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.
Once again, in the summer of 2019, I put up a video announcing that I was quitting gaming. This was now the second time I had done this ritualistic purge. Back in 2016, I had sold an Xbox One X, a PlayStation 4, and a Nintendo system, convinced I was done for good. Then I bought everything back, rebuilt my setup, and a year later sold all of it again. My gaming audience was crushed. The worst part was that this time, the audience was actually growing. I had streams where I pulled over 1,000 concurrent viewers and was regularly ranking among the top Facebook streamers online. From the outside, it looked like things were finally working. From their perspective, it made no sense at all.
They had shown up for me. They had been there live, day after day. I had played games with probably a hundred different viewers directly. They loved the streams, loved the energy, loved the community, and they couldn’t understand why I was walking away. I remember people saying, What the hell, man? We’re here every day. Why are you quitting? I tried to redirect them toward my courses, hoping they would follow me into the business side of what I was building, but it almost never worked. My gaming audience did not buy courses. Not mine, not anyone else’s. There was almost zero crossover. The thing I was pouring my heart into had no financial bridge to the thing I was desperately trying to keep alive.
At the same time, Uthena was failing. I technically had a lot of courses, but many of them were old, stitched together into massive bundles that looked impressive but didn’t convert. I was bleeding money paying freelancers to create content, which left me without enough cash to properly advertise my own courses. Looking back, the mistake is obvious. If I had to do it again, I would build a simple website with only my own courses, bundle them intelligently, and obsess over paid advertising to sell nothing but my material. Any upsells would also be my own. The biggest error I made was dragging in all these other freelancers and trying to manage a bloated ecosystem instead of focusing narrowly on what I already knew worked.
I tested everything hoping for a breakthrough. I put all the courses on my website. I ran WordPress setups. I experimented with different checkout systems, different hosting configurations, different sales pages. I tested so many business systems that I lost sight of the simplest option. I should have gone all in on myself. Instead, by the end of 2019, everything was coming apart. I was completely obsessed with money. I had borrowed every dollar I possibly could. The only loans still available to me were at 16% or 17% interest, which at the time—when rates were historically low—were brutal. Earlier loans had been around 8% or 9%. Now I was seeing offers at 22%, and that’s when it really hit me. Jesus, this is the end.
I was taking credit card cash advances just to pay bills, some of them at 14% or 15% interest. I had told my ex-wife that I was borrowing money, and occasionally I would mention things like paying someone $10,000 to make a course, but I had not been honest with her about how bad the situation actually was. At the same time, we had enrolled our daughter in an expensive private school nearby. I remember confidently saying, She’s got to go here. We’ll figure out how to pay for it. Looking back, that feels completely delusional. I was borrowing money aggressively while committing to a school we clearly could not afford.
Meanwhile, my son later attended a much more affordable preschool. Ironically, he had a better experience there than my daughter did at the expensive private school. One experience from that school still stands out clearly. Right after we enrolled my daughter, the school hosted a beginning-of-the-year party for parents and students at a local gymnastics gym. The kids ran around on mats and equipment while the parents talked and got to know each other.
Of course, I had jerrybanfield.com plastered everywhere, because that was how I operated back then. I wanted people to know who I was, check out my courses, and follow me online. On the front page of my website, I had posted my Fourth Step from Alcoholics Anonymous. My loyal followers had told me it was inspiring, so I put it right on the homepage. One of the parents read only the first half of it and completely missed the part where I talked about transformation and recovery. They focused solely on the raw confessions from decades earlier and freaked out. They called the school. Then they called the police.
That night, my ex-wife was out running, and I had just put the kids to bed around 8:30 p.m. when four police officers showed up at the door. I immediately knew why they were there. They asked the standard questions they’re required to ask in situations like that. I explained calmly that this was a blog post I had written years ago, describing thoughts and behaviors from ten and twenty years earlier, not anything happening in the present. They acknowledged that they understood and explained they still had to investigate based on the complaint. I invited them into the house, answered everything honestly, and after a short visit, they left. They were satisfied. By that point, though, it felt like every part of my life—money, business, gaming, and even parenting—was collapsing into the same chaotic mess, all at once.
After that incident, the school administration actually did their homework. The headmaster and the head of security both read my blog post while the security officer read my entire Officer Banfield book for context. They understood why some parents had lost their minds, but they were firmly on our side. Their attitude was basically, These parents are nuts. This is completely insane. Apparently, there were five separate groups of parents who had demanded that our family be removed from the school. They threatened to pull all of their kids out if the school didn’t kick us out. The administration refused. They told them flat out that they were not going to expel a family because a parent wrote honestly about his life and how he had changed. From their perspective, there was no actual issue here, just hysteria. In the end, none of those parents followed through on their threats, and nobody withdrew their kids.
