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.
Meanwhile, the crypto channel was thriving. I had a month where I made more than ten thousand dollars selling a crypto course. The whole crypto arc is something I describe much more fully in I Was Famous on the Internet, so I do not want to rehash all of it here. What matters is that the channel exploded in 2023. I became one of the rising faces on crypto YouTube. The views were huge. The money was flowing. And, predictably, it still was not enough. I got bored. The same pattern repeated itself. No matter how well something worked, it never filled whatever I kept trying to fill.
By the summer of 2023, I quit gaming again. This time it was because I decided I wanted to make music instead. That yoga crush had lit something up in me that I had not felt in a long time. Even though I had not seen her in months, I still thought about her every single day. I did not tell my ex-wife for months. I talked about it with my mom, my sponsor, and people at AA. At one point in the past, I had told my ex-wife about having a crush on someone at AA, and I remembered her saying she did not want to hear about crushes anymore. So I kept this one mostly to myself.
The road to quitting gaming was similar to 2016 and 2019. I told myself I did not have enough time for it and it was not making money anyway. In a moment of weakness just before quitting, I even went back and did a Call of Duty Warzone stream on Facebook after swearing I would stream there again. It was awful despite having a solid audience. I made no money. I played terribly. I got frustrated. Not long after that, I ended up deleting my Facebook page entirely, a page with millions of followers that had taken me more than a decade to build. I was still demonetized a year and a half later, not even for the race change anymore, but for some ridiculous unoriginality flag after posting a clip from one of my own live streams. When I tried to get help, I hit nothing but bots. Because I was no longer in the Facebook Gaming program, there was no human support. Nobody cared. Even though my posts were still reaching hundreds of thousands of people some days, almost none of them would follow me to Twitch or YouTube where I was monetized.
I snapped. In a mix of anger and exhaustion, I deleted the entire page. Over the next couple of years, I would sometimes regret it, thinking about the massive audience I had thrown away and wondering if monetization might have been fixable someday. At the same time, I felt free. I was finally done with Facebook. I got rid of all my gaming gear. I shut that door completely. And I went all in on music.
I bought an Ableton Push 3 for $1000 to start. I bought another keyboard. I started live streaming music. Crypto became the stable money engine again, and music became the creative outlet. Over the next two years, I released hundreds of songs on Spotify all under my name Jerry Banfield. I was just listening to my Bandance album yesterday which still rocks 3 years later. I am genuinely proud of the amount of music I made and how much my skill improved compared to where I had been before. I made some songs that are absolute bangers. There is one called Petra’s House Party that still makes me smile every time I hear it.
I also made a song about the girl from yoga. I called it Tuesday Yoga Crush, even though the crush really lived on other days of the week. I named it that because I basically stole the structure and energy from the song Tuesday and made my own version. The lyrics were ridiculous and hilarious, and I laughed my ass off while making it. I even started planning a fiction book inspired by the whole experience.
That crush, as messy and painful as it was, reignited something in me. It made me want to really create again. It pulled me back into music with a level of intensity I had not felt in years. It was crazy how something that never even turned into a relationship could shake my life so deeply and push me into an entirely new creative phase.
After Tuesday Yoga Crush released, I finally told my ex-wife about the crush I had on the girl at yoga. That confession became another major resentment my ex-wife added to the growing pile. Once I told her, it felt like another nail going into the coffin of our marriage. I released that song right before I deleted Facebook, and the response was wild. Big streamers played it on their streams. Some of the top Facebook streamers were laughing, vibing to it, loving it. Seeing my music land like that felt incredible. For a moment, I thought, holy shit, my music is actually getting traction.
If I had to pick my favorite song from that period, it would be She Did. That one came straight out of my obsession with Deadmau5. He made a track called Aural Psynapse, and when I listened to it, I could hear what felt like subliminal lyrics buried in it, something sensual hiding inside the melody. The song was so hypnotic and clever that I loved it immediately. I made my own version of that idea with She Did. If you listen to Aural Psynapse and then listen to She Did, you can hear the similarities. I did not copy the notes directly, but the influence is obvious. I loved that song. It felt like I had cracked into something real creatively.
From there, I went on a tear. I released a ton of albums across Spotify and everywhere else people listen to music. I made songs that people genuinely loved, and I had a ridiculous amount of fun doing it. I even experimented with diary-style tracks. I put out a small album called 11 Exercises in Power. I made ambient music. I made a dance track called This Is Your Mom. I made another one called Home Base. I recorded freestyle tracks that were funny as hell, like Perfection Is Obedience, God Mode, and Drop That Bottom on my One Time album. I made an album called Bandance with a track called FN Goat that I still think is great. I made Bantrap with a bunch of trap songs, including several about buying ICP. I created a digital wellbeing course in audio form. I made a full 12 Steps of AA album. One night at a meeting, a woman I was talking to told me that she and her sponsor had listened to that entire 12-step album on Spotify. That blew my mind. I had made something that actually mattered to someone.
