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 told her everything I could about him. I tried to give her a real picture of who he was. I also gave her one of the $100 bills from the last wad of cash my dad had when he died. My dad carried cash like that his entire adult life—thousands of dollars, almost always in $100 bills—ever since his racetrack days. Even near the end of his life, he’d routinely have $1,000 or more in his pocket. He had almost been robbed multiple times over the years because of it.
One story came back to me vividly as I was sitting there with her. In the 1990s, we were at a mall together, standing in line at a Godiva chocolate store. My dad pulled out a thick wad of cash to pay. You could clearly see there were many $100 bills in there—far more than what he needed. I remember noticing three teenage kids nearby whose eyes went wide when they saw it. As soon as we left the store, they started following us toward the parking lot.
My dad picked up on it instantly. He told my mom to take us kids straight to the car while he went a different way. He later told us what happened next. He walked partway down a set of stairs, then stopped, turned around, and looked back up at the kids. He put his hand behind his back like he was holding a gun and asked them, in a low, threatening voice, if he could help them with something. That was enough. The kids turned around and walked away.
It worked because it made sense. A man walking around with a wad of cash like that might reasonably be armed. He might be a cop, or mob-connected, or just street-savvy enough to protect himself. The bluff held. But that’s all it was—a bluff. He didn’t have a gun. If those kids had called it, if they had decided to push it, he could have been killed over a few thousand dollars. I’m incredibly grateful they didn’t. That was the kind of risk my dad lived with casually his whole life, and sitting there telling that story to my half-sister made him feel very real again, in all his contradictions.
Another story about my dad surfaced for me around 2017, and it came up through a moment with my daughter that caught me completely off guard. One day, she had been giving my ex-wife a hard time. My ex-wife finally got frustrated and put her in her room for a timeout. My daughter started pounding on the door, screaming to come out, absolutely losing it. I remember standing there feeling sick to my stomach. Part of me knew, rationally, that my daughter was being stubborn and pushing limits like kids do. But another part of me was furious—not at my daughter, but at the whole approach of defaulting to that solution. I hated the sound of it. The screaming hit something old and raw in me. I told my ex-wife I didn’t want my daughter put in timeout like that anymore. Listening to a child scream behind a closed door felt unbearable. It felt familiar in the worst way.
That night, after my ex-wife and my daughter were both asleep, it was around eleven o’clock and I was still awake, sitting with this massive, violent anger toward my father. It wasn’t vague irritation. It was sharp, visceral rage. How dare you parent me the way you did? How dare you? What my ex-wife and my daughter went through that day was a tiny fraction of what I experienced growing up—being spanked, being grounded in my room for days, all the stuff I’ve already described. But something shifted when I became a parent myself. Seeing parenting from the adult side made it worse, not better. As a kid, you assume adults know what they’re doing. As a parent, you realize they’re making choices. And I looked at my father’s choices with adult eyes and thought, That was fucking horrible.
By that point, I had already had several experiences where I felt like I could mentally connect with my dad after he died. In early sobriety, I’d prayed to him. In 2015, when I flew overseas to meet a major client who had been a big source of income for me, I had a profound experience on the plane. That money had given me enough runway to start on Udemy without immediate pressure, and on that flight I dropped into this surrendered, open mental state where connecting with my dad felt effortless. It felt as real as if he were sitting next to me. One of the things that came through clearly was a suggestion to get my mom an Easter basket. It was gentle, specific, and unmistakable. That experience stayed with me.
By the time this parenting moment with my daughter happened, my dad had been gone since 2014, and my grand-sponsor had died in 2016, right before we moved from Sarasota. His death devastated me all over again. He had become like a father to me in sobriety—my grand-sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous through both my first and second sponsors. He was one of the most loved people in the room where I got sober. I remember going out to eat with him and feeling like I had my dad back, except this time it was different. In some ways, it was better. He could teach me lessons my dad never could.
My grand-sponsor helped me enormously because he talked openly about his own hard struggles in sobriety. I felt safe opening up to him in ways I hadn’t before. He mattered deeply to me. The last time I visited him at the hospital, he still looked relatively healthy. He talked about wanting to start a business. We were hopeful. Then he died shortly after, and it crushed all of us. The grief hit hard.
After he died, there were nights when my ex-wife would be out of town with my daughter, and I’d be alone in the house. My pattern during that period was simple: I’d put on movies he had recommended and cry. One film in particular stands out—the one about a woman in Florida who had been a prostitute, treated horribly, and eventually became a serial killer, murdering her Johns. My grand-sponsor loved that movie. Watching it wrecked me. I sobbed through it, missing him, feeling the unfairness of him being gone.
On those same nights, something unexpected started happening. I had ordered a keyboard—just a basic Yamaha electronic keyboard. One night I played it for an hour. Another night I played it again. Then one night, back in 2016, I recorded myself playing it and made my very first music video. Looking back now, it’s almost funny. This interest in music came completely out of nowhere. It didn’t come from ambition or strategy. It came out of grief, solitude, and sitting with emotions that had nowhere else to go.
