My friends, here is the life story of Jerry Banfield, the early years. I was born in 1984 to my mother and father, who met at the racetrack. My dad was a harness horse jockey at the time, where he raced horses sitting in a cart behind them in Michigan. My mother was the track veterinarian when they met. At the time, my mother was already married, and my father had already been divorced once. My mother went through her divorce and got it finalized right around the time she got pregnant with me. My father had been divorced a few years from his first wife, with whom he already had two kids, and he saw being with my mother as a second chance at a life with a family, one of redemption.
I knew this. I actually remember choosing my parents. This is a memory I've been gifted recently. I'm almost ten years sober now, and I've really opened my mind. I've done a lot of hypnotherapy and read lots of books on reincarnation. My mind is very open, and one of the memories I've been gifted with is the memory of choosing my parents. When I chose them, my mother was in an abusive relationship with her first husband, and my father was an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sex addict, a gambler, and a horse jockey with very unreliable income. I looked down at the two of them getting together and thought, this is where I would like to enter this reality. This looks like it'll be a really fun ride. I can help these two as parents, and they will give me a perfect stepping stone, a launch pad into this reality myself. And they did exactly that.
My father, in the midst of his addiction, and my mother, in giving birth to me, gave up her time. She gave up being a track veterinarian so she could actually have the time to take care of me and not be on that crazy schedule working in the middle of the night, taking care of horses at the racetrack, which was not a place for a woman with a baby. With no income of her own and my dad providing none either, my mom moved in with my dad's family, including his mother and his sisters, into the house my grandfather built. My dad and all of his brothers and sisters grew up in Farmington, Michigan, and this is where I was a baby. My grandfather, who worked at the racetrack, would come home and throw me up in the air in the middle of the night. I had great affection for him. My grandfather and my mother were my main people when I was born.
Off to the Army
My father was kicked out of the house around Christmas the year I was born. He went down to Texas to try to live with his aunt and uncle and sober up, and my mom was left wondering what exactly to do with this baby and how to provide for him. The best option she could find was to go into the military. The Army was very enthusiastic to have a veterinarian with actual experience, and they let her come in directly as a captain. My mom went down to San Antonio to do her basic training, where my father met her at the airport. To celebrate getting his life back together and her coming into the Army, he immediately started drinking again, at which point my mom really got to begin learning about alcoholism.
After San Antonio and Fort Sam Houston for basic training, my mom moved to White Sands, New Mexico, where she was assigned. My dad quit his drug addiction in New Mexico one night just by praying to God and swearing he would do anything to never do the drugs again. Some of my first memories are in New Mexico, aside from remembering being born and choosing my parents. I remember riding my dog. My mom had this big hundred-pound dog, and I remember getting on his back. I loved the feeling of being on top of a dog when I was one year old.
When I was about two, my brother was born. He was unexpected, a surprise. My mother really wanted to have me, and my brother was a surprise they were not prepared for, but very happy to receive. My mother says the best day of her life was the day I was born, and my brother wishes he hadn't asked her that question when he did. My brother was a C-section, so my mom didn't have the same kind of experience with him as she did with me.
Japan, Alabama, and Texas
My parents then moved to Japan, as my mother was assigned to Yokota Air Base for her work as a veterinarian. A lot of my first memories are on Yokota Air Base, going to kindergarten, going to the Bear Store in Japan, and to Disney, and to the Hacienda Mexican restaurant on base. That's one of my mom's favorite times of her life, and I have very fond memories of childhood. That was also where some of my earlier traumatic memories began, where I started learning to be afraid and to feel awkward and weird.
Then, when I was six, we moved to Auburn, Alabama, where my mom was doing her master's. When you are a veterinarian, you do your master's after you get your degree as a doctor of veterinary medicine, so she studied really hard and passed the boards. I went to elementary school in Auburn, Alabama, which was interesting because they were still doing desegregation there. I lived in a mostly Black and college-kid neighborhood, so me and all the other Black kids got bussed over to this white school, which was a fun experience. I loved that elementary school. I had a lot of great friends there, and we'd always play at recess. I remember we'd get 20 or 30 of us at recess just playing football games. My best friend at the time was in a wheelchair, and he'd quarterback from the wheelchair. We had a great time in elementary school. That was also where I got in the worst trouble I'd ever been in. My parents grounded me for somewhere between a week and a month. There's debate now, because I was just totally out of control as a kid, fighting my parents and messing with them constantly and trying to push against their control. My dad tried to really lock me down, and it worked to some degree for a while.
