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.
A few weeks later, I went to one of those parties and got absolutely shithoused. It didn’t take much. A few shots, a few beers—maybe five shots and three or four beers total—and I was completely fucked up. I barely made it back to my dorm room. I remember the room starting to spin, which was terrifying and confusing. I kept thinking, what the fuck is happening? I made it to a toilet and puked, then spent the rest of the next day in absolute misery. That hangover was the worst I ever had in my life. I went on to drink alcoholically for the next eleven years, and I never experienced anything that bad again. My body simply wasn’t ready to be hit with that much alcohol all at once after a lifetime of sobriety. I threw up all day, dry heaving, unable to escape the pain.
At some point, the college TV network—maybe thirteen channels total—was playing Pay It Forward, that Jodie Foster movie. I couldn’t find anything else to watch and was desperate for any kind of distraction, so I left it on. It was awful. Like a train wreck I couldn’t look away from. I was arguing with the movie out loud, telling myself I wasn’t anything like her, that I’d only drank twice, that this wasn’t me. It was Easter Sunday, April 20, 2003. After years of wanting to be grown up and independent, I suddenly wished I was back home with my Easter basket. I hated being on my own. I felt hopeless, sick, and overwhelmed. I had never felt that much physical pain in my life. My entire body was wrecked. Even on Monday, the next day, I still didn’t feel right. From the very first time I got drunk, alcohol caused serious negative consequences to my physical health—and that was with fewer than ten drinks. I remember all of it clearly, including stopping to get a sub on the way home and throwing all of it up.
That experience didn’t stop me. It just convinced me to be “more careful.” For a while, I tried to moderate. I’d have a beer or two, maybe a couple of shots, telling myself I was being responsible. Then sophomore year came, and I moved in with a group of guys. One of them drank heavily, and on move-in day he spiked my drink without telling me. I didn’t even realize what was happening. I just felt confused, then suddenly drunk, while freshmen were still moving into the dorms. That was the real beginning. From there, my alcoholism took off.
Freshman year, I hadn’t developed drinking buddies. Sophomore year, I did. My friendships started forming around alcohol. One guy didn’t drink at all. He was cool, and we played a ridiculous amount of video games together and watched movies like Super Troopers, Scarface, Fight Club, Clerks, all that stuff. The rest of the guys drank hard and fast. We played Madden, put on boxing gloves, and beat the shit out of each other. We played NHL Hitz. We drank, watched movies, talked endless shit, and bonded over chaos. These guys taught me how to drink. They had hookups for handles of liquor. They showed me how to mix drinks. And without realizing it at the time, I let them show me how to become an alcoholic.
They also introduced me to more kinds of porn, and that turned out to matter more than I expected. Freshman year, my porn habits were pretty basic. I watched standard straight porn and some girl-on-girl stuff and didn’t think much about it. My favorites freshman year were homemade movies that guys would record with their girlfriends. These new friends, though, showed me all kinds of other porn—genres and scenarios I hadn’t gone looking for on my own. Some of it left me feeling genuinely bad afterward, like I’d crossed some internal line without meaning to. Instead of stopping, I did the opposite. I started searching out more on my own, going deeper and darker, and over time I slipped into a place where I really didn’t like myself. Up until then, I’d lived most of my life in a fairly bright mental space. Now I felt like I had a secret life I couldn’t talk about, things I was doing that made me feel ashamed and disconnected from people around me.
Drinking kept dragging me further down too. A few months into this phase, gambling entered the picture. My friends introduced me to online poker on PokerStars. At first it was harmless enough—ten dollars here, a free roll there, maybe twenty bucks at most. But I quickly discovered that drinking and gambling paired together almost perfectly. I’d mix vodka with Dr. Thunder, the cheap Walmart knockoff of Dr. Pepper, and pound vodka Dr. Thunders all night while playing poker, watching movies, watching porn, and playing video games. Looking back, it’s hard not to call that what it was: deeply antisocial behavior. I was isolating myself while telling myself I was having fun.
Thankfully, ROTC still gave me some structure. It kept me grounded enough that I didn’t completely spiral. I was still doing all right with girls, socially speaking, but I continued to struggle when it came to actually having sex. One girl came over and hung out with me multiple times. One night, when I was sober, she asked if she could sleep in my bed because her roommate was being too loud. Even then, I completely missed the hint that she wanted to have sex. I genuinely didn’t understand what was being offered to me and she went home frustrated after I did not start anything with her for 20 minutes.
Eventually, alcohol did what sobriety never had. After a night of heavy drinking, I finally had sex for the first time. It wasn’t romantic, meaningful, or grounding—it was transactional, rushed, and emotionally hollow. My friends’ cruel jokes afterward about the girl stung more than I admitted, and even though I tried to turn the experience into something validating, it only reinforced how disconnected I felt from myself and others.
