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.
Not long after that, I ended up going to a bachelor party. By that point, I was certain I had experienced a spiritual awakening. The friend hosting the bachelor party was completely supportive of my sobriety. He had been one of my old drinking buddies, someone I used to travel out of state to visit so we could drink, play zombies, and disappear together. I told everyone in AA that I was going to this bachelor party, and almost universally, they told me it was a bad idea. They said I shouldn’t go, that I was still in my first year, that I was playing with fire. But I knew something had changed.
In the past, when I tried to stay sober, I would avoid things like bachelor parties altogether because I felt so sorry for myself. I knew I’d be sitting there miserable, watching everyone else drink, and that I’d probably end up drinking just to make the feeling stop. So I would stay home and feel resentful and deprived. This time felt different. I wasn’t avoiding life anymore, and I wasn’t trying to white-knuckle my way through it either.
This time, I actually went to the bachelor party. It was up the coast, right on the beach, so I drove eight or nine hours to get there and arrived before anyone else. On the drive up, I was listening to The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. The same woman who had suggested getting a massage had also recommended that book, and I happened to be listening to it at exactly the right moment in my life, right in the middle of a massive spiritual awakening. The book made perfect sense to me. It helped me see clearly that I wasn’t my body or my mind. There weren’t two versions of me—some “I” and then a separate “myself.” There was just I. What I had always thought of as myself was really just ego: a temporary, illusory thing that comes and goes, a mind constantly throwing out thoughts. Listening to The Power of Now on that drive felt like everything I’d been doing in AA had prepared me to actually understand it. It wasn’t abstract or philosophical anymore. It was obvious. I arrived at that bachelor party on a spiritual high, feeling grounded and clear in a way I’d never felt before.
My friend’s brother showed up next, before anyone else arrived, and we started talking. He was excited, pacing around, talking about how pumped he was to get drunk. He had drank and played zombies with me plenty of times before, and we both had a tendency to get sloppy, leaving my friend stuck with two idiots playing like shit. Naturally, he started asking me how much I was going to drink. I told him I wasn’t drinking anymore. He asked why, and I said, because I’m an alcoholic. He pushed back immediately. Couldn’t I just have one drink? A couple? Drink reasonably? I told him no, I couldn’t. When he asked why, I said something that stopped him cold. I told him honestly that late at night, drunk, I could get genuinely dangerous. He looked confused and asked what I meant. I told him I didn’t know how to explain it. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes when I got wasted and things went sideways, I became genuinely dangerous. You never know which night it’s going to be. It’s not like at the start of the night I know I’m going to lose control. It just happens. And if I take that first drink, I’m consenting to the possibility that things might get scary later.
After I said that, something shifted. He admitted to me that sometimes when he drank, he felt like he couldn’t stop. He would plan to have one or two, and then he’d end up drunk even though he didn’t want to be. I told him that was exactly how alcoholism works. It’s not that every time you drink, everything has to fall apart. It’s that sometimes you drink more than you meant to, sometimes you do things you would never do sober, or sometimes you drink when you didn’t even want to. That’s alcoholism. That was the first real, honest conversation I’d ever had about it outside of AA.
Not long after that, my friend and the rest of the group arrived. My friend had already told all of them—except his brother, apparently—that I wasn’t drinking. He had been clear with them: Jerry’s sober, he’s in Alcoholics Anonymous, don’t ask him to drink, don’t give him any shit about it. And that’s exactly how it went. For the rest of the weekend, nobody pressured me. Nobody encouraged me to drink. Nobody tried to test me. No one at that bachelor party wanted me to drink, and I felt completely supported in being sober.
That didn’t mean I never felt anything. There were moments where I felt like I was missing out. The groom mixed himself a massive drink in a pitcher you’d normally use for lemonade, filling the whole thing with liquor, soda, and ice. They played beer pong and drank all weekend, and I stood there watching. For short stretches, I felt a little sorry for myself, like I was on the outside looking in. But it was different from before. The feeling passed. It didn’t spiral into resentment or obsession. I wasn’t white-knuckling it. I was just noticing the feeling and letting it go, and that alone told me something fundamental had changed.
Over the next few days, we did normal stuff—went to the beach, went out to dinner, hung around the house. Here’s where I drew a very clear line. I told them, “I’m not going to the bar with you guys.” I was happy to go to the beach, hang out, play games at the house, whatever, but I wasn’t going to a bar. I didn’t even like going to bars when I was drinking. I sure as hell wasn’t going to one sober, especially when I had a wife and wasn’t trying to pick a girl up. So they went off to the bar both nights, and I stayed back. I talked on the phone with my ex-wife. I talked to my mom. I went to bed at a reasonable time—before midnight both nights. I woke up in the mornings around 8:00 a.m.
