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.
From 2006 to 2011, coping stops being something I do and becomes the way I live. I had been relatively healthy in college, and there were genuinely good times mixed in, but the five years that followed were rough in a way that felt structural, like the center beam of my life had cracked and everything else was compensating around it. I was deep in addiction by then, desperately hoping someone would come along and save me, while quietly knowing no one was lining up for that job. My ex-girlfriend, who was still my girlfriend as of the summer of 2006, had as many problems as I did, which made the relationship feel both familiar and impossible to leave. I was overweight the entire time, constantly trying and failing to regain control of my body. Drinking was a constant struggle. I was sick often, and when I ended up with mono that dragged on for nearly six months, life didn’t just get hard—it stayed hard. Every attempt to improve felt like stretching a rubber band: I would snap right back to where I started and then somehow end up worse.
Chronologically, this period opens with me renting a penthouse apartment with two guys I barely knew. That alone said a lot about how badly I was doing socially. I could have easily lived with friends, but my relationships were strained because my life revolved around drinking, gambling, video games, and porn. I made half-hearted attempts to see people, but I was increasingly disconnected, operating on a different frequency than everyone else. That summer, as my sense of control continued to slip, I tried getting sober again. At the same time, I was working a 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. internship at a federal courthouse, which was fucking miserable. I hated every other minute of it. Sitting there watching the clock all day permanently cured me of any romantic ideas about office work. My primary mental activity during those hours was counting down until I could leave and arguing with myself about whether I was going to drink that night. Some days I did. Other days I played video games, and occasionally I managed to see friends, but nothing felt like progress.
After one more embarrassing night, I made another serious commitment to sobriety and managed to string together a few days. Then my roommate told me he wanted to paint the apartment and suggested we pick up a few beers and make a project out of it. He was giving me a ride home from work, which felt generous, and I said yes without much thought. Sure, let’s get some beers and paint. The outcome was completely predictable. I did a terrible job painting, quickly decided the whole thing was pointless, said fuck the painting, and logged into World War II Online after my roommate said I’d painted enough. Same behavior, different apartment. Meanwhile, my weight kept climbing. I was heavier than I had ever been, eating nonstop, drinking nonstop, watching my body get further away from me while feeling powerless to stop it.
When the internship finally ended, nothing improved. I bounced into a couple of shitty jobs with no real direction because any meaningful career planning had long since collapsed under the weight of drinking, gaming, and porn. Somehow, I still had a girlfriend who tolerated all of this—far more than she should have. At that point she was pretty well stuck with me, emotionally if not literally. Don’t worry. She eventually got out.
I worked two shit jobs briefly and floated myself on zero-percent credit cards while barely making any money. I wasn’t solving problems so much as postponing them. Around this time, my dad went with me to buy my 2006 Toyota Corolla, which I am still driving today. It was an objectively great purchase. That car has outlasted multiple versions of me. After wrecking the previous car, I swore I would never drive drunk again. I made it a few months before I broke that promise, driving drunk to pick my girlfriend up one night after a party at my roommate’s house.
Backing up slightly, I moved out of the penthouse and into a brand new house with the same roommate, and we proceeded to completely fuck that place up. He managed to flood part of it. One night, while drunk, I kicked a hole in the wall after coming very close to getting arrested. Earlier that same night, bouncers had thrown me out of a bar, waved a cop over, and I somehow had the presence of mind to immediately straighten up, get into a cab, and go straight home. It was a close call, and it wouldn’t be the last one. The only reason I don’t have a criminal record is that I was good at getting out of shit. These days, I don’t do anything illegal, partly because if there’s a legal way to do something I’d rather do that, and mostly because I don’t drink anymore, which was the environment where nearly all of this illegal behavior happened.
Eventually, I ended up taking a job as a correctional officer. I couldn’t be a police officer because I had smoked marijuana within the past year or so, and they explicitly ask you about that under “undetected crimes.” My drinking and gambling were escalating, and I was getting desperate. Gambling had already pushed me toward trying to quit drinking in the past. I would gamble online, lose everything, beg poker sites to ban me, then create a new account and be right back at it. I managed to temporarily stop gambling online, but after starting the correctional officer job, I was still drinking. One night, I gambled online again and somehow managed to take the $200 I pulled out of my bank account and put it back in. At that point, $200 was a lot of money. I was barely covering rent.
In the final game, I remember playing Texas Hold’em heads-up against a woman on PokerStars. I had set up yet another new account, and I was in a state of complete desperation over that $100 1v1 match. I threw her off her game, got my money back, and felt briefly victorious in the worst possible way.
