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.
As I continued to stabilize mentally, my relationship with my ex-wife—and with her family—improved dramatically. Then one day, about six months into sobriety, my ex-wife said something to me that stopped me cold. We were at her parents’ house, and I was getting all worked up, complaining about her family and how much of a pain in the ass they were. She looked at me and said, “You go to AA and talk about how much you love everyone there and how great they are. Why can’t you do that here with my family?” I remember sitting there, dumbfounded, out by the fire pit at her parents’ house, thinking, damn, that actually makes complete sense.
That’s when it clicked. What I was doing at AA—how I was acting there—that was a classroom. Every time I went to a meeting, I was essentially going to class to learn how to be a decent human being, how to love other people, and how to love myself. The point wasn’t to behave well only inside the meeting rooms. The point was to practice that behavior everywhere else, when I wasn’t in AA, and then be accountable for how I acted out in the real world. That realization was a massive breakthrough for me.
Even so, sobriety didn’t suddenly make everything easy. I still had days where I struggled badly. About once a month or so, my ex-wife and I would get into a fight, and afterward I’d end up laid out on the couch, in a dark, hopeless place, for a couple of hours. The drinking was gone, but my mental health still had a lot of work to do. I could feel that clearly. So I started reading relentlessly—book after book after book—trying to understand my mind and stabilize myself. I also began opening up to counseling, something I had avoided earlier.
Around that time, my sponsorship situation shifted in a pretty dramatic way. My first sponsor ended up getting kicked out of our AA meeting. I actually voted to kick him out while sitting right next to him in the business meeting. The reason was simple and serious: he kept harassing women. Every time a woman came to the meeting, he would immediately go up to her and ask for her phone number. Then, unsurprisingly, those women would stop coming. Some of the guys in the meeting confronted him about it, telling him not to ask women for their numbers the first time he met them, especially when he didn’t know them at all. Instead of listening, he’d get angry and start threatening violence against the guys who confronted him. At that point, it was clear the behavior wasn’t going to change. I said that for the good of the group, we needed to encourage him to leave. We weren’t kicking him out of Alcoholics Anonymous. He could go to another meeting. But his behavior was causing real harm, and we had already tried addressing it calmly and directly. It wasn’t just one incident or one woman. It was consistent.
Not long after that, he died unexpectedly. When that happened, a lot of guys in the meeting were shaken and upset. I remember my grand-sponsor stepping in one day and essentially taking over the meeting. He had us read the long form of the Third Tradition from the Twelve and Twelve. He hadn’t been at the business meeting where we voted to remove my first sponsor, and the whole situation stirred up a lot of emotion and reflection in the group.
After that, I ended up getting another sponsor. My grand-sponsor was his sponsor as well. This new sponsor—my second—took me back through the first few steps again and worked with me patiently. We did the first three steps together in his trailer, and then he encouraged me to go even deeper. He suggested I do another Fifth Step, this time with the rector at the church.
So at that point, I had done two Fifth Steps privately with different people, in addition to sharing most of my Fourth Step openly in AA meetings. I went to the rector and did several counseling sessions with him. Those conversations took me even further back into my childhood. He helped me uncover memories I hadn’t accessed before—deeper layers of childhood sexual trauma. It was in those sessions that I remembered all the way back to the babysitter. Before that, I hadn’t remembered anything that early.
If you want to go even further back, you could argue that circumcision itself is an immediate sexual trauma inflicted on men at birth. But even if you don’t want to count that, the earliest trauma I could clearly identify went back to that babysitter I mentioned at the beginning of this book.
I went to see the rector at the church for several sessions, and this was my first real experience with counseling. It turned out to be incredibly helpful. He had worked with a lot of addicts and alcoholics and had some personal experience in that world himself, which made a huge difference. He understood how my mind worked in a way that didn’t feel clinical or judgmental. He never charged me for any of those sessions. Later, when we moved in 2016, I wrote him a $1,000 check as a donation to the church as a thank-you for everything he had done for me. Those sessions mattered. They helped me stabilize and go deeper into healing in a way AA alone couldn’t quite reach.
Another major breakthrough came at the beginning of January 2015. My ex-wife was pregnant, and I wasn’t just thinking about myself anymore. I was thinking about being a father. Around that same time, I was reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh named the The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation. One section focused on facing the fear of death directly. He talked about how powerful it can be to meditate on death itself, because as long as you’re still terrified of dying, that fear quietly runs your life. Until you face it, you never really get to live.
I decided to try it. One day after the gym, when my body was tired and my mind was a little quieter, I went home and got into the shower. I thought, okay, let’s do this right now. I started following the meditation exactly as described. I imagined myself dying. I pictured my body dead in detail. I imagined different scenarios—dying in bed at home, dying of natural causes, my body in a morgue. I pictured my funeral. I imagined being cremated, my body burning. I imagined being placed in a coffin and lowered into the ground. I didn’t rush past any of it. I stayed with each image.