Then we moved to San Antonio, Texas, when I was in elementary school, around fourth grade. I loved San Antonio. We went to Six Flags Fiesta Texas and SeaWorld all the time. That was one of the most fun parts of my entire childhood. My dad's dad, my grandfather, passed away in 1994, right after we moved to Texas. For years, my dad was determined he was going to give my brother and me the best childhood possible.
The Darkest Part of Childhood
Then the darkest part of my childhood started. My mom had an officer who was harassing her at work, and to get away from him, she took a command in Germany, got promoted to lieutenant colonel, and got a unit there. For some reason, everything went downhill when we went to Germany. I was 13 when we moved, and I was hitting puberty and feeling really uncomfortable with myself and my body. My mom started having chronic headaches all the time and really wild, violent mood swings. My brother and I had all these friends in San Antonio, and we left them all behind. I started to get really lonely, got really heavy into video games, and became kind of withdrawn at school. My mom and dad started fighting at levels way higher than ever before. That was a darker, scary time.
Then we moved to Virginia, back to the USA. My childhood was pretty nice the way I look at it today. I went to a really nice high school in Virginia. Then all my college plans got screwed up. I was going to do ROTC, but the University of South Carolina was the only place I applied to with an ROTC program where I had signed a letter of intent to go. I had been set on Virginia Tech, but I stayed overnight at their ROTC and it was horrible. It was like going to West Point. So I decided to take the only backup option I had and go to the University of South Carolina.
College and the Start of the Mess
I remember being a military brat who had lived all over the world. I guess this is going to be a life story in 20 minutes, because we're about halfway through. So we'll make it a life story in 18 minutes or something. When I first drove down to the University of South Carolina, I remember thinking I had really screwed up. How could I go to this hick, backwards, redneck place? But I quickly got used to it and felt at home there, and I made some really good friends I still talk with today.
After my parents had kept me in control and on a short leash at home, college was a complete shift. I had never drunk. My dad got sober in 1990, when I was six years old, and he never drank again. I never drank until I went to college. At home, my parents had strict bedtimes and stuff like that. When I went to college, it was like, I'm going to stay up until seven in the morning playing video games, Axis and Allies. I had gotten almost all A's through all of school, except I'd taken four or five AP classes my senior year. Then I started playing this video game, World War II Online, and I got way, way into it. Some of my grades suffered, because for the first time I stopped doing my homework and I stopped caring as much about school after I got accepted into college.
At the University of South Carolina, my life, which had been pretty smooth and controlled by my parents, started to get real messy and nasty, especially internally. I had felt pretty good about myself and loved myself up until I went to college, although there were certainly a few things here and there. But then I started drinking. Then I started downloading all this music, first on things like LimeWire. That snowballed into downloading movies, which snowballed into downloading adult movies, and then watching all of those things along with all the drinking. We would do all this crazy stuff in college, which I'll elaborate on with more stories in the future. By the end of college, I was an alcoholic. I had wrecked my car. I had almost lost my job. I had almost died. I had thrown up while unconscious, passed out face down. I hadn't drunk a drop when I went to college, and I came out an alcoholic, with a bunch of self-hatred, all these secrets, and a girlfriend. I went to college thinking I'd be an engineer in the Army, but after two years...
Doing ROTC at the University of South Carolina, drinking and playing video games and chasing girls became much more important than going in the military. Halfway through college I decided I would switch to criminal justice, because crime really interested me and I thought it would be fun to be a police officer. I couldn't stand the idea of ever doing a boring office job. Out of college I took a bunch of crappy little jobs first, like door-to-door sales and some insurance billing, that kind of thing.
Then I got a job as a correction officer, which was one of the scariest jobs I've ever had, working in a prison. I got physically ill from the stress of the job multiple times. By the end of it, though, I had outlasted almost everyone in my demographic. Most of the young white males who started quit within a day or two of their first shift. I made it eight months, and then I got a job as a police officer and went to the police academy.
While I was in the police academy, my girlfriend dumped me, and I sank into one of the lowest mental states I'd ever been in. I tried to get sober at the time and ended up relapsing. Then I got what to me was my dream job. I became a police officer at the University of South Carolina, where I'd gone to undergrad. That was a dream job. It was one of the best paying jobs in policing in Columbia, South Carolina, and my drinking ended up blowing that job up, even though I did well while I was actually at work.