Around this same period, I bought a gun. When your life feels completely out of control, buying a gun can feel like a reasonable decision while from everyone else’s point of view it is insane. The same night of the $100 heads up win, my roommate was gone, I was drunk, and I was drinking his liquor while playing online Hold’em. Between heads-up games that I was winning, I fired a few shots out the door into the air. The next day my roommate came home and casually asked if I had gone to the range. I said no, and then realized that I had forgotten to clean up the empty shells from both the front and back doorway where I had been firing the gun.
Despite all of this, I still wanted to do better and was horrified by my behavior. I remember sitting there one day playing Quake 4, thinking, I don’t want to fucking drink. I just want to get my life together. Why is it like this? What if something I can never get past happens one night? I was miserable every other day. Bored. Directionless. I hated my life. Drinking was the only thing that made me feel better, even as it made everything worse. The idea of going to AA wasn’t even on my radar.
Working as a correctional officer at the Department of Juvenile Justice dropped me into an environment that felt brutal and overwhelming which ironically matched my inner life. I found myself relating to the inmates there even though I had never done the things they had like murder. My mind was full of fucked-up thoughts, and it felt like the main difference between them and me was that I had grown up in a relatively loving, stable household. That had given me just enough insulation to keep me from crossing the worst lines.
The first few nights on the job, I nearly quit. On one of those early shifts, the major came through and dressed me down hard, telling me exactly what a fuck-up I was as a correctional officer because I struggled to maintain control of my unit. Right before this, I the kids in my unit—by “kids,” I mean twelve- to eighteen-year-olds, some of them bigger than me, almost all of them tougher and scarier—were ready to jump me in the bathroom. Thankfully, I didn’t walk into that bathroom because they would have beaten the shit out of me.
Years earlier at that facility, an officer had been beaten so badly that, as far as I heard, he was left permanently disabled. His partner had ended up beating the hell out of one of the kids involved the next night and was taken to prison for it himself. That was the environment I was walking into every day—already miserable, already addicted, already barely holding myself together.
It was a rough environment, especially for a young White man like me. Most of the correctional officers were older Black women, and most of the kids locked up there were young Black men. A lot of them fucking hated me for being a young White guy in that space. Many of my coworkers didn’t like me either. They eventually paired me with the only other White guy on staff and gave us a unit together, and that arrangement worked reasonably well. The real reason I didn’t quit, though, had nothing to do with teamwork or resilience. It was pure spite. The major had talked so much shit to me that I couldn’t walk away. I had no other job prospects. If I quit, I would have had to move back in with my parents, and I didn’t even know if that was an option. When someone tells me I’m not cut out for something, my instinct is always, fuck you, I’ll prove it. So I stayed.
I worked as a correctional officer from November 2006 to June 2007 on nothing but stubborn determination. I was going to show everyone I could do it. I told myself I’d keep the job until I landed a police officer position, even though the work was miserable. My shift ran from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. By February, I had mono. Technically, I came down with mononucleosis back in November, which made no sense. I had a steady girlfriend and wasn’t out kissing or fucking anyone else. I honestly believe the stress of the job combined with my shit diet and drinking broke my immune system. I kept going to work anyway. It was brutal. Some days my internal organs were so swollen that if one of those kids had punched me in the abdomen, I would have gone straight to the emergency room and might have died.
Eventually, I reached a point where I couldn’t keep pushing like that. I felt awful all the time, and I was convinced something bad was going to happen. Some of the kids really fucking hated me, and I really fucking hated them too. They threw vicious taunts and slurs at me, asking what I was doing there. There was one kid I fucking hated. He was about seventeen, rough as hell, and I was convinced he had murdered someone. My head was in such a warped, exhausted place that I caught myself wishing the worst on him and telling myself that would somehow make the world better. That’s where my head was at. I could see if him and I kept being in the same unit, violence was highly likely and I would probably be on the losing end.
I eventually landed in the infirmary a couple months after I started drinking before work. That started when one night I noticed some of my coworkers had been drinking, and I thought, fuck it, this must be what we do. Some nights I’d sit at home playing the Scarface video game on PlayStation 2, drink five beers, then drive into work and sober up during the shift. That was miserable. On my days off, I’d get hammered with my friends, but I missed a lot of their lives because of my fucked-up schedule. I couldn’t get first or second shift because I was new, and third shift was the garbage shift nobody wanted. The only upside was that the kids were usually asleep for most of it.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.