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.
Eventually, I took a couple of weeks of unpaid sick leave and went home to see my parents. My then girlfriend had given me some supplement pills that were supposed to treat mono naturally. Instead, they flared it up right when it had been starting to improve. After I stopped taking them, I went home, stayed there for a couple of weeks, and got sober. For the first time in a while, it was clear how fucked up my life had become. I knew I had to do something real about drinking. I stayed sober with the help of my parents and vowed to do so until I got my shit together.
For the last several months I worked in corrections, I stayed sober longer than I had at any point since I started drinking. That sobriety wasn’t coming from insight or healing. It was powered by fear and sheer determination to qualify for a police officer job. Still, the result was impossible to ignore. As soon as I stopped drinking, my life started getting better. My attitude improved and I got along better with the kids, especially because the one I hated most got moved out of my unit for attacking someone else. The mono finally went away. Looking back, in my experience the drinking and the mono were tied together. The one thing I genuinely loved about mono, though, was the sleep. I could fucking sleep like you wouldn’t believe. There were days I slept close to twenty hours, waking up for a few hours to watch a movie or play video games and then going straight back to bed. If you’ve ever felt like you couldn’t sleep enough, mono fixes that real quick. You just sleep your ass off, and for me that sleep felt like part of my healing.
In the summer of 2007, I landed a job as a police officer with the South Carolina Department of Mental Health. They didn’t run a polygraph, which made things easier so we did not have to talk about undetected crimes like my marijuana use. All they cared about was that I had zero criminal history. They hired me immediately and treated me well there. It was another dangerous job, but I was proud of it. I was a state-certified police officer tasked with transporting Department of Mental Health patients—people who had often murdered others and were pleading insanity—from one facility to another, to court, to their lawyers. One kid I transported all over the state had, I believe, killed someone. I remember him being hungry one day, and I bought him McDonald’s. You would have thought it was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for him. It felt good to do that. I didn’t make much money, but I was proud to have a gun and a badge.
I went through the police academy, and during that time I ballooned up to around 240 pounds. I was shockingly fat and finally had crossed into morbidly obese. My ex started getting neglected because I was working nonstop, and her health slipped right along with mine. The academy ran five days a week, and back then they had you live there. On weekends, all I wanted to do was drink and play Rise of Nations and/or hang out with the boys. I wasn’t drinking during the week, so I had to let it all out on the weekends. The first weekend of the academy, she came over and we spent the afternoon together, and afterward I told her I was going out with my friends that night. She begged me to stay with her or to let her join us. I told her no, that she would ruin my time, and that I was going out with the boys. She was furious and went home. I knew she wasn’t going to tolerate this forever. Before long, she would cheat on me the same way and mercifully end the dying relationship.
That night with the guys turned into a disaster that was also a lot of fun. We went out and got completely fucked up on Long Island iced teas. One of my friends was drunk driving us all over the place. Another friend went shot for shot with a Marine, got into a fight, and got kicked out of the bar. Outside, we barely avoided having a huge dude looking for a fight beat the absolute shit out of him. Then, on the interstate, that same friend started covering the driver’s eyes from the back seat while we were flying down the road drunk. I warned him that if he did it again, I’d fuck him up. He did it again. I launched myself from the front passenger seat into the back seat and started choking him out. He tried to gouge my eye out. I kept choking him until he couldn’t move anymore. After that, we went home, played NHL Hits, and kept drinking. We threw him in the shower to sober him up because he was puking everywhere. The next day it took me a while to remember why my eye hurt and we all laughed about it.
At DMH, things unraveled again. A few weeks into the police academy, my girlfriend cheated on me and then came over to tell me she was done. I felt destroyed. The bottom dropped out emotionally, and I got genuinely scared of where I was headed. Out of that fear, I stayed sober again—for about three months. All told, in 2007 I managed at least six months of sobriety. On paper, that sounds impressive. In reality, I didn’t change anything else. I didn’t work on myself. I didn’t build a life I actually enjoyed. I just didn’t drink.
Instead, I sat around feeling sorry for myself and resenting the fact that I wasn’t out with the guys. I felt like I was missing life while everyone else was living it. Eventually, after a brief rebound with a girl I found on Facebook, I started rationalizing my way back into drinking. I convinced myself I was going crazy. I told myself I either needed to do something drastic—like join the Air Force—or start drinking again, because I was so bored. The reality was that my life was actually going fine when I was sober. There was no drama. No chaos. Things were smooth. And that smoothness drove me insane.
