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.
At the same time, I was deeply immersed in a video game called Gods Unchained. I was addicted to it. It is a card game, similar to Magic: The Gathering Arena, but unlike most card games, it actually had a real audience on Twitch. A serious audience. I was close to qualifying for Twitch Partner, which requires seventy-five concurrent viewers on average. I hit the threshold at least once and even applied, but Twitch told me I needed more viewers who were not coming in from third-party platforms. Still, I had technically met the requirements, and I was thrilled. I still had this wild idea that I wanted to be a professional gamer despite the obvious evidence I hadn’t like it.
Gods Unchained was also a crypto game, and that is what truly pulled me back into crypto again. The developers found me somehow and sponsored me to play the game on stream. They paid me two hundred dollars to play it for an hour live on Twitch and upload a video to YouTube. Then they sponsored me again for another stream. They hooked me. I ended up dumping around ten thousand dollars into the game, buying NFTs and giving a bunch of the the $GODS currency away. I lost thousands of dollars based on what I gave away and the timing of my sales. Then, incredibly, I bought back in and sold again two more times. It was insane behavior, but the game had the best viewership of anything I could find on Twitch.
I streamed Gods Unchained every day. Sometimes I played four, five, even six hours at a time. I genuinely loved it. Customizable card games were what I loved most as a kid. My brother and I played Magic: The Gathering and the Star Wars customizable card game obsessively. Playing Gods Unchained tapped straight into that part of me. I climbed into the highest ranked division, Mythic. There were only a couple hundred players in that division, and I became one of them. There were weeks when I was the number one Gods Unchained streamer on Twitch. That felt incredible. I had just started playing the game, and suddenly I was at the top.
What frustrated me endlessly was that most of the people who had watched me play Warzone would not watch me play Gods Unchained. Even though many of them did not actually play Warzone themselves, they refused to watch a card game. It made no sense to me. If I streamed the game on Facebook, I got almost no views at all. So I focused heavily on Twitch. There was just one problem. There was no money in it. I remember waking up in the middle of the night in a cold panic, thinking, fuck, what if this game goes to zero like so many of these coins do? What am I going to do then? I am not making real money as a Twitch streamer unless I get sponsorships and play constantly, every single day. This is just going to turn into another Warzone even if the money works out.
When I bought heavily into Gods Unchained in 2022, the token price was around thirty to forty cents. I was excited because it had come down from its highs earlier in 2021. I bought tens of thousands of the Gods token in that range. The lowest I saw it while I was actively playing was around twenty cents. I could already see the pattern forming. Today, that token trades for under five cents. There were a few brief, possibly manipulated pumps along the way, but the overall trend has been straight down ever since. Even while I was fully immersed in it, I could see exactly where it was heading.
In the middle of my Gods Unchained addiction, streaming constantly and pushing hard for Twitch Partner, I already had a plane ticket booked to go visit my mom. I knew exactly what that meant. Taking a week off from Gods Unchained was going to seriously set me back. The momentum mattered. The views mattered. The consistency mattered. I was having so much fun playing the game, and it was giving me a real emotional high. I felt sharp, alive, excited. I loved that Gods Unchained was a game you won with your mind. You had to think. You had to build the right deck. To build the best decks, you had to spend money, and I did. I bought all the best cards in the game so I could build anything I wanted. I tried every deck archetype. I loved experimenting. It was mentally demanding in a way that felt deeply satisfying. On stream, every time I won, I gave money away. That created a huge rush. The energy was high. It was the best streaming experience I had created since Warzone, and a real community was forming around it. I did not want to leave that behind and I’m having euphoric recall just writing about it. I am setting all of this up because what happens next carries an important lesson.
At the same time, my health was phenomenal. I had read a book called Breath after getting fed up with having constant little colds, runny noses, sniffles, and minor flu symptoms. I had been frustrated because I knew, based on my experiences with my mind and body, that I had more control than I was exercising. I kept asking myself what I needed to do to stop getting these stupid, nagging colds altogether. Right around that time, I walked into an AA meeting and mentioned this to someone. He immediately recommended I read James Nestor’s book. That recommendation changed everything. Reading Breath eliminated almost all of those little cold and flu symptoms for me. I still get a runny nose sometimes, but what I learned fundamentally changed how I breathe.
I trained myself to always breathe through my nose. I even started taping my mouth shut at night. Not duct tape or anything extreme, but specialized mouth tape designed to gently keep my mouth closed so my body could relearn how to nose breathe while I slept. Over the course of a few months, my nasal passages opened up dramatically. I have a deviated septum, and for most of my life I dealt with constant congestion, stuffy noses, and sinus issues. My mom dealt with similar issues herself. I was heading down the same path. Once I started consistently nose breathing and paying attention, things shifted. From the book and my own experience, I learned that you usually breathe primarily through one nostril at a time. The right nostril tends to be more active, associated with alertness and activity, while the left is more associated with rest and relaxation. As I am dictating this now, I am mostly breathing through my right nostril, which aligns with doing focused, active work. Since making these changes, I have had almost no stuffed noses, no constant runny noses, no recurring little colds. I love it.
