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.
In the process of promoting my business, my ex-wife and I joined a local business networking group. That’s where we met this so-called health coach. My weight had been steadily climbing, and I felt completely out of control which opened me to getting some help. Meanwhile, my drinking was ramping up again, but my solution—naturally—was to go on a diet instead of dealing with the drinking. So I met with this guy, trusting that he knew something I didn’t. What he actually did was convince me to order hundreds of dollars’ worth of absolute garbage food. Ultra-processed, chemically engineered bullshit. At the time, I didn’t know any better. I was ignorant and desperate, which is a dangerous combination.
I won’t even name the company because I wouldn’t want anyone to accidentally buy their shit. Boxes started showing up at the house filled with little snack packs and pre-portioned garbage. The system was simple: eat their fake food all day, then have one tightly controlled “real” meal within a bunch of arbitrary rules. There were also these powdered smoothies you mixed up and drank. And to be fair, I lost weight. I dropped about ten pounds pretty quickly.
But by then, my dad was dying. The emotional and mental pain was intensifying, and the cracks were showing everywhere. I started missing things because I was too fucked up to function. My ex-wife and I had Universal passes, and we were supposed to go one day, but I got so drunk the night before that I woke up with a miserable hangover and couldn’t go. Another time, my ex-wife got Tampa Bay Buccaneers tickets. She’d been out of town with her friends the night before, and I took that as permission to get absolutely shithoused. The game was at 4:00 p.m. I woke up around 1:00 when she got home, barely able to keep from throwing up.
She didn’t care how bad I felt. She told me I was getting in the car and we were going to that game. I went, feeling like I’d been mauled by a pack of wild dogs. I was wrecked. I slammed Coke for caffeine just to stay upright. I almost threw up in her car, and she had to pull over at a gas station so I could get out, walk around, and buy another soda. Somehow I survived the day. This kind of thing kept happening over and over.
Meanwhile, this “health coach” kept pushing his bullshit diet while making money off me as an affiliate. I wasn’t paying him for coaching; he was getting a fat commission every time I reordered food. He also tried to rope me into the pyramid-scheme side of it, which I thankfully never fully bought into.
Eventually, the whole thing collapsed in the most predictable way possible. One night, after doing the diet all day, I got drunk and played a ton of Call of Duty Zombies. By then, I’d moved the TV to the far side of the house so I could drink, yell, and sleep away from my ex-wife. That night, I ordered a large Papa John’s pizza—some Philly cheesesteak monstrosity—and ate the entire thing while drinking something like fifteen to twenty drinks total. Beer, liquor, whatever was there. I mixed the liquor with diet soda and chased it with water, desperately trying to avoid a hangover. I went to bed bloated like a fucking manatee.
The next morning, hungover and disgusted, I thought, What is the point of this diet? I had completely annihilated it in one night. My go-to hangover routine kicked in: heat up a can of thick-and-chunky soup, choke it down, drink soda and water, crawl into bed, jerk off to porn as many times as I could, and then try to fall asleep after I came. That was my recovery strategy. That was my version of “self-care.” And that’s where things were headed—dieting, drinking, numbing, pretending I was fixing something while continuing to avoid the actual problem entirely. Meanwhile, my ex-wife is at work every day, paying the mortgage, while this is what I’m doing at home. That becomes the rhythm of the entire year.
In the summer of 2013, we travel to Canada after visiting my family in Michigan. One night we’re at this upscale restaurant at the top of a building, a really nice place, and I’m playing a character I barely recognize—ordering drinks like I’m a rapper, knocking back Hennessy and Courvoisier and whatever else sounds impressive. I get completely fucked up. By the end of the night, I’m crying into my martini about my dad dying and how my life feels like it’s falling apart. I’m oscillating constantly—desperate, ashamed, numb. I’m quitting drinking sometimes without telling anyone, just white-knuckling it quietly, then starting again. Nothing is stabilizing. Everything feels like it’s getting worse.
The one redeeming thread running through this time is books. Back at the beginning of 2012, when I’d briefly enrolled in a doctoral leadership program, I’d been forced to start reading seriously. That habit stuck. I started listening to audiobooks obsessively, reading anything that felt like it might help me understand how to live or how to fix myself. On many hangover mornings, the only thing I could do to survive the day was put on an audiobook and let someone else’s voice carry me through the pain.