The decision that sent everything downhill
One of the more pivotal decisions I remember making there was this: should I chase the dispatcher, or should I focus on being a corporal? I decided I didn't really care about the job that much. I wanted the dispatcher. So I got the dispatcher, and then everything went downhill from there. I ended up moving home with my parents in 2009, and that's where my alcoholism got the ugliest and the craziest. I have lots more stories about that period coming in the future. I did one telling of it on my original channel, but I'll be breaking it down into smaller segments in the Jerry Banfield autobiography.
Moving back home with my parents is actually where my life really got on track. One reason I moved home was that I saw my dad starting to have chest pains, and I realized he was going to die fairly soon. I figured I'd better spend more time with him, and I'd better meet my wife. My dad was the person I was closest to in the world. He was the person I called when I was a police officer, in the depths of my alcoholism and self-hatred, and told him I couldn't stand to live anymore. I felt safe opening up to him about those things. He helped me and he understood me.
After moving home, I lost a bunch of weight, got healthier, and started going to the gym. I got into grad school at the University of South Florida, moved there about a year later, and then met my wife three, four, five months after I moved to start my master's degree. I met my wife and everything was going great.
Meeting my wife and starting online
My wife unleashed this giant wave of inspiration in my life. I started my first YouTube channel in 2011, just a few months after meeting her. I started my business online that same year, after I met her. I moved in with my wife just seven months after we met, pretty suddenly, ditching my lease at just the perfect time to get out of it before the next school year started. I had never lived with a woman before.
I'd had a great first year at the University of South Florida, and I was under the delusion that my drinking would be okay because I'd left that old, crazy police officer life behind. But once I moved in with my wife, the drinking became a front-and-center issue again. It was right in her face, and she couldn't stand it. So I went through these on-and-off periods of sobriety for a few years.
My wife and I had some fantastic times. We started dating in 2011, got married in 2012, and did our honeymoon in Vail. We had season passes to Disney and went a bunch of times. We had season passes to Universal one year. We ate out several days a week, we'd go to movies, and we did so many fun things together. We really enjoyed our time. I managed to string together periods of sobriety in there too. I was sober about six months one time, and several other months at various points.
Getting sober and building a business
Then my dad died in 2014, and my drinking started to get really ugly. I prayed to God: please, I'll do whatever it takes to get sober. After that I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I've been sober ever since. My life has been absolutely fantastic since then.
I got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, and my online business started to take off in 2014. I got to be one of the top 10 Udemy instructors in 2015 and 2016. Then I got banned from Udemy, basically for being a loud mouth, obnoxious, and talking a bunch of junk about them and making them look bad. They made up an excuse to ban me even though I wasn't violating any of their policies. I'd made very sure not to, because I figured I could run my mouth and say whatever I wanted as long as I followed the rules. It turns out that's not how it works. These platforms can just get rid of you for any reason.
Then I got into gaming and streaming a lot. I got popular streaming League of Legends on YouTube, and that was one of the things that blew my first YouTube channel up. I got into crypto and became one of the top crypto YouTubers in 2017 and 2018. I got heavy into gaming, quit gaming for a while, and then kind of bottomed out with crypto in 2018, getting disgusted with everything and taking all my profits out. After that my business just sucked and went downhill. It was a rough stretch of doing all this stuff that didn't work in my business for a few years, hitting bottom at the end of 2019, really wishing I could turn everything around, and nearly declaring bankruptcy after all that earlier success.
During this time, my wife and I had my daughter, and then my son as well. My business has been something I've really been focused on, honestly obsessed with, ever since I got sober, carrying my message and helping people online.
Where my life is now
Then in 2020, everything turned in my favor, because people were locked at home and didn't have anything better to do than watch me play games on Facebook. I blew up on Facebook gaming and became a Facebook partner, one of the very top streamers. Then I had a similar issue to the Udemy one. I ran my mouth as much as I possibly could, one post went viral, and Facebook decided to cancel me over it. Now I'm live streaming on Twitch, and I've found my home on YouTube. YouTube has proven to be the one place I've created that's been the most supportive since I started.
Today I'm a full-time YouTuber and Twitch streamer. This is what I do every day. I go to yoga almost every day, and I'm at AA meetings most days. I'm there with the kids and my wife every day. My mother lives across the street now, and I'm as healthy as I've ever been. I love my life. I'm really proud of my life story, and I'm really excited to see what happens next. If you want to follow more of these stories as I share them, you can find them in my Life playlist.
This was going to be my life story in 10 minutes. But now this is my life story in 20 minutes, as a part of my autobiography.