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.
July 12, 2025
my ex-wife, the kids, and I wake up just outside Atlanta after a night made chaotic by a Beyoncé concert that had swallowed the city. The night before, we toured Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and felt genuinely grateful to have found a place to stay at all, since most of the hotels around Atlanta were booked solid. We are south of the city now, up around seven in the morning, staring down the full drive back to St. Petersburg, Florida. Nine hours on the road stretches ahead of us.
I wake up energized and ready for the drive. My mind is alive with book ideas. I want to write books. I feel a deep pull toward it, like this is finally what I am meant to do. I have an idea that morning that I could write a few books specifically aimed at helping my ex-wife’s family, especially her mom and her sister, around the struggles I see them dealing with over and over. I share this with my ex-wife, genuinely excited, thinking I am sharing something hopeful and constructive. She immediately goes off on me. She tells me I have nothing to offer her mom or her sister, that they do not need my help, and that I do not know what I am talking about anyway. I get defensive. I am hurt. Something in me shuts down, and the day spirals from there.
We get into the car and settle into the drive. Being deep into the silent treatment sucks, especially on a day where you are staring down nine straight hours in a confined space. For the first couple of hours, my ex-wife says nothing to me. She sits in the passenger seat with this unmistakable energy of resentment and anger. Eventually, I try to patch things up. I try to make amends. I reach out. She is not having it. She refuses to acknowledge that anything she said or did was hurtful.
That is when I lose it. I go off on her, not because I want to destroy her, but because I want her to understand how cruel she is being, how mean and hurtful and unsupportive she is of my work, and how relentlessly defensive she is of her family. I talk for ten or twenty minutes straight, unloading everything I am sick of, everything that feels broken, everything I think she needs to do better. She defends herself a little, but soon we slide right back into the silent treatment.
The rest of the drive home is empty. There is no love. No affection. No hand resting on my leg like there usually is. Just silence and a thick, hurtful resentment that fills the car all the way back to Florida. When we finally get home, we cooperate in the basic logistics of life. We unload the car and unpack everything. We function. But inside, I feel completely hopeless.
I am thinking, there is not even going to be makeup sex after this. There used to be, in the first few years we were together. We would fight, then come back together with incredible makeup sex and feel genuinely close again. That does not happen anymore. My ex-wife is unlikely to apologize or acknowledge anything she did. She defends every position like it’s her job. She always has to be right. Occasionally, if she says something hurtful and I cry immediately, she will admit she was wrong. Outside of that, she is right all the time, and she will argue endlessly to prove it. It is always me. I am always the problem. She never needs to change. I am always wrong. I am so exhausted by that dynamic. I do a tremendous amount of work on myself, constantly trying to grow, reflect, and heal, and I cannot honestly say the same effort exists on her side.
Once everything is unpacked, she takes the kids down the street to see her parents. We have been on a two-week road trip, and they have not seen her family in over a week. I end up going to an AA meeting that evening, trying to center myself and regain some sense of grounding. Later, I walk the dogs alone at night.
There is another layer to all of this that has been quietly present in my life for years. There is a woman I had a crush on at yoga I mentioned a while back. It has been two and a half years since I last saw her. The last time was winter of 2022, and now it is summer of 2025. I have not seen her in all that time, but sometimes I imagine talking to her. Sometimes I reach out and ask her where she has gone, why I have not seen her, when I might see her again.
Her answer has been consistent. You are not ready to see me. More recently, she has been very clear. You are not ready to see me until you are ready to leave your wife. What am I supposed to do with you if you still want to stay with your wife? You hurt me before, and I am not willing to see you again until you are ready to leave your wife. We have had many versions of that conversation, and my response inside myself has always been the same. That is not fair. I do not want to leave my ex-wife.
That night, after walking the dogs, I come back to the house. It is dark. It is around nine o’clock. As I walk up to the front of the house, I hear a loud, unmistakable thought, almost like it is spoken directly to me without any effort on my part. She says, without me initiating anything, without me starting a conversation, Now you’re ready to see me.
