This is my journal entry from December 2, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.
It felt damn good to sleep in a real bed last night, in a dark room, without cats crawling all over me or messing with my sleep. At the same time, I missed being with my sister and her kids. Both things were true. I woke up to my little sunrise alarm and headed out to pick up my kids, arriving a bit later than usual instead of lurking around waiting. I picked them up at 7:30 a.m. and took them to school, feeling genuinely happy to have this rhythm with them again. After dropping them off, I came home knowing it was time to get serious about my books. I swear this must be the twentieth time I’ve had the epiphany that I’m going all in on books, but today felt like the day I actually followed through. I submitted It’s Not You, It’s the Dating Apps to ACX for Audible distribution and to Findaway for Spotify distribution, alongside my other audiobooks. For once, it wasn’t just another idea—it was done.
At 9:30 a.m., I went in for a dental cleaning with my dental hygienist. We had a genuinely nice conversation, and I filled her in on how much had changed since I last saw her four months ago. I told her I was getting divorced, and she shared that she’d been through it herself. She encouraged me to renew myself, to enjoy the process, maybe even move to South Tampa and let life open up a bit. She mentioned that she’d met someone at work and that it had happened naturally. “Don’t force it,” she said. I told her I didn’t really know how not to hunt for women. I mean, what do you think the guy at work was doing? That guy was probably hunting for you. We both laughed, and it felt grounding to talk about it so casually.
After the cleaning, I went to an AA meeting around 11:00 a.m. My sponsor was there, along with a former sponsee. I got called on first, which I actually liked, and gave a short three-minute rundown of what’s happened in my life over the last two weeks. One thing my sponsor always compliments me on is how I take action, and that matters a lot to me. I believe it’s my responsibility to use my will to take actions, to ask for feedback, and to keep figuring out which actions are supportive, loving, joyful, and character-building—for me and for others. After the meeting, I had a good conversation with another guy and walked him all the way to his car so I could give him a copy of I Was Famous on the Internet.
I ended up about ten minutes late to my personal training session with my personal trainer at Crunch Fitness, but it didn’t matter. We had a great conversation. I told him that his approach of walking up to women and honestly saying what he feels—like telling someone directly that he finds her absolutely gorgeous—has been working really well for me. I told him about the woman I’d met and how natural and electric that interaction felt, especially how incredible it was to feel that same interest coming back from her. We talked more about Tampa, and he told me that dating in downtown Tampa is basically an ideal environment. He pointed out that South Tampa puts me close enough to take full advantage of that, which only reinforced what I’ve been thinking. We ended up doing a longer session, and I told him to bill me for a double so he’d be properly compensated.
After leaving Crunch, I went home for a quick snack and then headed out to pick the kids up from school. My daughter has a new after-school activity now, which means pickup is a bit later than it used to be. While I was home, I carved out some more time to work on my books, hoping to get my fourth diary book submitted later today. I’m currently dictating this as my sixth diary book, which means I’m a couple behind, but that’s just part of the process right now.
As I pulled up to the kids’ school and picked them up, they immediately launched into a coordinated chant from the back seat: “McDonald’s! We want McDonald’s. Please, Dad. Please, Dad.” The first thing out of my mouth was, “There’s no fucking way you’re getting McDonald’s today.” I don’t usually cuss at them like that, but I’d already asked them not to ask for McDonald’s after school—or at most, once a week—and to respect it if I said no. So no McDonald’s it was. They went quiet and a little pouty for a while. On the way home, we came up on a car accident at a nearby intersection and managed to slip through just before traffic completely backed up, which felt like a small stroke of luck in an otherwise emotionally full afternoon.
When we got to my place, I asked them what I could do to make it comfortable for them to have overnights here. I explained that I’d been spending too much time hanging out at my ex-wife’s house. That made sense during the first couple of months of the transition, but it’s time for me to reclaim my own space. If the kids are with me, I want them to be at my place. Of course, my ex-wife, the kids, and I can still do things together when it makes sense, but it needs to be intentional, not this default pattern of casually hanging out for two or three hours a day, which quietly turns into 10 or 20 hours a week at her house. My trip to Michigan made it painfully clear that space matters. I need my own space.