I remember listening to Brené Brown’s The Power of Vulnerability talk, and it hit hard. It resonated because I felt completely miserable, but I also felt incapable of being honest about how bad things really were. On the surface, my business was working. Throughout 2013, I was making decent money. I looked functional. But underneath, my drinking was escalating, my health was deteriorating, and my personal life felt increasingly unmanageable. I couldn’t stay sober and enjoy it. I couldn’t drink without consequences. I couldn’t control my weight. I’d wake up with brutal hangovers, swallow several of Advil, wreck my stomach, then end up sick enough to go to the doctor. I’d get antibiotics, which in my experience set me back even further. Everything fed into everything else. It felt like a closed loop I couldn’t escape.
I was trapped in this negative spiral that felt unstoppable. Books were the only thing that even vaguely helped. I listened to 10% Happier, which talks about making small optimizations to improve your life, and I remember thinking, I don’t even know where to start. My situation feels hopeless. At the same time, my dad’s health was continuing to decline. My physical health was declining. My mindset was collapsing.
At the end of 2013, we went to visit my family for Christmas. My dad was wrecked. He was about a month away from dying. Cancer had spread throughout his body. The atmosphere in the house was heavy and ugly. Everyone was struggling. My brother was there, barely holding it together. We didn’t connect with the woman he was with at the time, and they stayed in a hotel instead of the house. Nothing about the visit felt warm or celebratory.
I lost my shit over wanting a Christmas tree. My dad said he didn’t feel well enough to get it out of storage. I snapped. I told him to give me the key, that I’d go get the artificial tree myself. I didn’t want to accept reality. I didn’t want to slow down. I drove to the storage unit, dragged the tree out, set the whole thing up like we were going to have a normal Christmas. My ex-wife was there, staying at my parents’ house, watching this whole mess unfold.
The holiday was miserable. On the last morning before we were supposed to leave, my dad rolled over in bed and broke his arm. Just rolled over. The cancer had eaten away at the bone so badly that it shattered under his own weight. He was screaming in pain. That was the last time I ever saw him. My brother had already left. I stood there, watching my dad suffer, and something in me just shut down. All I knew in that moment was that I had to get the fuck out of that house. I needed to go back to my own house. And I needed to get fucked up.
We leave, and I’m emotionally wrecked in a way I don’t even have language for. My mom stays behind with my dad. She has to call an ambulance, get him out of the house, get him to the hospital. I’m useless. I’m literally walking out the door like, Sorry you broke your arm, Dad. Love you. Bye. That’s the level I’m operating at. My ex-wife and I drive home, and the collapse is immediate. Not the first night back—but the very next night—I’m drinking as much as I can again.
My dad deteriorates fast. I can barely talk to him on the phone anymore. I’m as emotionally destabilized as I’ve ever been. The last real conversation I have with him is when I’m driving to Charlotte to visit a friend. He has one of those brief lucid windows between painkillers, and we talk for a bit. A few days later, I’m back home. It’s late morning—maybe 11:00 a.m. or so. I’m playing Battlefield, one of the good ones, back before the series went to shit—Battlefield 4, I think. I’m just about to start drinking for the day when my phone rings.
It’s my mom. And before I even answer, I know. There’s no panic, no confusion—just this instant, quiet certainty. Dad’s dead. He was in hospice, so it’s not shocking, but it still lands heavy. I answer. She tells me. She’s distraught, exactly how you’d expect. I respond like I’m being calm and responsible. I tell her I’m here if she needs anything. And in my mind, I decide I’m being heroic by not drinking immediately. It’s noon. My ex-wife’s at work. I tell myself I’ll wait an hour, just in case my mom needs something.
About an hour later, I start drinking anyway—a bit before 2:00 p.m. My college friends are coming down to visit, so we just go full throttle. We drink until six or seven in the morning, rotating through every gaming system imaginable—Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Xbox—just marinating in nostalgia and alcohol. One of my friends has these milk thistle pills and tells me they’ll help with the hangover. I take that information and immediately abuse it. I swallow about ten of them. He has to physically stop me and take the bottle away, telling me one is enough and ten is fucking insane.
I wake up the next day with the realization that my dad is dead and my body feels like it’s been run over by a truck—and then backed over again for good measure. My friend explains that taking that many pills probably made the hangover worse, not better, because now my liver is trying to detox alcohol and a pile of supplements at the same time. We go out to a sushi restaurant, and I’m sitting there trying not to puke on the table, sulking, whining, wrapped up in my grief and my misery. That’s when things really start to slide.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.