The breaking point came when I hurt my back arresting a woman who fought us hard. She was probably around 300 pounds, and it was just me and a female investigator who mostly stayed out of the way. Somehow my fat ass managed to pin her against the wall, and I pulled my back doing it. Instead of doing anything sensible like yoga, physical therapy, or massage, I just took muscle relaxers and the over the counter pills the doctor gave me. After a couple of weeks feeling the relief from the pills, I rationalized that I might as well drink again because I was tired of missing nights out with my friends and my job was dangerous.
Soon after, I landed a job as a police officer with the University of South Carolina Police Department. It was one of the highest-paying police jobs in town, and I’ve already written about that period in detail in Officer Banfield, so I won’t rehash it all here. What matters is that working at USCPD came with plenty of drama—and a lot of fun. I absolutely loved that job for the first year. They did require a polygraph, and somehow I slid right through it despite my history of undetected crimes. They wanted me to pass because I was already a certified officer, which made hiring me easier because they did not give me as detailed of a polygraph as they did to the uncertified candidates. I minimized everything I had got away with, believed the bullshit I told them, and the polygraph worked exactly as advertised. It only detects lies you don’t believe. I believed mine completely. For example, one question in the massive packet he gave me to fill out asked about car accidents. I left the question blank and told the captain I was unsure how to answer it. Did bumping my car over a curb count as a car accident when no one else was involved and there was no police report? He said no and thus I was able to hide my drunken car wreck from scrutiny.
For most of the first year at USCPD, life felt great. I was having a blast since me and the guys were going out and getting fucked up with few consequences. I was sleeping with women all over the place. I felt alive again. And then, right on schedule, I spun up a fresh batch of drama—this time with a dispatcher.
By the beginning of 2009, one thing was genuinely different: I still wasn’t gambling online. That alone felt like progress. Everything else, though, was quietly lining up for another collapse. Some of the officers I worked with invited me out to dinner one night. Almost everyone was drinking and driving which shocked me given we were all state certified police officers. After dinner, they more or less demanded that I go to the strip club with them. One guy, the only one who showed any real backbone probably because he had a wife and kids, said no. Everyone else went including two of the guys that did have a wife and kids. I went too despite feeling like this was certainly a bad idea and I was crossing another line that would be hard to step back across.
I ended up in the champagne room and dropped $1,000 my first night at the first club. It was an absolute fucking ripoff, which somehow didn’t stop anything—it just pushed me further along the same path.
Things escalated quickly after that. I started stirring up drama with a dispatcher at work, even though literally everyone warned me to stay away from her. I remember sitting at my desk one day, working on a burglary report, thinking about how boring the job itself was. At the same time, I was doing incredibly well. I was a rising star. I was on track for a quick promotion to corporal because I already had experience as a certified officer from working at the Department of Mental Health. I was my sergeant’s little helper, going out of my way to support him, doing everything right, and building a solid reputation.
And then I had a very clear realization. I could keep doing well at work, get promoted, and continue down that path—or I could go after the dispatcher. I knew I couldn’t do both. I knew that pursuing her would require me to start acting differently, to become toxic in the same way she was, and to put myself squarely in a position where things would eventually blow up. I didn’t say any of this out loud. I didn’t tell anyone. I just made the decision silently in my own head. I decided I was going to go after her.
A few weeks after that decision, my sergeant “punished” me by sticking me in dispatch all night. I put punishment in quotes because, looking back, I honestly think he was trying to help me on some level. He didn’t like my attitude starting from the day I made the decision and I think he sensed I was heading somewhere bad. He put me in dispatch with the very dispatcher I had decided to go after.
Two nights later, we were together. It was almost effortless, and she was so perfectly gorgeous it was unreal. She seemed happy. I was happy. Two days later, I was miserable.
That’s when my life really started to spin out of control. I had truly believed that if I got the right job and had a beautiful woman fall in love with me, I’d finally be happy. Instead, the emptiness hit almost immediately. I remember driving to work and stopping at the traffic light right before the police station, and it felt like reality cracked open. It was like I could see the Matrix. Everything suddenly felt fake, pointless, and absurd. I remember thinking, this is all fucking stupid. I got everything I wanted, and I’m still not happy. It felt hopeless in a way that scared me.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.