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.
At the beginning of 2022, my work and my business looked, at least from the outside, like they were going great. I was getting a lot of views. I was making a lot of money. I was enjoying the rush of winning the Facebook Stars contest and watching those payouts hit. I was playing tons of retro games and spending nearly all my time focused on maximizing views. On paper, it looked like success. But when I looked at the rest of my life honestly, it was harder to say things were going well. Almost all of my time, energy, and attention were consumed by video games and performance metrics. My marriage was already strained, something I had begun to realize more clearly after developing a crush the year before. I was trying, but I genuinely did not know what to do. My ex-wife and I were not on the same page about intimacy anymore. I felt dissatisfied and unhappy, even though I could not clearly articulate why. The kids were in school, and while my ex-wife and I used to do many things together with them, we were slowly drifting apart. I was showing up to her family dinners less often, and my obsession with games kept growing. I missed family activities so I could play. I told myself I was balancing things, but the truth was obvious if I was willing to look.
I really was helping a lot at home. I did the majority of the dishes. I handled a good portion of the laundry, including the sheets. I cleaned, took care of the cars, and mowed the lawn. I showed up in those practical ways. But when it came to time with the kids, I often had only thirty minutes to an hour of what could be called quality time on most days. Even then, some of that time was me sitting on the couch while they played video games or watched their tablets, with me reading something or watching a live streamer on my phone. That was the best time I usually gave them during the day. In terms of work and health, 2022 started out strong. My health was better than it had ever been. At the same time, I was consistently trying to get my mom to move next door to me, and she was actually beginning to consider it. After not seeing her for years, we had visited her at the end of 2019, which turned out to be perfect timing. We went again in the summer of 2021 and then took another trip in the winter of 2021. My relationship with my mom was in a really good place, and the same was true with my brother. I talked with him consistently, and despite the challenges in his life, I was able to be present in his life. We did not visit my extended family in 2020, but we took a nice road trip with my ex-wife’s family in 2021. Coming into 2022, nothing was perfectly organized. There were clear areas of dysfunction. Still, from the outside, it probably looked like things were going pretty well.
Internally, though, I was deeply frustrated with my work. I had achieved what I once fantasized about having on the outside, yet on the inside it did not feel the way I thought it should. I believed that if I were truly doing valuable work, it would feel good, grounding, and meaningful. Instead, something felt off. I became obsessed with trying to figure out what I could do that was genuinely valuable, something that involved consistently offering myself up in service to humanity rather than chasing attention. One day, an idea came to me that fit that longing perfectly. I described that idea in detail in I Was Famous on the Internet, so I am not going to repeat the full story here. There is too much else to cover. But this is where the short version begins.
After a strong start to the year in terms of viewership and business momentum, everything shifted on February 16, 2022. That day, I went live with a Warzone stream and announced that I was changing my race. Based on my face, most people would assume I am white. Yet I was living in a cultural moment where people were publicly changing their genders, even when their biological sex appeared fixed and hardwired. I woke up that morning with a clear, almost electric thought. If people can change their gender, then there is no reason I cannot change my race. If anything, race felt less fixed, less stable, and less grounded in biological reality than gender, which at least connects to sex. The idea hit me fully formed. I felt inspired, energized, and convinced that I was onto something important. In my mind, I pictured myself as a kind of civil rights figure, pushing boundaries and forcing a necessary conversation. I went live immediately. I told no one beforehand because I knew exactly what would happen. People would try to talk me out of it. They would say it was too sensitive, that it was dangerous territory, especially during Black History Month. They would say you cannot announce you are Black when you look white, not now, not ever. They would say I would get canceled. And that is exactly what happened.
The live stream exploded. It went wildly viral, far beyond anything I had anticipated. The comments were on an entirely different level of viciousness than anything I had ever experienced. I thought I had already seen the worst the internet could offer. I was wrong. What confused me most was that, in my own mind, I believed I was doing something valuable. I felt I was offering an idea that mattered. I was not joking or trying to provoke outrage for attention. I fully embodied the idea, and I genuinely loved it. I wanted to identify as Black, and more than that, I wanted to understand what it was like to be Black. I realized, painfully and honestly, that I did not understand, despite having many Black friends and despite living in predominantly Black communities, including a Black neighborhood in South Carolina where I was one of the only white people. I had proximity, but not understanding. I wanted that understanding. I wanted to step into it fully.
