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.
On the plane from Tampa to Detroit, I listened to Signs by Laura Lynne Jackson, and I cried almost the entire flight. I kept thinking, I know I need to get divorced, but I can’t. I know I need to, but I can’t do this. The knowing was there, and the resistance was just as strong. I will get to the rest of that in a minute. When I arrived in Michigan, I went to a yoga class at a studio there. There was a woman in the class who immediately caught my attention. She was beautiful, playful, and having so much fun. I had never seen someone enjoy a yoga class the way she did. After class, I said hi to her in the parking lot, we introduced ourselves, and I told her I hoped I would see her again. As I walked away, I had a very clear thought. That is the kind of woman I want to be with. That is the kind of woman who would make my life feel alive. That is the kind of woman I want to be married to.
For the first time, I fully admitted to myself that I did not want to be married to my ex-wife anymore. I did not want to keep going through the motions of resentful intimacy. Sometimes there were genuinely good moments between us. But most of the time, my ex-wife showed up like a martyr, doing her duty, trying her best, but without passion. In the first years of our marriage, and honestly for most of the first decade, we had real passion. It was not just a honeymoon phase. It slowly eroded through resentment and then me starting to look outside the marriage emotionally. We both drifted. Seeing that woman in Michigan made it impossible to keep lying to myself about what I wanted.
When I started talking to people about it, I told my family and others that I was unhappy in my marriage. I said I wanted more kids, more sex, more passion, more life. Every single person told me the same thing. Do not leave your marriage. Stay. Make it work. Not one person said, maybe what you are feeling is real. Maybe you should take it seriously. Nobody encouraged me to trust myself. Everyone pushed me back toward endurance.
I came back home carrying all of that. At the same time, I had barely spoken to my mom or my brother for most of 2024. Around the anniversary of my dad’s death earlier that year, my mom spun out hard. She became nasty and bitter, and I lost my patience. I told her she needed to move on. Dad had been dead for ten years. I told her it was time to stop living like this, sitting alone in the house, living as someone chronically ill on a mountain of medications, endlessly wallowing. He was my dad too. I had grieved him. I had grieved other father figures since then. A decade had passed. I said her life needed to get bigger. She went off on me. I went off on her. We stopped talking for about six months. I was exhausted with the dynamic.
While I was in Michigan, thinking about divorce, another realization hit me. I was not talking to my mom. I was not talking to my brother, who had been one of my closest people. I had also cut off a close female friend over her struggles. If I got divorced right then, I would not have much of a support system at all. That scared me. I was finally being honest about what I wanted, but I was also seeing how isolated I had allowed myself to become.
I called my mom and made amends. I called my brother and re-opened that relationship too. I decided that if I was going to face the possibility of divorce, I needed to at least repair my family ties first. Then I came home and made one more sincere attempt to save the marriage. I told my ex-wife directly what I wanted. I wanted more sex. I wanted more passion. I wanted more life together. I could compromise and give up having more kids. I wanted us to take a trip, just the two of us. We had not done that in years, even though I had asked many times. My ex-wife usually resisted planning anything like that. This time, we did it. We went to a landmark beach hotel and stayed overnight. We spent about a thousand dollars for twenty-four hours. We had a great time. For a moment, I felt it again. I thought, yes, this is what I want. This is us.
And then we came home, and everything snapped right back into place exactly the way it had been. The same patterns. The same tension. The same frustration. I felt crushed. I told my ex-wife that if we were going to stay together, we needed to actually experiment. I needed her to be playful again, to meet me somewhere new instead of just holding the line on how things already were. I told her plainly that if she was not willing to try, we would need to get divorced. She agreed to try. For a while, we even tried throwing ourselves at the physical side of the marriage. But when most of what passes between you comes from resentment and obligation, it does not fix anything. It just drains you in a different way. Eventually, I gave up and told her she had been right all along. We went back to the old pattern. By then, the frustration had stacked so high that it felt permanent.
At the same time, my business stopped feeling viable to me. I tried to quit entirely. I did a two-hour livestream saying goodbye, telling everyone I was done creating content online. I took about a month off. During that month, I experimented with writing books. I could see clearly that writing was the direction I wanted to go, but I had no idea how I would make money with it. I did not know how I would sell books or build a system around them. Meanwhile, people kept telling me I would be back to videos. And they were right. After about a month, the pressure for income and instant gratification returned, and I started uploading videos again.