Then I expanded it outward, just like the meditation instructed. I pictured my ex-wife dead. I imagined finding her body. I imagined identifying her. I imagined watching her body burn or being lowered into the ground in a coffin. Then I moved outward again. I pictured my mother dead. I pictured my family dead. I pictured my friends dead. I even pictured the unborn child my ex-wife was carrying—barely started growing—dead as well. Then it widened further. I imagined dead bodies on the road. Death everywhere. Ordinary. Unavoidable. Universal.
At some point, something inside me broke. I hit a mental wall and completely lost it. I started scream-crying in the shower. It wasn’t quiet crying. It was full-body, animal grief. I remember thinking, I don’t want to die. This isn’t fair. This isn’t theoretical. This isn’t some abstract philosophical idea. This is the direction reality is moving. This is where everything is going. This is not optional. This is not a maybe. This is the fact that everyone ignores every day. And standing there naked in the shower, confronting it directly, I just unraveled. I don’t know how long it went on. I know I ran a lot of hot water. I know I stayed there long enough that time stopped feeling linear.
At a certain point, the pain reached such an extreme level that something inside me broke. I had been in agony for what felt like an eternity, fully facing death in a way I never had before. Picturing my future child dead was what really pushed it over the edge. Picturing my ex-wife dead pushed it even further. It became unbearable. My mind just collapsed under the weight of it. And then, suddenly, there was silence. I had been scream-crying in the shower, and now I was just standing there. No thoughts. Nothing coming at me. Just stillness.
Then a single thought appeared, calm and obvious: well, you’re alive now, aren’t you? And the answer came immediately—hell yes, I’m alive now. It felt like I had gone all the way forward to death and then traveled back in time to this exact moment, like I had been given another chance to live. I felt an overwhelming sense that life itself was a massive gift. Everything felt reset, like a beginner’s mind. I had cried so hard that I ended up sitting down in the shower, and then the crying turned into laughing and crying at the same time. The water was just pouring over me, warm, steady, coming out of this thing in the wall, splashing onto my face, and it felt incredible. I was marveling at the simplest things. It felt childlike in the best way.
I got out of the shower and immediately recorded a video and uploaded it to YouTube—one that’s since been deleted along with all the rest of my videos—talking about how I had broken my fear of death. I remember saying how grateful I was to be alive, how it felt like I had every chance in the world right now to live fully and do something meaningful. That moment shattered a huge amount of old programming. Life became dramatically easier after that. Courage is much easier when you’re not secretly afraid of dying. When you’re afraid of death, it infects everything. It makes every decision heavier, every risk terrifying. Breaking that fear freed me up to go all out with my life.
The way I went all out, at least initially, was by becoming a complete workaholic. I poured everything into work. I had gotten onto a platform called Udemy back in early 2014, where people teach online courses and sell them. When I was still drinking, I had made one course on a sober day, but it didn’t sell at all, so I just gave it away. In sobriety, I took all that energy—forty hours a week or more—that I had been pouring into drinking, obsessing, and destroying myself, and I redirected it into building my business. I made videos, built courses, served clients, did anything I could to make money and create something.
I started uploading full video courses on Udemy, then putting preview videos on YouTube that funneled people into the paid courses. It worked incredibly well. In my first couple of years sober, I made millions of dollars in sales on Udemy. Almost every single day, I set a goal to film at least two videos for one of my courses. Many days, I filmed four, eight, sometimes sixteen video lectures in a single day. I also paid other people to create courses for me on trending topics. Before long, I rose into the top ten instructors on the entire platform.
For the first time in my life, I felt what it was like to put my energy into something without immediately sabotaging myself—at least not right away. I felt alive, productive, powerful. For the full Udemy story, I tell it in detail in I Was Famous on the Internet, but the short version is this: in my first two years sober, Udemy paid me over $600,000, and total sales across my courses ran into the millions. Eventually, I got banned. Not because I violated any policies—I didn’t, though I lived in a lot of gray areas—but because they didn’t like me. I was loud. I criticized them publicly. I had a big personality, and I was outperforming people they preferred. They fabricated policy violations and kicked me off the platform. But that came later. What mattered in this chapter is that sobriety, spiritual awakening, and facing death completely rewired how I lived. I was no longer trying to escape life. I was finally all the way in it.
One thing I’ll say honestly is that I was relieved to be free from Udemy when it ended. I was making so much money on that platform that I barely had time to live. Everything became about producing more content, optimizing, chasing the next thing. I tried all kinds of angles to turn video courses into money. I tried live-streaming games on Twitch so I could make Udemy courses about it. I experimented with crypto and, unsurprisingly, managed to turn that into another addiction. In my first year sober, I got into Bitcoin and started trading it, promptly losing thousands of dollars in 2014 alone. Crypto became my new form of gambling. It scratched the same itch. I finally shut that down toward the end of the year and took a break from crypto altogether. Then in 2015, I partnered with another instructor to teach a Bitcoin course, and by 2016 I was making crypto videos on YouTube that were getting a lot of views. It was still addictive, but now it also made money and attention. It was essentially a way of monetizing my addiction rather than drowning in it.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.