They’d previously said they didn’t want to stay at my house, but it turns out they really only needed a few simple things. My daughter wants a twin mattress she’s happy having on the floor right in front of my closet, and she’s comfortable with all three of us sleeping in the main bedroom. My son can sleep in the king bed with me and my daughter. I offered to set her up in the office, but she prefers being in the room with us. Beyond that, she just wants some strawberries, their books, lunch boxes, and a soccer ball, and they’re good. Listening to them lay it out so plainly felt relieving. I could see how having them here regularly would help me enjoy my alone time more, instead of sitting around feeling sad or lonely in my own place. It would give structure to my work time and my quiet time. And if I start dating someone, that will eventually require its own boundaries—maybe taking a night off when the kids are here, or someday having everyone together here—but right now there’s no girl in the picture, so it’s not something I need to solve yet.
After dropping the kids back off at my ex-wife’s house, I went to the 4:00 p.m. AA meeting and let the group know that we might have to shut it down, since there’s a real chance I’ll be moving to South Tampa next month. The guys there expressed a lot of gratitude for everything I’ve done to keep the meeting going. One of them said he thought he might be able to carry it forward with another guy who wasn’t there today because he’s been sick. After the meeting, one guy pulled me aside and said, “Go move to Tampa. Reinvent your life. You’d regret not doing it way more than doing it.” I was deeply grateful for that advice.
Earlier in the day, I’d been telling my personal trainer that my nephew talks about how clearly he hears God when he reads the Bible. For me, it feels like that all the time. Every moment feels like an interaction with God. That conversation after the meeting felt exactly like that—another clear, timely message delivered through someone else. I walked home afterward, and instead of heading straight back to my place, I stopped by the tennis club. I’m planning to cancel my membership.
On the way there, I ran into a married woman I met walking her dog. The dog was completely nuts about me, leaning in and soaking up the attention, and that opened the door for a short conversation. She told me she was married, and we talked a bit about her dog and a bit about me. As I walked away, I found myself wishing I’d simply told her how pretty she was and added something honest, like if she weren’t married, I’d be trying to ask her out. That kind of comment would have left her feeling complimented if she was in a closed relationship, and if she was in an open one, who knows. Some married women are looking to date too. Either way, it felt like a missed moment of clean, direct honesty.
Walking into the tennis club, I started reconsidering my plan to cancel the membership immediately. Maybe not this month. Maybe next month. It’s not like $240 is going to make or break my finances right now. I went in, used the bathroom, and walked back out without doing anything else, then headed home. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to keep the membership for another month so I could keep playing with friends and give people some notice that I might be leaving. I also realized it would be smart to actually check out the house and spend some time in South Tampa tomorrow before making a decision that could lock me out of the tennis club for six months or more if I wanted back in. I’m trying to slow myself down and not make everything so impulsive and immediate, even though just yesterday I was convinced I should cancel it. That $240 a month would neatly cover the gap between my current rent of $1,750 and a potential new rent of $2,300, so the math is obvious. What isn’t obvious yet is exactly how books are going to pay all the bills. What I do see clearly is that books are my future—writing them, selling them, and helping other people write theirs. And “potentially” isn’t even the right word anymore. I’m actively helping two people write books right now, and both of them are coming over this week.
It felt really good to know I’d be staying in at my place for the rest of the night. When I got home, I had some private time to myself and released a lot of pent-up energy after the conversation on my walk. I hopped in the shower right after and then got out to make a big, fat salad.
While I was making dinner, I listened to Metabolic Freedom by Ben Azadi, a book recommended to me by a guy at the AA meeting earlier today. I’d bought it right away after liking the introduction, but then he started getting into keto diet stuff, and my immediate reaction was, fuck, why did I buy this dumb book with all this keto bullshit? At the same time, I’ve noticed that when I have a strong negative reaction like that, there’s usually more for me to learn than I want to admit. So I kept listening, sorting through what felt useful and what didn’t. Is there some validity to keto? Absolutely. Do I think it’s ideal to eat only keto foods, loading up on meat and eggs, or going full carnivore? Absolutely not. That feels like a terrible idea. Still, there’s clearly something in this book worth paying attention to, especially since he acknowledges you can adapt his approach even if you’re vegan. So maybe I’ll give parts of it a real shot and see what actually applies to my life.
One thing I picked up listening to the first couple of hours of the book—at two-and-a-half–times speed—is that I’ve been snacking constantly and basically running my body on sugar. According to what he’s saying, that keeps inflammation high and makes it harder to lose fat. That landed for me. I did intermittent fasting a couple of years ago and was really happy with the results, so I can feel myself wanting to get back to that. I want to hear his full take on intermittent fasting, maybe grab another book specifically on that, and then actually listen to my body and see how it wants to eat. What I like about how he frames it is this idea of metabolic flexibility, and that’s something I want for myself.
