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.
What started to shift things for me in elementary school was video games. I grew up in the kind of household where my dad would tell us to go play—go outside, go do something. We didn’t watch much TV. Maybe a little Winnie the Pooh or some cartoons in the morning, maybe a movie at night, but we didn’t have screens on all day. Over time, though, we got more access to video games. I remember the day my dad bought me a Game Boy. I think I was around eight years old. My favorite game on it for a long time was Empire Strikes Back. That game was hard as fuck.
My dad usually wouldn’t let me play the Game Boy for very long anyway, and the screen was tiny. That thing was like half the size of a modern iPhone screen. You had to squint, and it strained your eyes. But one day, I played Empire Strikes Back for six straight hours when my dad was heavy into making furniture. I got more than halfway through the game, died, and had to start over. You only got so many lives, and when you ran out, you were done. So I went all the way back to the beginning and beat the entire game in one day. I still remember how proud I felt. Beating that hard-ass game felt incredible. It was pure fun and focus in a way I hadn’t experienced before.
Around that time, my brother and I both carried a little extra fat. We weren’t fat kids, but we had enough padding to take a beating from each other, from other kids, and from dad. My dad hit us, and when we played with other kids, we played rough. We’d go out before the bus came and play tackle football. One football, five or ten kids, and whoever had the ball got smeared. You’d grab the ball, run as long as you could, and eventually everyone would tackle the shit out of you and rip it away. Then whoever grabbed it became the next target.
We played soccer too and wallball too but full on tackle football was always what I loved most. Somebody was always getting hurt. We never meant to seriously injure each other, because every time someone did get hurt, the adults—teachers, parents, whoever was around—would lose their minds. It was always the same outcome: Now you kids can’t play tackle football anymore because a neighborhood kid got hurt. That was childhood for us—rough, physical, chaotic, and somehow still fun.
I had some extra fat on me, and in a strange way, it helped keep me safe. This is something I’ve come to understand through my body over time. A lot of the weight I carried as a kid wasn’t a flaw—it was protection. It helped me absorb the beatings life handed out. I never broke any bones. I had fat and muscle to take a hit, a slap, a tackle. And honestly, none of that stopped me from having fun. I loved running around and playing sports. I was extremely active. I played my ass off, and it felt good. When I look back, most of my childhood feels genuinely great.
That doesn’t mean it was calm. There were problems and drama between my mom and dad, especially around the holidays. We were far away from both sides of the family, and that distance made everything heavier. My mom’s family carried a lot of drama—there was this sense of you’re dead to us because she chose my father instead of them. On my dad’s side, he was far away from his daughters from his first marriage and wasn’t a regular part of their lives. He’d left a pretty bad impression when he disappeared, and that history never fully went away. Emotions ran high, especially during the holidays.
My parents would get into screaming fights sometimes. Occasionally things would get thrown or slammed. Every once in a while, someone would go completely off the rails—usually my mom after dad got sober. She’d grab the keys, storm out the door, and say things like she was never coming back, then slam the door behind her. You’d just sit there hoping she’d come back. It didn’t happen that often, but there was a background anxiety in the house, a low-level tension that was often present and slowly built over the years.
Still, there were mostly good times. In 1990, we moved to Alabama, when my mom went back to school for an advanced degree. She studied her ass off and was completely buried in work. She barely had time for us, which was a huge shift from Japan, where from 1986 to 1990 she’d had a lot more time with us and my dad had a fuller social life. In Alabama, my dad lost all his friends from Japan, and his world shrank fast. He basically had no life outside of raising us kids and woodworking in the backyard shed. My mom had almost no time for us while she was working and studying, so my dad’s entire existence became taking care of us.
One story from that time still stands out to me. There was this kid on the bus in third grade who was kind of a pain in the ass. We’d shove each other sometimes. I don’t even like the word bullying—that never felt accurate to me. I don’t see myself as someone who got bullied. This kid just crossed lines now and then. One day, as I was stepping off the bus, he shoved me. I fell forward, scraped my knee, and hit the ground. My dad was standing right there. He saw the kid push me and watched me fall. Without hesitation, my dad slapped him upside the head—hard. Then he grabbed him, dragged his ass home to his parents, and told them exactly what had happened. The kid’s parents agreed with my dad completely. They said that’s exactly what they would have done too. After that, my dad drove us to school.
Then we moved to San Antonio, Texas. That Christmas was the first real technological upgrade of my childhood. My parents got us a Sony Trinitron TV and a Nintendo Entertainment System. The Game Boy had been fun, but it usually wasn’t engaging enough to pull me into the kind of all-day bender I’d had with Empire Strikes Back. The Nintendo was different. It held your attention. While we were living in San Antonio, between 1994 and 1997, we eventually talked my dad into getting a Super Nintendo as well. Our gaming escalated a bit, but it never replaced real life.
My brother and I were still outside constantly. We played basketball, played football, and were always hanging out in the neighborhood. We were moving all the time. My dad took us everywhere. We had season passes to the theme parks—Fiesta Texas, which is Six Flags now, and SeaWorld. He’d take us two or three times a week. That was the highlight of my life. I loved that shit. Roller coasters, water rides, drops, flips—up, down, backward, throw me around, scare the hell out of me, I loved all of it. We went down every water slide imaginable until we were dead ass tired.
Looking back now, as a parent myself, I realize how boring that must have been for my dad. I have two kids now, and I can see it clearly. We’d run around like maniacs, and he’d sit in the lazy river. He didn’t even like theme parks. He was just trying—trying really hard. His dad had just died. My sisters had stopped talking to him because the relationships hadn’t been maintained over time. He poured everything he had into us. All of it. Then I hit puberty.
In 1997, we moved to Germany. My mom had problems at work and got a command overseas to get away from the situation and advance her career. Right before that move, my life was actually great. I had an awesome friend group in middle school. I was in with the popular boys and the cute girls. I loved my school, and I fucking hated leaving it behind. Moving had already been hard enough back in fourth grade, but leaving in seventh grade was brutal. That one really sucked. I lost my entire social life overnight.
We started at a Department of Defense school on base in Rammstein, and the difference was shocking. My last school had been relatively normal. The kids were nice. We played four square and talked shit. I remember one kid stealing my lunchbox once, and I tried to fight him over it. He was way bigger than me, and I didn’t give a shit, so I ended up hitting my head on the concrete in the process.
This new military school was on a completely different level. These kids were crazy as shit. I’m talking about kids beating each other in the face with belts before school. There were mob-style riots where a hundred kids would be running around chasing people outside. The place felt feral. It was chaos, and that was the environment I got dropped into right as I was trying to figure out who I was becoming. I didn't know what to say and I just felt alone. I remember we were in this hotel in Germany, and I remember the moment I just gave up. Before that, I'd been trying to manage my sexual urges with some level of reasonableness. Eventually, I was like, fuck it. I'm just going to do whatever it takes to satisfy those urges without hurting anyone else. I'll just hide, lie, you know, whatever I got to do, I'm just going to do it. And I didn't tell anybody about this. I felt horrible about it. But yet to me, this is where some of my issues bloomed much later in life. It was like right there at 13 years old, feeling like I was a slave to those urges. Like giving in was all I could do. I felt very shameful, disgusting, nasty. And yet I'm like, I can't stand these urges all the time. I just need to release the pressure.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.