The album that Tuesday Yoga Crush is on is called August 2023 with Jerry Banfield. It was my first album in five years. Just talking about it now makes me want to make music again. I love making music. The problem is time. Who has time to make music, write books, record audiobooks, and do everything else I was doing? Still, that yoga crush was enormous in my life. It lit a fire that changed the direction of my creativity.
As 2023 went on, life smoothed out on the surface. I was making music. I was running the crypto channel. My ex-wife was steady in her job. The crypto channel started producing consistent income. We hit a period of stability. From sometime in late 2023 into 2024, there was not much drama to report. We were grinding. We were functioning. Things looked calm from the outside. But underneath, the unresolved stuff was still there, quietly accumulating, waiting for whatever would come next.
In 2024, after about six months away from video games, I started playing again. My ex-wife was furious. It was the same story we had already lived through multiple times. You’re going to do whatever you’re going to do. I had made a bunch of music albums, but I missed gaming. I found a game called Marvel Snap. It was similar to Gods Unchained, but with a much bigger audience and no NFTs. It was even more addictive. In early 2024, with solid crypto income coming in, I spent over two thousand dollars on Marvel Snap cards without much hesitation. I started streaming it on Twitch and slid right back into gaming. At the same time, I was still making music. Creatively, I was on fire. I was producing an absurd amount of content.
At one point in 2023, I had as many as eight YouTube channels across different topics. I deleted several of them, then made new ones. Over the years, I ended up with four separate Jerry Banfield gaming channels, plus gaming videos posted on at least two other channels. I had a crypto reviews channel. I was everywhere. I had money coming in. People were scheduling calls on jerrybanfield.com where they were paying me three hundred dollars an hour to talk to me on Zoom about crypto, and I was turning around and spending lots of that money on video games. I was chasing Twitch Partner again, this time with Marvel Snap. When I played it on my tablet, the addiction was vicious. I was live streaming constantly. I was playing during my time with the kids and even got them their own accounts to play the game too. It started to become obvious that something deeper was going on.
I had a breakthrough when I realized that my Marvel Snap addiction was covering up how uncomfortable and unsatisfied I was in my marriage. I kept asking myself why I could not stop. In 2024 alone, I quit Marvel Snap three separate times. Each time, I made videos saying I was done, that the game was addictive, that people should not play it. Then two weeks later, I would come back and spend more money while releasing another I’m back video. I told my ex-wife how much I was spending, and she was furious. I was embarrassed. I shared openly in AA that I had a new addiction. At the same time, I had not seen the girl from yoga in over a year, and I still thought about her almost every day. Every yoga class, I still looked for her. Every woman who was not her felt like a disappointment.
Around July 2024, after quitting Marvel Snap for the third time, I got rid of all my gaming systems again. I had bought a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X … again. The kids were playing constantly, glued to tablets and consoles. I shut it all down. I quit Marvel Snap and told myself, fuck it. If quitting gaming means I finally have to face my marriage, then that is what I am going to do.
That same month, I flew to Michigan by myself for my nephew’s graduation. I really wanted to go. My ex-wife did not. She said she was too busy, gave the usual reasons. Earlier that year, around New Year’s at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024, we had taken the kids to Michigan in the winter. They absolutely loved it. We went to Frankenmuth, went ice skating, saw snow, and spent time with family. It was a beautiful trip. Because of that, my ex-wife did not want to go again in the summer. So in July, I flew up by myself to attend my nephew’s graduation party.
On that trip, something crystallized with shocking clarity. I knew I needed to get divorced. I did not want to be in the marriage anymore. It was not a dramatic revelation. It was calm, certain, and undeniable. My ex-wife and I had already had multiple fights since the yoga crush where she had essentially told me that if I wanted someone like that, I should go be with her, that she would cooperate, and that everything would be fine. Strangely, even though part of me had fantasized about that outcome, when she actually said it, I shut it down. I told her no, we had to stay together. I told myself there was no point in being with someone else, because then I would have to deal with them and still deal with my ex-wife. The truth was more uncomfortable. I did not feel like I had time to get divorced. My work consumed me completely. I was obsessed with making videos, producing content, staying relevant. The idea of navigating a divorce felt impossible not because it was emotionally hard, but because I was too addicted to my work to step away and deal with it.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.