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.
Let me tell you about this girl I went out with in the summer of 2001, not long after World War II Online came out. She was a gorgeous girl I worked with at a grocery store. Drop-dead beautiful, exactly my type. I remember seeing her and thinking, oh my God.
And yet I wasn’t trying to pick her up at all. Every time I was around a girl and felt slightly sexually aroused, anxiety would flood my system. Desire didn’t feel exciting or safe to me—it felt wrong. I had no positive framework for sex whatsoever. The only contexts I had were bad ones: early sexual violation, being punished and sent to my room, or masturbating in secret while feeling ashamed and disgusting afterward. So whenever arousal showed up, fear came with it. My body would tense instead of relax. You can probably already see how that set me up perfectly for alcoholism later, but I’ll get to that.
What mattered at the time was that somehow, because we worked together, I was able to connect with her in a way I never had with a girl before. After we’d been working together for a few weeks, I went through her checkout line on my break to grab some snacks. I put my stuff on the conveyor belt, and while she was ringing up the customer in front of me, she looked at me and held eye contact. Not casually. Not accidentally. She eye-gazed with me. I felt like I was about to pass out. I remember thinking, oh my God, she’s actually into me. She wants to go out with me. She likes me. Holy shit.
I’m still proud of myself for what I did next, because I had never done anything like it before. While I was checking out, I asked her for her phone number. She wrote it down on a piece of paper while customers waited to check out. I called her almost immediately afterward, and we set up a date. Everything felt like it was going great—except I had no awareness yet of how my lifestyle was shaping my nervous system and my behavior.
So what do you think I did the morning of my date with her? I played World War II Online. Of course I did. That’s what I did every day, as much as I possibly could. I spent the entire morning on the computer. My clanmates were mostly guys ten or twenty years older than me, a lot of them former military. And honestly, they sucked at the game compared to me. But they were the ones in charge, issuing orders to someone like me—one of the best players in the world at that point—because all I did was play, and I was in my prime. I was seventeen. My reaction times were sharp. I had cable internet. I was fucking people up.
They kept getting in my way, so I disobeyed orders and went off on my own, dropping bodies. Then I got killed. Then I got pissed. Then I started talking shit. By the time afternoon rolled around, I’d already burned through a massive amount of dopamine and adrenaline, locked in arguments with my clan about how much they sucked and how they were screwing everything up. My nervous system was completely fried before the date even started.
Then she came to pick me up. And this part still sticks with me. She pulled up in a two-door sports car. I was seventeen and didn’t even have a driver’s license because I didn’t have a car. My dad had made that crystal clear. You’re not driving my fucking car. You want to drive, you buy your own. I didn’t have the money yet, so he drove me everywhere. This girl, meanwhile, had a sports car and a cell phone—in 2001. That alone told me her family had money which was normal for the high school I went to. She was dressed up and looked absolutely incredible. I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, how is this happening? How am I going out with this girl?
She picked me up, and we went to see Rat Race. Your girl is driving like a maniac too. She’s going ten, twenty miles an hour over the speed limit, on and off her phone, driving a manual transmission, shifting gears while switching hands between the phone and the steering wheel. I’m sitting there thinking, fuck, I’m about to die like one of my classmates had in a car wreck earlier that year near my house. Somehow we make it to the theater alive and watch Rat Race. That part of the day is actually pretty good. I’m laughing. I’m sitting next to this insanely attractive girl. On paper, everything is going right.
Then we leave the movie, walk through the mall, and she’s on her phone a lot. Calling people and coordinating things it turns out but I didn’t know it at the time because I have absolutely no context for this given I’m socially underdeveloped as hell. All I do is play video games and jack off. I don’t understand that hot, popular girls like her are often on the phone with their friends, especially when they’re making plans. In my head, I’m translating this into, she doesn’t really like me. She’s not paying enough attention to me. I start spiraling. I’m insecure, anxious, and my internal narrative is going completely off the rails.
From her point of view, everything is probably going great. She’s driving fast, talking to her friends, showing me off. From my point of view, I’m convinced we’re going to die in a car accident and that I’m somehow failing this date. I’m proud as hell to be out with her, but at the same time I’m starting to feel like shit. This was supposed to be my dream scenario. This was my fantasy. And I keep thinking, why doesn’t this feel how I thought it would feel? I assumed it would feel amazing. Instead, I feel flat, tense, and uncomfortable. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I’d already burned through all my feel-good chemicals that morning playing World War II Online. I had nothing left in the tank.
We end up at one of her friend’s houses. Her friends are gorgeous. I still remember them years later—just stunning. The house is huge. It’s me and three of her girlfriends, and I’m the only guy there. She must have said good things about me because her friends are immediately warm, friendly, and comfortable around me. They like me. They’re welcoming. By any rational standard, this is a perfect setup. You’d think there’s no way I could fuck this up. Watch me.