I stop cold. I am shocked. After a day of arguments, silence, and emotional distance, the idea lands in me with unsettling clarity. Really? Now? I feel something shift. I think, yeah, I guess I do feel ready. Not because I believe something serious is actually going to happen, not because I have a plan, but because something in me finally admits the truth of how broken things feel. I am stunned that the conversation suddenly begins with those words. Now you’re ready to see me.
July 13, 2025
On Sunday morning, I go to the yoga flow class I like best. It is a slow, steady flow, grounding and calm. This is the class where I used to see the girl I had a crush on two and a half years ago. I have been to countless classes there since then, and I have not seen her once. I am not even consciously thinking about the thought from the night before. I am on autopilot. My ex-wife is out of the house again with the kids, so yoga makes sense. I need it. I am getting a massage right after to unwind from the trip, and this feels like the right way to start the day.
I put my mat far up front, front left, in the very first row against the wall, nowhere near my usual spot in the middle of the room. I see a woman I am friendly with and we catch up briefly before class starts. As the class moves along, I notice a girl on the opposite side of the room who keeps catching my attention. About thirty minutes in, a thought cuts through me. Fuck me, is that her?
My vision is a bit nearsighted. The last time it was tested it was something like 20/40 or 20/60. The main way I would know it could be her is a small detail about her that I remember clearly. For at least thirty minutes, I am trying to catch glances, trying to convince myself it cannot actually be her. Eventually, I get a clear enough look. There it is. My stomach drops. Holy shit. Two and a half years later, she is here. Oh my God.
It does not fully register right away, but later it hits me. She is here the day after I heard the thought, now you’re ready to see me. That realization knocks the wind out of me. That is not coincidence. That feels like alignment. Telepathic communication. Something precise and impossible. It feels wild and undeniable, and I am barely holding it together through the rest of the class.
I know there is no version of this where I just stay cool and act like this isn’t a huge deal. I absolutely have to talk to her after class. There is no easing into it. I am going to talk to her immediately. The problem is, I am terrified. I almost never get nervous talking to people. Almost no one intimidates me. I can walk up to just about anyone without thinking twice. You could put the President of the United States in front of me and I would not feel this way. But her, right there in that room, has me more anxious than I ever get.
Class ends. I stand up immediately. Here we go. I grab my blocks and walk in her direction, trying to time it so we cross paths naturally. The first time I walk by, she does not make eye contact. The second time, I say hi and say her name. We make eye contact, and she recognizes me instantly. She immediately gives me a big hug. I have never gotten a hug from her before. It feels incredible. We are standing right next to her girlfriend, when she asks “What was your name again?”
I fucking die. I’m destroyed inside. No, no, no. She does not remember my name. Oh my God. She remembers my face, clearly, but not my name. In my mind, I picture my ex-wife standing behind me laughing hysterically. I picture my dad, my granddad, and all these men who have passed away in AA just erupting into belly laughs, the whole universe rolling on the floor at this moment. Of course she does not remember my name. At the same time, another thought hits me. Her girlfriend is standing right there. Her girlfriend is probably wondering who the hell this guy is that she is hugging at yoga. Maybe she does remember my name, and maybe asking was a way to take the edge off, to make it seem casual, to make it less loaded. Or maybe she really does not remember. Maybe it is all in my head. Maybe this is not a big deal for her. Maybe she never had a crush on me at all. I ask her where she has been. She tells me she had moved away with her girlfriend, and that she might be coming back. Holy shit.
I leave shortly after that. The moment she says she does not remember my name, I am wrecked. I am completely off center. Most of the time, I am confident, grounded, sometimes even overpowering in presence, or deeply attentive in a way that makes people feel seen. I can be intimidating without trying. But the second she does not remember my name, I am right back in third grade. I am devastated. I can barely keep the conversation going. I am struggling to form intelligent responses. Everything I know about myself collapses into that old, familiar feeling of being small and forgettable.
I walk out of the yoga studio in a fog, asking myself what the hell just happened. I had that thought the night before, now you’re ready to see me. I had not seen her in two and a half years, and then she is suddenly there the very next day. What does that mean? When am I going to see her again? Does this mean I am ready to leave my ex-wife? I feel desperate to see her again, to be alone with her so I can talk, so I can ask the questions that feel unbearable to hold inside. Did she miss me? Does she think about me? Will I ever get closure on this?
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.