I got a taste of it immediately. One of the Black celebrities who commented publicly on my race change was Charlemagne the God, who was actually supportive of it. He said publicly that I had chosen to be treated as a Black man, and that is exactly what happened. His take captured it perfectly. Facebook decided that I looked too white to be serious about identifying as Black. They labeled my race change as hate speech. Their position was clear. Someone who looks like me cannot be sincere about changing their race, therefore it must be hateful. Meanwhile, every other platform upheld my legal right to self-identify. Legally, you are allowed to identify with whichever race you choose. There are no genetic requirements under the law. I verified this myself. In nearly every legal context, race is a self-identified characteristic. That means you choose it. When I chose to identify my race as Black on Facebook, they took my post down for hate speech, removed me from the partner program, and then made a public post celebrating how they had successfully shut me up and censored me for changing my race.
What makes this even more interesting is that I made five or six additional posts afterward that also received significant reach, and Facebook did not take those down. They targeted the main live stream. That was the one they removed. If you want the full story, with all the details and fallout, I wrote a much longer and more detailed chapter about it in I Was Famous on the Internet. That book goes far deeper into the aftermath and the broader implications. For now, this is the short version of how everything unraveled.
What I want to focus on here is what happened to the rest of my life after that moment. My ex-wife was furious that I changed my race without telling her, and that I had effectively destroyed, at least for the foreseeable future, my income and the entire business system I had built. This became another resentment she held onto, something she did not seem able or willing to let go of or forgive. She laid into me after I had already endured an absolutely miserable day being canceled on Facebook. None of the other platforms canceled me that day. YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok all saw mass reporting against me, but only Facebook took the post down. They did not take my page down, but the damage was done. After hours of hate, after being called racist over and over again, I felt completely hollow. The irony did not escape me. I was changing my race to Black out of love and curiosity, and yet I was being labeled racist. It did not matter what I intended or what I was trying to offer. What mattered was how people reacted. That was the most painful lesson of the day. The reaction mattered more than the message.
At the end of that brutal day, my ex-wife came down hard on me. She told me what I did was wrong, insensitive, and inconsiderate. I was horrified. I felt like my own wife had stabbed me in the back at the exact moment I needed her support the most. Instead of listening to me, instead of trying to understand that I believed I was doing something meaningful and valuable, she attacked me. I felt completely betrayed by how she handled it and by how aggressively she went after me. Around that same time, it became clear that her family had seen what happened on Facebook as well. From that point forward, they stopped asking me anything about my life. They never asked about my work again. They did not even generally ask superficial questions anymore. That kind of silence is its own form of rejection. When people are so walled off that they will not even pretend to care, it creates a cold, isolating distance that lingers.
The day after, I was in such a dark place that I deleted almost all of my profiles except for YouTube. I still wonder what my life would have looked like if I had just deleted everything permanently right then. The only reason I put my profiles back up was because most platforms give you a thirty day grace period after deleting, a window to change your mind. They do that because they are tired of people deleting impulsively and then begging to come back. I put everything back up because I still believed in the message I was trying to share. My original message was about love. It was about changing my race to show that we are all one, that we should work together, that we should try to understand each other. It was about exposing how we are controlled, manipulated, and encouraged to fight one another by clinging to identities like race, which make less and less sense the closer you look at them. My race change made the entire system look nonsensical. That was the point. It exposed how arbitrary it all is. I genuinely liked the idea of thinking of myself as Black, but beyond that, I wanted to highlight how ridiculous it is that people form entire belief systems, hierarchies, and judgments based on something as arbitrary as skin color.
If we discriminated based on eye color, the stupidity of it would be immediately obvious. It would be so clearly absurd that the only reasonable response would be to abandon the idea entirely. That was the message I was trying to carry. But the reaction completely overwhelmed the intention. The story went so viral that it spread far beyond my own audience. It was everywhere. It traveled so widely that my brother ended up having a conversation with one of his friends about what race really means and whether it is something you can change, without knowing that I was the one who had sparked the conversation. The idea moved independently of me. It went out into the world and started conversations on its own. Nobody with a big audience was publicly talking about this before I launched the conversation. For months afterward, I saw people posting the same question again and again. If you can change your gender, why can’t you change your race? I was the first person I ever saw openly initiating that conversation, and once it started, it did not stop.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.