Spring break came, and I went to Myrtle Beach with one of my closest friends at the time. Just the two of us. We brought an absolutely stupid amount of alcohol—at least two full handles of liquor plus cases of beer, all for ourselves. It was excessive even by college standards. The first night, we got completely wasted by playing poker but betting with drinks. By the second night, I was hung over beyond belief. I couldn’t stand the thought of alcohol, couldn’t smell it, couldn’t look at it, but going out was still the plan. My friend told me he’d meet me at this club and dropped me off because parking was impossible. It was spring break in Myrtle Beach, and half of South Carolina had descended on the place.
I walked into the club feeling like absolute garbage, physically wrecked, trying to convince myself to power through it. It was around 10:00 p.m., and I’d had all day to recover as much as I could, which wasn’t much. I was standing there thinking I’d just make the best of it when I spotted a girl across the room. She immediately caught my attention, but she came with a complication: a friend glued to her side. My first thought was irritation. I wasn’t interested in hooking up with both of them, and I assumed the friend would be an obstacle.
Then something incredible happened. This guy shows up—long flowing hair, literal Jesus look—and starts hitting on the friend given I’d worked into dancing with the girl I met on spring break. I remember thinking this was divine intervention. I was genuinely grateful. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to meet another man before or since. When we were introduced, I shook his hand like it was Christmas morning. In my head, I was thanking God for sending his only son to handle a problem I didn’t want to deal with. I was all in on this guy wingmanning the situation for me, and I appreciated him immensely.
The night took off from there. We danced our asses off. She ended up entering a wet T-shirt contest, didn’t win, and some other girl got immediately kicked out of the bar, which felt like a massive buzzkill. Eventually, she and her friend drove us back to their hotel. The car ride nearly ended me. It was March, still cold outside, and they cranked the heat all the way up in the fucking car. I was on the edge of puking the entire ride, sweating, dizzy, barely holding it together. I somehow made it up to the hotel room without throwing up, which felt like an achievement.
Inside, I reverted to being weirdly prude and awkward. Police Academy 4 was playing on the TV. I sat off to the side in a chair while she sat on the bed. Thankfully, Jesus took initiative and started making out with his girl. That broke the tension. She pulled me over to the bed and started making out with me. This time, I was ready, and we ended up sleeping together. When morning came, I wanted to get back to my friend and see how he was doing. He hadn’t come out at all the night before because he was still hung up on his ex.
They wanted to go to the beach. The girl I met on spring break asked if I wanted to come with them, and I said no. I told her I was going back to the hotel to drink, see my friend, and hang out. I also wanted to tell him what had happened. I wanted to brag. She was actually hot, which mattered to me then, especially after how things had gone with the girl I lost my virginity to. I didn’t know how to reconcile any of that yet, but I knew this felt like a win and I wanted to talk about it. Before I left, she asked if we should exchange numbers. I said no. I just ditched them. I never saw her again. I don’t know her last name. I have no way to ever contact her. Looking back, that was some pretty cold-hearted shit. At the time, it felt normal. I didn’t know yet how much cold-heartedness I still had coming back my way.
After that trip, things turned. Junior year became a long losing streak. Being a resident hall advisor and living on campus had actually helped keep me somewhat stable, but a couple of friends and I decided we should move off campus and get an apartment together. The idea was freedom—real parties, no responsibilities, no oversight. In reality, it sent me straight down the shitter. Once we moved off campus, I got lonely fast. There were no longer people around all the time to casually hang out with. My friends had lives. One guy we roomed with was already married at twenty years old. Another was constantly having girls over and had a social life outside of just hanging with me. I dropped ROTC after deciding I wasn’t going into the military because fuck going to Iraq. I changed my major. Suddenly, I stopped seeing all the ROTC guys who had been a big part of my friend group. I suddenly was alone a lot. Lonely in a way that kept feeding on itself.
I filled that space with movies, video games, gambling, and alcohol. The more I drank, the crazier I got. The more shit I talked, the less people wanted to be around me. Drinking became frequent—often every night, or at least getting drunk several nights a week. Poker escalated too. By that point, I was addicted to it. The combination of poker, drinking, porn, and video games became my entire life. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer things were happening with girls. My self-esteem was collapsing, and girls responded to that immediately. When I first got to college, I felt good about myself. I had confidence. I approached women. I got interest, made out, hooked up, and eventually had sex. Now I felt like shit, and girls treated me accordingly. I was in classes with all new people, no built-in social structure, no momentum. So I went all in on the isolation: poker, video games, drinking, porn, over and over.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.