didn’t even count the hangovers or the wrecked mental state I lived in the rest of the time I was technically sober. When I added it all up—forty-plus hours a week drinking or recovering, plus the constant mental bandwidth spent thinking about drinking and cleaning up the mess it caused, especially dealing with how upset my ex-wife was—I came up with what felt like a reasonable plan. I decided I would go to two AA meetings a week. In my head, I was replacing forty hours of drinking, hangovers, and chaos with two hours of AA meetings.
Surprisingly, that actually worked for a little while. For a couple of months, I was flooded with energy. I started testing all kinds of ideas in my business. I began making gaming videos, something I had never been able to do consistently before. When I was drinking and gaming constantly, I could record gameplay, but I couldn’t upload it or add commentary because I talked way too much shit for any of it to be usable. Now, sober, I realized I could actually make these videos. I started recording myself trying new games and uploading them to YouTube, and some of them pulled in tens of thousands of views. I was playing video games again, but this time without being blackout drunk, without spiraling afterward, and without hating myself for it.
In the background, there was still a steady current of self-pity running through me because I couldn’t drink, even as I felt genuinely grateful that I had found a new sense of hope around sobriety. That contradiction wasn’t especially difficult to manage at first, mostly because I had stayed sober for months at a time before. By then, I already knew how to coast. I could ride momentum, show up to a couple of meetings a week, and essentially do almost nothing else in AA while telling myself I was fine. For a while, that worked. Then July 4 arrived, and that flimsy plan collapsed completely.
To understand why, it helps to back up a little. About a week before July 4, we were at my ex-wife’s parents’ house, and I was already wound so tight I felt like I might snap. They had this little dachshund who barked constantly—bark, bark, bark, bark, nonstop—and for whatever reason, the dog seemed especially committed to barking at me. It was like he couldn’t settle down or feel safe around me, which honestly wasn’t surprising, because I was aggravated as hell. To be fair, the dog barked at everyone. He was a rescue and had even bitten my father-in-law the first time he met him. Still, that relentless barking got under my skin. Everyone else ignored it, but at one point I lost it. I turned to the dog and screamed, “Shut the fuck up,” as loud as I could. Of course, the dog didn’t stop barking. Everyone else in the room turned and stared at me. I didn’t say anything out loud, but internally I was thinking, fuck y’all.
A week later, when my ex-wife said she wanted to spend July 4 with her family and expected me to come along, I told her I didn’t really like her family and didn’t like how they treated me. In my head, the story was that her family were assholes. She shrugged it off and said that was fine, she was still going to spend the day with them, and I could do whatever I wanted at home. At the time, that logic made perfect sense to me. I screamed at her parents’ dog, blamed her family for being the problem, and never once stopped to consider that I was deeply embarrassed about how I had acted and didn’t want to be around them because they’d seen just how fucked up I really was.
The moment my ex-wife left that morning, everything changed. The desire to drink, which had been lying low, playing possum and pretending it was gone, came roaring back to life. At that point, I was going to AA a couple of times a week, but that was about it. I didn’t have a sponsor. I hadn’t read much of the Alcoholics Anonymous book, though I had skimmed some of it. The most substantial thing I’d done was write out a roughly 10,000-word story of my life, which people told me counted as a Fourth Step. Other than that, I was doing almost nothing. As soon as my ex-wife walked out the door, the obsession jumped on me hard. The internal voice was vicious and seductive at the same time: look what she did. You got sober for her. You’ve got all day to drink. Let’s go. Go get your Diet Dr Thunder. Go get your strawberry Smirnoff and your Admiral Nelson’s vanilla rum. Let’s do this. My ex-wife left around 9:00 a.m., which meant I had prime drinking time ahead of me—eight, maybe ten or twelve hours before she got home. Plenty of time to go all the way.
That’s when I caught a glimpse of just how insane my thinking really was. I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, I’ve been going to Alcoholics Anonymous for over two months now, and I finally understood something with brutal clarity. Drinking, for me, was essentially consenting to my own destruction. It was knowingly poisoning myself to death. If I took that first drink, I was implicitly saying I was okay with whatever came next. I was okay if I cheated on my ex-wife—even though I hadn’t, I knew it could happen, especially on a night like that. I was okay if I died. I was okay if I drunk drove, even though I hadn’t driven drunk in four years, ever since my seven-hundred-mile drunk-driving road trip. Taking that first drink meant I was okay with potentially hurting other people. I was okay with gambling online and blowing more of my money. Standing there, watching this argument play out in my head, I could see how completely deranged it was. I knew, without any doubt, that wanting to drink was killing me and destroying everything I cared about, and yet I still wanted to do it anyway.
From there, I went through weeks of what I can only describe as conscious insanity—wanting to drink all day, every day, and then begging and praying to God to please let me stay sober. One day I was so mentally wrecked that I stood in my hallway for a long stretch of time, frozen in place because I was terrified of slipping back into autopilot. Autopilot, for me, is that state where you’re just doing one thing after another, spiritually asleep, not consciously checking your choices or vetoing bad ideas. You’re not examining your life or deciding whether anything needs to change. You’re just a zombie. One action leads to the next, which leads to the next, and by the time you go to bed, you haven’t made a single conscious decision all day. You’ve just drifted. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to live that way, sleepwalking through their lives. I’m trying to wake some of you up, but at the time I realized something much more urgent: I had to stay spiritually awake. I didn’t have the luxury of drifting. If I fell asleep at the wheel, I knew exactly where I’d end up—straight at the liquor store.
Sometimes, the only way I could guarantee that I stayed awake was by not moving at all. I would stand in one place and think, there’s no alcohol within arm’s reach, so I’m safe. As long as I don’t move, I’m safe. I wouldn’t move until I was sure I wasn’t sliding back into that unconscious routine where my body would just carry me somewhere destructive without my permission. Around the same time, I had family members who were also trying to get sober alongside me, and they were relapsing. I remember calling one of them and feeling absolutely furious that they were drinking again. After I hung up, the realization hit me hard: I was right on the edge of joining them. I wasn’t doing anything meaningfully different. The only distinction was that I hadn’t yet gone to the liquor store and picked up. That scared the hell out of me. It felt bad. Really bad.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.