Right around then, we got hit with two hurricanes back-to-back. For a couple of months, everything revolved around cleanup and recovery. Everyone talked about the tragedy of it. I could not relate to that framing at all. Losing some water-damaged furniture is not a tragedy. It is an inconvenience. Real tragedy is what my dad saw in Vietnam. Real tragedy is loss of life, loss of dignity, loss of freedom. Replacing a couch and some rugs is annoying, not tragic. Our house took on a few inches of water, and we dealt with it. My ex-wife’s parents and sister, who lived nearby, got hit much worse, almost a foot of water, and lost far more. My mom’s house somehow did not flood at all despite being right near us.
As 2024 continued, we adopted two new dogs. My daughter wanted a German Shepherd, so we ended up with two German Shepherd–Shar Pei mix sisters. Within a month, they started fighting viciously and injuring each other, so we gave one back. That left us with one Shar Pei–Shepherd and our original dog, Bo. From the outside, everything looked fine. I was making money again. My crypto videos were getting strong views. People were happy to see me back. I even deleted an entire crypto reviews channel because I felt so toxic making those videos. There is a whole story about the crypto mafia paranoia that I tell elsewhere, but the pattern was the same. I built channels. They grew fast. Then I deleted them. I posted videos. Then I erased them. Over and over.
Underneath it all, I kept hearing the same phrase in my head: tech slave. I would sit down to work and think, you are just a tech slave. You think you are free, but look at you. You show up every day and do something you do not want to do because you have to survive. That is what slaves do. They do what their masters require. And my masters were YouTube and crypto markets. Algorithms. Audiences. Trends. I hated that feeling. I hate being told what to do. I hate feeling owned by a system I do not respect. That tension never went away. Music became my pressure valve. I kept making music and tried to enjoy it without expectations. It was one of the few places where I still felt like myself, even as everything else in my life felt increasingly constrained and out of alignment.
As we moved into 2025, I picked up a new habit to replace gaming. I started playing tennis. I joined the tennis club and began playing a few times a week. That is where I met an older man who became a regular tennis partner. He is a doctor with his own practice, in his late sixties with six kids, the youngest still a teenager. He beat me playing singles tennis in the middle of the day, in September and October Florida heat, multiple times. He had not even played singles in five or six years. I remember standing there, drenched in sweat, completely confused.
I asked him how he was still in such great shape at his age. He said he works. He said having kids keeps him young. He told me he still has a teenager at home, and keeping up with him keeps him alive. He had his youngest child in his fifties. That hit me hard. I asked if he had all six kids with one woman. He said no, three with his first wife and three with his second. Later, I told my ex-wife about him, and she said, “You want to be like him, don’t you?” At the time, I said no. But the truth was immediate and obvious. Yes, I do want to be like him. That is exactly what I want. Since my ex-wife does not want more kids, I want another woman I can have more kids with. I want to be in my late sixties, out there beating someone half my age in singles tennis, making great money, still alive, still engaged, still building life. That man was a mirror showing me exactly what I wanted.
As the year went on, I kept playing tennis. From the outside, my life looked great again. I was a member at the tennis club. I had a lifestyle. I played tennis. I did yoga most days. I still missed the girl from yoga, but not the way I had before. Sometimes I talked to her in my head. Sometimes I wondered where she was. Sometimes I hoped I would see her again. But the obsession had softened. I was getting massages every week. I was making great money posting videos. I was getting lots of views. On paper, everything looked ideal.
And yet something still felt way off. My marriage did not feel right. I was not happy the way I used to be. My ex-wife and I kept drifting further apart. We spent less and less time together. We did more things with the kids separately. Even on vacations, it felt like we were just going through the motions instead of being genuinely excited to be together. I kept wondering what the hell happened to the marriage I once believed was the best thing in my life. It was painful to admit how sad I felt about that loss. And I could tell my ex-wife felt it too, even if neither of us quite knew how to say it anymore.
We went to Universal at the beginning of 2025, and I remember sitting in the park with my daughter while my son wasn’t feeling well. We were just sitting there together, bored, in the middle of one of the most overstimulating places on earth. I remember looking around and thinking, what the hell is going on? Something is not right. If you can be bored at Universal with your kid, something deeper is off.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.