We get back in the car to go to another friend’s house and I suddenly panic. I tell her it’s getting late. She looks at me like I’m insane. She’s like, what are you talking about? It’s nine o’clock. I tell her I don’t want to be out too late. I say I don’t know when we’ll get home. I ask her if she can just take me back to my parents’ house. She’s confused. She asks what’s wrong. She says she thought we were having a good time. I tell her my dad is really strict. She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. It’s summer. I’m about to be a senior in high school. She’s like, what do you mean your dad is strict? It’s so early and it’s summer. I insist she take me home and then she goes quiet.
From her point of view, this had to be brutal. She liked me. She thought the date was going well. She was introducing me to her friends. And suddenly I’m asking to be taken home early. From her side, it probably felt like rejection. Like she wasn’t good enough. Like she did something wrong. I can imagine her thinking, what the fuck just happened? I’m hot, I’m fun, I’m into him—what went wrong?
She drops me off at my parents’ house. I go inside, already feeling this vague sense that something isn’t right, but also itching to get back to World War II Online. I rush upstairs to check my email. My dad comments on how early I’m home, which doesn’t register at first. He clearly expected me to be out later, especially after seeing the girl who dropped me off. And looking back now, he was right. His seventeen-year-old self wouldn’t have been home at nine o’clock or maybe even all night. If I had to do it over again, I’d stay with her until she was tired of me even if it meant we were out all night.
I get upstairs, check my email, and I’ve been kicked out of the clan. Just like that. I remember staring at the screen thinking, oh my God. And then there’s this brief, brutal moment of clarity. I can suddenly see it. I can see exactly where I fucked up, even though I don’t fully understand how it happened. All I feel is this crushing sense of hopelessness. Like I’ve done something really stupid and irreversible. I’m thinking, how the fuck did I tell her to take me home? That was so dumb. And now I’m kicked out of my clan too. It felt like everything collapsed at once. I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, why am I such a fucking idiot?
That moment is where something darker really took root. That’s when I started hating myself. I started talking to myself like I was worthless. You’re a fucking loser. You don’t deserve a good girl. You can’t even stay in a video game clan. You’re a piece of shit. From there, my dating life went absolutely nowhere during my senior year and struggled for a decade afterwards. I could barely bring myself to ask a girl out for another year. I just felt like shit all the time. So I did what I knew how to do: I went deeper into video games.
I played so much that I barely planned for college at all. And that’s wild, because academically I did fine. I scored 1410 out of 1600 on the SAT. I crushed it. But I was incredibly lazy when it came to applications. I put almost no time or thought into researching schools. I didn’t really think about what I wanted to do with my life. I figured I’d just do Army ROTC, because thinking beyond that felt like too much effort. All I really cared about was playing games.
So I looked at my mom’s career, looked at my brother—who was two years younger than me and already interested in engineering—and I basically copied them. I thought, fine, I’ll just be an engineer in the Army. That’s honestly how much thought I put into it. I swear to God, it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. One day I thought about it briefly and said, fuck it, I’ll just do that, and that was it. Decision made.
I started applying to schools with ROTC programs. I visited Virginia Tech, and that experience was enough to shut that door immediately. The ROTC program there was awful. You had to sign out to go to the bathroom freshman year. Meanwhile, you’re not at West Point or some elite military academy where everyone around you is in the same environment. You’re on a civilian campus, watching other students actually enjoy their college lives, while you’re locked in a dorm like a prisoner. That was a hard no.
One by one, all my ROTC-based scholarship options fell through leaving only the honors college offer from the University of South Carolina. I remember driving down there for the first visit and thinking, you’ve got to be shitting me. We had lived in Alabama and Texas earlier in my life, but still—driving into South Carolina, all I could think was, this is a redneck shithole. I could not believe this was where I was going to end up.
My parents weren’t exactly encouraging me to stay either. They made it clear when I turned eighteen it was time to leave. Go to college. Leave the house. We’re done. Especially after I’d been shouting things at my dad like I wish I’d never been born. So I committed to the University of South Carolina.
Up to that point, I hadn’t drank at all. My dad made drinking look deeply unappealing, and I genuinely believed there was a real chance he’d kick me out of the house if I drank even once. So I didn’t touch it in high school. I remember having an internship with my mom where I needed a military security clearance to work in a secure facility. I answered no to every single question. No drugs. No alcohol. No crimes. Nothing. I was clean across the board. Masturbation doesn’t count legally, and that was basically the only thing I’d done.
What I didn’t understand yet was how primed I was for everything I was about to fall into. The moment I left the protective structure of my parents’ house, all of it was waiting for me. Looking back now, I’m genuinely grateful for my childhood. At the same time, it absolutely set the stage for what came next. And if I’m being honest with myself, I chose it. I chose my parents. I chose my childhood. And I chose where I went to school. So now let’s talk about how that went.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Dating playlist.