I’m still sitting around nineteen-something percent body fat. According to his criteria, that technically puts me in the top seven percent of Americans in terms of health, based on exercise habits and body fat percentage. He talks about men being under twenty percent, and I’m just barely sneaking under that line. I’d really like to drop a bit more body fat and put on a little more muscle. There’s no real reason for me to hang out near twenty percent if I can move to the next level with how I eat. On top of that, I want to write a book called Unfat Yourself, so this book feels like it’s going to be a useful piece of that puzzle whether I like the keto framing or not.
Dinner was a massive, unapologetic salad made from lettuce that had been sitting in the fridge for at least a week and a half, plus cabbage that was just as old and some celery that had gone pretty floppy. That celery was limp as shit. Still, I chopped it up and ate it anyway, because floppy just means it lost some water in the fridge, not that it was rotten. It ended up in my belly, and it was good and nourishing. I loaded the salad with a ton of celery and three kinds of nuts, plus tahini, which I guess makes four kinds of nuts. It was a solid meal.
After showering and eating, I went all in on my books. First, I finished the manuscript and cover for what will be my fourth diary book. I went through hundreds of title ideas, mostly by being lazy and letting ChatGPT tell me which one was best and then agreeing with it. The title ended up being The Unpolished Truth: Living Alone Again. The previous title was Learning to Live Alone Again, but there were already a couple of books with similar names, and The Unpolished Truth: Living Alone Again really captures the style of these diaries. I finalized the manuscript, set up the Amazon listing, finished the cover, and submitted a proof request. Hopefully I can order the proof tonight and have it in my hands in a day or two so I can finalize everything.
After that, I shifted to getting transcripts ready for the fifth diary book, setting up a time to talk with my friend Joe, and texting with one of my top reader fans, Dave. He read Author in St. Petersburg and left an incredible Amazon review, and now he’s reading The Kind Divorce. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I ended up looking at my Amazon page and saw that someone had left a two-star review on I Was Famous on the Internet. It frustrated me. It’s always the critics who show up like that…
One thing I’ve always done exceptionally well is attract haters. If I could just balance that out by attracting a few more lovers, I’d really be onto something. As it stands, I’ve built a pretty solid collection of haters over the years. This latest one was probably someone who went to my website, didn’t even read the book, and casually dropped a two-star review. And Amazon just leaves it there indefinitely, quietly dragging down the book’s rating. That little moment of frustration is what motivated me to text Dave. I told him he’d left such a great review on the first book and that this one could really use a boost. He told me he hadn’t read it yet, which was fair, so I moved on and texted a friend to ask if she could leave a review since I know she actually finished the book and liked it. I just want reviews from people who’ve genuinely read the thing and resonated with it. That doesn’t feel like asking too much.
After that mini emotional detour, I got back to work. I read through and processed the first transcript for Diary Book 5. I’ve got about 50,000 words total in transcripts for that book, and I ran the first 5,000 through ChatGPT, then went through and edited them myself. That puts me roughly ten percent finished with the manuscript already, which feels amazing. It’s incredibly satisfying to watch these raw diary entries slowly turn into polished books. What a day. I feel genuinely good doing this work. My goal right now is simple: get caught up. Publish the books I’ve already written, keep writing new ones, and eventually pursue a real book deal. That path feels clearer than anything else right now.
Dave mentioned that he has two books published on Audible, so I downloaded both of them. They’re under his name, Dave Seminara. One is Footsteps of Federer: A Fan’s Pilgrimage Across Seven Swiss Cantons in Ten Acts, and the other is Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed, and a Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth. I bought both on Audible and made a mental note to leave him some well-deserved five-star reviews. It feels good to support other writers who are actually doing the work.
I’m really glad I gave myself this night alone to focus. That’s been missing lately. If I’d gone over to see my ex-wife and the kids, and then my mom afterward, I would’ve been completely distracted. I would’ve lost the chance to put in five straight hours of real work tonight—maybe four if we subtract the breaks and the food, but still, four solid hours of quality, focused effort. That’s huge for me. This is what I want my work life to look like indefinitely: writing books like this and helping other people write books like this. I trust that the universe will support that, even though I don’t yet know exactly how it’s going to happen. For now, I can tell my mind to figure it out, keep my heart open to seeing the path, and do the one thing I know for sure matters—keep writing.
One of the things I’m most grateful for over the past few months, despite all the instability, is that I’ve kept showing up every single day and doing these diary entries. No matter what else was falling apart or shifting around me, that part stayed intact. And that matters more than I probably realize yet.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.