With all of that as context—the grief, the spiritual experiences, the moments where connecting with my dad and with my grand-sponsor felt not only possible but natural—I want to describe what happened one night in 2017. It was the same night I had been triggered by my daughter’s timeout and flooded with anger toward my father. I already knew, from experience, that it was possible for me to connect with him. So I didn’t hold back. I silently raged at him as if he were right there in the room with me.
I told him exactly what I felt. I said I didn’t understand how he could have treated me the way he did. I didn’t understand how he could hit me, spank me until my ass was bruised, threaten me, scream at me, and lock me in my room. I told him it was fucked up. I told him he was a horrible parent. I kept repeating that I didn’t understand how any of that made sense. Then, in a pause between waves of anger—just a moment of quiet—I heard something from him, clear and calm. Would you like to understand?
That stopped me cold. I said yes. Hell yes. I told him I would love to understand how any of this could possibly make sense. And then something happened that I can only describe as his life flashing before my eyes. Images started moving rapidly, one after another, like a film playing at high speed. I saw him as a child, being hit and spanked by his own father. I saw him racing cars around Detroit. I saw him at the racetrack, immersed in a brutal environment—organized crime, mafia influence, rigged horse races, drugged horses, drunks, drug addicts, gamblers, sex addicts. It was chaotic, violent, and ruthless. That was the world he was shaped by.
Then I saw him in Vietnam. I saw the worst things human beings can do to each other. Men, women, children killed. Violence everywhere. Trauma layered on trauma. It was the kind of experience that breaks people at a fundamental level. He went to Vietnam already married. The child he had there—my half-sister—was the result of an affair, one of many. That realization tied directly into something else I had been struggling to understand: why so much of my family refused to meet her. To them, she wasn’t just a person. She was a living reminder of everything they didn’t want to face. As one of them put it, it felt like my father was haunting them from the grave. Another skeleton added to an already overflowing closet.
For my sisters especially, the reality was brutal. Here was an older sister—older than both of them—who existed because their father had cheated on their mother during the war. That wasn’t a detail anyone wanted to sit with. And the more I reflected on it, the more I realized how common that behavior was in war zones. From conversations I’d had with friends who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, they told me the same thing: cheating was normal. Faithfulness was the exception. In an environment defined by constant stress, fear, and death, people grasped for connection wherever they could. It didn’t make it right, but it made it understandable.
Seeing all of this in one continuous flood changed something in me. It didn’t excuse what my dad did to me. It didn’t suddenly make the abuse okay. But it gave me context. It showed me that he didn’t invent his behavior out of nowhere. He was carrying generations of violence, addiction, trauma, and moral chaos inside him. He passed some of that on to me. And in that moment, for the first time, I could see him not just as my parent, but as a deeply damaged human being who never learned another way to survive.
As the images kept moving, I watched my father’s life unfold after Vietnam. I saw the shame settle in. The guilt. The self-loathing. He hated himself. He hated life. Nothing made sense to him anymore. Alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex—every form of escape he could find, he grabbed. He was desperate to get out of his own head. Every attempt to build a normal, reasonable life collapsed into another chaotic mess. He tried to be a husband. He tried to do the right things. Everything spiraled anyway. One disaster after another. Then he met my mother. I saw him get kicked out of the house with her. I watched the years roll forward—his attempts at stability, his failures, his parenting of me—everything layered on top of unresolved trauma and self-hatred.
When the experience ended, I came out of it stunned. What I felt wasn’t anger anymore. It was clarity. I realized that from his point of view, he had done incredibly well. Far better than anyone might have expected given what he came from. He parented me with more love than he had ever received himself. He gave me enough tools to survive. He made my childhood hard enough that I could handle life. The outside world never felt as difficult to me as dealing with my own father had felt growing up—and that, strangely, prepared me. I came out of that experience thinking, Thank you, Dad. I love you. I’m proud of how you parented me.
That realization permanently changed how I relate to my childhood and to my father’s parenting. It didn’t erase what happened. It didn’t pretend abuse was okay. But it reframed everything. It allowed me to see him not as a monster, but as a deeply damaged man who still managed to give more than he ever received. It was one of many powerful spiritual experiences I’ve had, and it fundamentally altered how I carry my past.
Someone close to me hasn’t had that experience yet. He hasn’t processed any of this. He still carries resentment toward our father, even though our dad was significantly rougher on me than he ever was on him. I’ve tried sharing my experience with him, but that kind of understanding can’t be handed to someone. It has to be lived. Until he has his own moment of reckoning, his resentment will stay intact.
This feels like the right place to pause. By 2018, everything had shifted—my health, my career, my identity, my family, my understanding of my past. My son had been born, and what comes next is a completely different chapter. The roller coaster after that only gets wilder, and that’s where the next part of the book begins.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.