I, being stubborn as hell, insisted that we stay. My ex-wife wanted to pull my daughter out immediately to avoid all the drama, and her logic was simple and correct: This is not the right place for us. But I turned it into a battle in my head, and I decided that “winning” meant staying. I became determined to keep my daughter in that school as proof that we belonged there. Looking back, that was pure insanity on my part. If I had it to do over again, I would have withdrawn her immediately, saved myself from having to see those unhinged parents for an entire school year, and kept the extra tuition money. Instead, we stayed the whole year.
There was one mom in particular who I knew was a major instigator. She had talked to me early on, acted enthusiastic, and told me she was going to check out my website, which is how I knew she was one of the people who lost her shit after reading it. Every time I saw her after that, I gave her the dirtiest stank eye imaginable. In my head, I thought the nastiest things about her—that she was the one inventing all this drama, and that she was the one who should have the police showing up at her house. Every time she caught that look from me, she’d go back into the school and stir up even more drama. Eventually, they stationed a dedicated security officer in the area of the school where our kids were, purely because this woman complained so relentlessly.
It was a shitty situation, and I should have exited immediately. One of the dumbest things people do in life is stay in places where they are clearly not welcome and then fight tooth and nail to keep showing up anyway. I burned that lesson into my brain. If I’m not welcome somewhere as I am, there is always somewhere else I can go where I will be. Staying and forcing it only guarantees misery.
That school drama mirrored everything else going on in my life at the time. It was an external manifestation of my internal state. Inside, I felt like a complete fucking idiot. I had made so much money in the years before, and now I had managed to put not just myself, but my entire family, into the worst financial position of our lives. The chaos outside matched the chaos inside perfectly, and I couldn’t escape either one.
In 2015, I knew I could afford to fail. If everything blew up, my ex-wife still had a job and money was coming in. There was a safety net. This time, that wasn’t true. My ex-wife had asked to do some freelancing and was bringing in a little money, but it wasn’t much, and instead of appreciating it, I resented it. I had been making so much money for so long that I thought it was ridiculous she should even need to work. What I didn’t understand—what I was completely blind to—was that she wanted to feel like she was contributing financially and validating the massive investment she had made in her education. I had been paying her student loans on top of everything else for three or four years at that point. That payment sat right alongside the mortgage, and now it was stacked on top of all the new loans I had taken out. I had even taken our new car and signed the title over to get a bank loan because the interest rate was lower. I was stripping everything down to feed this collapsing system.
All of that created the background for how I was living: constantly stressed, obsessed with money, hiding things, and still not knowing what else to do. I felt trapped inside my own decisions. What started happening in my body was that I began coughing all the time. For my entire life, I had interpreted coughing purely through germ theory. If I was coughing, it meant I had picked up some bacteria or virus, and that was that. I never once considered that anything I was thinking, feeling, or doing might have anything to do with it. Coughing, in my mind, was something external and uncontrollable.
Then I read You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, and it completely rewired how I thought about my body. In the book, she talks about how the internal environment of your body—your emotions, your thoughts, your beliefs—can be directly connected to the physical symptoms you experience. One example that hit me hard was her explanation that coughing often indicates resistance to change. She suggested that affirmations like I am changing or I am willing to change could directly address it. I was listening to the audiobook while driving to pick up my daughter from school when another coughing fit started. I paused the book and, out loud in the car, started affirming, I’m changing. I’m willing to change. I’m changing. I’m willing to change. I repeated it maybe ten or twenty times as I coughed.
Then the coughing stopped immediately. I remember thinking, Holy shit, that just worked. I had done an affirmation, and a physical symptom in my body stopped on the spot. I had been dealing with coughing fits all through 2019, and I was stunned by how effective this was. But as soon as the coughing stopped, another realization followed. If I had just said I was willing to change, then the obvious question was: What do I need to change? And the answer came instantly, clear as day.
I started bawling in the car. I knew exactly what had to change. I had to talk to my ex-wife about the finances. I had to come completely clean and tell her everything—every detail of what I had done. I had to admit that I had destroyed our family’s financial stability. I needed to beg for her help just to keep paying the mortgage and the student loans. I had to tell her that financially we were ruined, that I was going to lose money in 2019, and that I might need to talk to a bankruptcy attorney. When I added it all up—the house, her student loans, my business loans, and all the credit card debt—we were more than $600,000 in debt. We were financially fucked.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.