My health reached a place where many of the everyday issues other people struggle with simply stopped affecting me. Sniffling, congestion, constant minor illness, those things disappeared. One of the biggest changes I made was stopping the habit of sniffling. When my nose runs, I blow it. I let it clear. I use a handkerchief, wipe my nose, and move on. I do not sniff mucus back up into my sinuses. I minimize mouth breathing as much as possible. With those habits in place, I was able to wipe out nearly every cold or flu symptom I used to experience. It felt incredible to realize how much power I actually had over my own body once I paid attention and changed something fundamental instead of just enduring it.
With all of that in place, we moved into late October 2022, right when I was supposed to help my mom move. The night before my flight, something strange happened. My entire body started to feel heavy and fatigued. I felt that familiar ache, the kind of dull, full-body soreness you associate with the very beginning of a cold or flu. I remember thinking, damn it, I can’t do this right now. It felt like my body was betraying me. That specific feeling where you sense illness coming on and your mind immediately protests, not now, why are you doing this to me. What made it so unsettling was how rare that sensation had become for me by that point. Even back in 2022, I almost never got sick anymore. And yet there it was.
The next morning, I was completely wiped out. I had no energy at all. I was laid out in bed, drained, certain there was no way I could drag myself onto a plane and fly to Mississippi. So I called my mom first thing. My mom has long lived as someone chronically ill, and sickness has been a defining feature of her life for a long time. I told her I was sorry, that I was sick and couldn’t fly out that day, and that I would reschedule as soon as I could. She was upset, but sickness is something she understands deeply, so there wasn’t much she could argue with. What is she going to say, you’re not sick? I apologized again and hung up.
Then something odd happened. I had been exhausted and dreading that phone call, but almost immediately after hanging up, I started to feel better. Not fully better, but noticeably different. I realized I wasn’t going to have to leave the comforts of home. I wouldn’t be away from my ex-wife, from my kids, from my routines, from my video games. That realization brought relief, and with that relief came energy. Enough energy, in fact, that I dragged myself out to the shed and sat on the floor to play Gods Unchained. That should have raised a red flag. I had enough energy to play a video game, but supposedly not enough energy to get on a plane and help my mom move. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what was happening, but in hindsight it is glaring.
Even then, I knew I still wanted to go. I told myself, I really do want to see my mom. Come on, body, give me my energy back. I want to help her move. And yet another part of me clearly did not want to leave behind all my comforts and addictions to spend a week doing physical labor for her. It was obvious I was staring down a lot of work. After a couple of days, I booked another flight for Wednesday and went. I had just enough energy to make it there. When I arrived, my mom was genuinely happy to see me. That part mattered.
The next day, Thursday, the real work began. For an entire week, almost every day, nearly all day long, I moved my mom’s storage stuff. I mostly did it alone. I hauled roughly fifteen thousand pounds of her belongings out of storage. Most of it went straight to the landfill. I rented a U-Haul, drove load after load, and threw her things out the back onto the ground while bulldozers pushed it into the piles with the rest of the trash. There were tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of items in that storage unit. My mom had never taken the time to sort through it. I had asked her many times in the past if she wanted help, and there was always a reason it couldn’t happen. She was too sick. She didn’t have the energy. She didn’t have the time. Everything had been put off until the last possible moment.
Her house was a disaster and thankfully professional movers handled packing most of it. The whole week was exhausting. Even then, I still found ways to sneak in Gods Unchained. The computer I had with me, a MacBook Air my mom had given me, could barely run the game. It lagged, malfunctioned, and was incredibly frustrating to use. But I still played. I still squeezed in matches. I still made sure to get my play-to-earn in. Even in the middle of hauling my mom’s entire life to the dump, the addiction found a way to assert itself.
Over that week, I was genuinely amazed by how much energy I had. On Thursday, I picked up a U-Haul and started hauling box after box of books. My mom had an enormous collection of old textbooks, and I was lifting heavy shit all day, every day. We made endless trips to the thrift store as well. I loaded up cars and trucks full of belongings and donated as much as they would take. Even then, it barely made a dent. The thrift store did not want massive boxes of old textbooks, and there was simply too much stuff overall. My mom had tubs and tubs of stuffed animals. One image from that week still sticks with me. There was a blue plastic tub filled with Winnie the Poohs, Eeyores, and Tiggers. Somehow, it had fallen off the main trash pile at the landfill, maybe blown by the wind. The tub cracked open, spilled, and the stuffed animals were coated in dirt, mud, and sludge from trucks driving by. Seeing them like that was visceral. It was a harsh reminder that all the things we buy eventually end up somewhere. My mom had bought those stuffed animals with love and addiction. They spent most of their lives sealed in storage tubs, and then they ended up at the landfill, crushed back into the earth. The whole cycle felt absurd when I really looked at it.
Eventually, I did help my mom complete the move. She got settled into the house right near us. I was genuinely happy about that. Having her living next door felt like a huge win after all the years of effort it had taken to maintain and improve our relationship. I started going over to see her every day. I brought the kids over to visit her almost daily. I even started taking her to Al-Anon meetings. Those moments felt precious. I remember thinking that this was the payoff. After all the patience, all the frustration, all the distance, this was a good result.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Games playlist.