They, on the other hand, started trying to wake up around 9:00 or 10:00 a.m., and the difference between us was obvious immediately. The first morning, they were a little hungover and still kind of drunk, but it wasn’t too bad. The second morning, they were absolutely fucked. They had stayed out later. One guy—who had a girlfriend—had been making out with some other girl on the beach the night before. Another guy got punched in the face by a bouncer, and the entire left side of his face, from his eye socket down toward his mouth, was swollen. He was laid out on the couch with ice on his face. The groom was hungover as hell and could barely eat. Someone else was throwing up. I stood there looking around at the scene and thought, holy shit.
Yeah, there had been moments—maybe an hour here, a couple of hours there—where I felt like I was missing out. But look at them now. Look at how they didn’t sleep worth a shit. Look at how bad they felt. That could have been me with a swollen face. That could have been me making out with some random girl on the beach and waking up feeling like absolute garbage about it. That could have been me puking in the toilet. This was a better deal. I might have missed a little bit of the fun, but I missed all of the misery. I probably got fifty percent of the fun they had and skipped one hundred percent of the misery. That’s a pretty good deal.
That was one of the first times it really clicked for me. Staying sober doesn’t mean you hit the absolute peak euphoria. You might not get as wild. You might not laugh quite as hard, especially in early sobriety when you’re still learning how to have fun again. But you miss out on one hundred percent of the misery. That alone makes it worth it. The whole weekend felt strangely familiar, like college had felt when I first went—twelve years earlier—when I could see clearly that staying sober was the smart move and everyone drinking looked like an idiot. Of course, I forgot that lesson along the way, as I’ve already described. But this bachelor party brought it back into sharp focus.
It made something else very clear, too: drinking is a shitty deal in every possible way. Alcohol and drugs are traps. People get lured into them, sucked into them, and snared. If you think of it like an animal trap in the woods, you should count yourself damn lucky if you ever get caught in one of those traps and manage to get out alive. And if someone comes along, shows you how the trap works, and helps you get free, you have a responsibility to give back—to help others get out, too. There are millions—tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions—of people trapped in alcoholism right now.
Is it always as ugly as mine was? No. Is it always as chaotic? Probably not. But for some people, absolutely. And even if it’s “milder”—even if someone just needs a glass of wine every night to relax or they get irritable without it—that’s still a trap. It’s a smaller one, but it’s still a trap. You’re still stuck needing something outside yourself to feel okay. I was in a big-ass trap. And because it was such a big-ass trap, I was also highly motivated to get out of it. I’m incredibly grateful that I did. And I’m even more grateful that, over the last eleven and a half years, I’ve stayed out.
From there, early sobriety kept getting better. The first few months were rough, no question, but once I got past that initial stretch, I just kept improving. We moved into a beautiful holiday season together. Now that I was sober, my ex-wife and I were back at theme parks, hitting them just as hard as we ever had, walking all day, laughing, actually enjoying ourselves instead of managing my mood or my drinking. By the time we moved into 2015, it was shaping up to be an absolutely gorgeous year.
Right at the end of 2014, my ex-wife finally got pregnant. In hindsight, the timing makes complete sense to me: she got pregnant once I had become trustworthy. My ex-wife started to feel like I would actually make a good dad, like I was someone she could build a future with. Eight months after I got sober—and really just a few months after I stabilized into healthy sobriety, where I was pleasant to be around, full of energy, loving, joyful, and actually showing up as a proper husband—she got pregnant. That timing makes perfect sense.
Thankfully, we were able to get pregnant naturally. Right after we got back from Christmas at my mom’s house, my ex-wife sat me down and told me that for Christmas, we were getting a baby. I was thrilled. We had wanted this for a long time, and now it felt like the right moment. This was also the point where I felt truly ready to change my life in a deeper, more permanent way.
One unexpected gift of that season was what it did to my relationship with sex and porn. I realized I didn’t really want porn anymore. I decided I wanted my sex life to be focused entirely on my ex-wife. From that point on, for most of the next decade, I didn’t masturbate or watch porn. That wasn’t something I had to build an entire program around. As my mental and physical health improved, some changes just became obvious and easy. I didn’t want porn anymore, so I stopped. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just aligned.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.