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.
I kept going to AA meetings. There was a week where in-person AA meetings were illegal, and I went anyway. My thinking was simple: I might get arrested for going to a meeting, but if I don’t go, I might drink myself to death. At that time, people were relapsing everywhere. I could picture alcoholics sitting at home, isolated, drinking instead of being in meetings. The home group I was part of tried to shut things down. They told me, as secretary, that I had to lock the room. The chair and treasurer insisted. I told them, I’m showing up in person every day. I have a key to our meeting space, and you can’t stop me. They split the group. Half went to Zoom. Five or six of us kept meeting in person almost every day. I was there nearly every day, even during the period when it was illegal.
There were others who felt the same way. One of them was a pastor who actually got arrested for keeping his church open. Eventually, churches and AA meetings were allowed to stay open even while nearly everything else remained closed. I never stopped going. My ex-wife was angry about it, but she also understood why I wouldn’t budge. For me, staying sober mattered more than following rules that felt disconnected from reality. In that moment, I wasn’t trying to be rebellious for the sake of it. I was choosing what I believed would keep me alive.
Around that time, I started getting pulled into an entirely different social orbit. Through another massage therapist, I met a few people who introduced me to a wider circle over Zoom. These were very new-age, light-and-love types, and a lot of them lived together in a shared house in town. I began spending time with them in person. In May of 2020, I even paid a guy $100 an hour for life coaching. He was in his early twenties, living in a house with a bunch of other guys, and my ex-wife was furious that I would spend $100 for a single hour with him. But the experience was genuinely transformative. We ran around a park yelling, I’m free, I’m free, at the top of our lungs, and as ridiculous as that sounds, it felt liberating. It cracked something open in me. It shifted my perspective. It was worth every dollar. Looking back, it still amazes me that even at the depths of my financial collapse, I somehow still had the abundance to afford massages and life coaching.
At the same time, my ex-wife was accumulating a lot of resentment toward me. Her entire family was angry because if I had just gone along with the lockdowns, they would have been able to see her and the kids. Because I refused to comply, they refused to see us for months. My ex-wife held that against me far more than she held it against them, because she agreed with them more than she agreed with me. From her perspective, my stubbornness was the problem. From my perspective, I was watching collective insanity unfold and choosing not to participate. During the height of all of this, I was going to ecstatic dances, doing ice baths, and spending time in close quarters with all kinds of people. I was fully immersed in real, physical experiences while most of the world was locked inside scrolling their phones. I genuinely believed I was the sane one for continuing to live my life.
That contrast mattered. As everyone else retreated further into the internet, I felt more convinced than ever that I wanted my life to be in person. That realization was a huge part of why I sold off my entire studio and all my equipment. Spending time with people face-to-face was infinitely better than doing everything online. It felt alive. It felt human. So I committed to it. By June 2020, I had launched The Jerry Banfield Show as an in-person event. I found a venue, booked it, and went for it.
The first show drew about twenty people. The first mistake was the tickets. I wanted people there so badly that I gave away too many free tickets. Out of those twenty people, maybe three actually paid. The show was losing money immediately. On top of that, I had no idea how to promote locally. I tried running online ads, but they didn’t work, at least not for that first show. None of my existing followers showed up either. Many platforms were actively discouraging or suppressing promotion for in-person events during that phase of lockdowns, so inviting people to gather in real life was treated like a problem. Under those conditions, twenty people was all I could get.
Still, the show itself was genuinely good and I hosted multiple shows each week. I brought in a hypnotherapist who led a group hypnosis and past-life regression session, which was incredible. I had a massage-therapist friend lead a movement practice that was fun and energizing. A guy I had partnered with came on and told his story, including how he had once modeled for a famous magazine, and it was surprisingly motivating. I loved the variety. I loved the energy of it. It felt like something real was happening.
I had also joined Toastmasters back in 2019 to improve my public speaking, but when that moved to Zoom, I stopped participating. After nearly two decades of living my life online, the last thing I wanted was another virtual room full of faces in boxes. I was done with that world. Even though the show was losing money and clumsy in execution, it represented something I deeply wanted: a life built around real people, real conversations, and real presence.
Watching everyone else retreat further into online life made me want to unplug even more. So I did. I stayed unplugged and ran the in-person show for a few months. At first, the lockdowns were the main obstacle, but masks weren’t really a thing yet. Then the mask bullshit started, and to me that was even worse than the lockdowns. Seeing people finally allowed out of their houses but forced to cover their faces felt completely insane. Around the same time, my daughter’s school shut down. We got about $1,000 back in tuition, which was something, but it only reinforced what I already knew—we should never have enrolled her there in the first place.
As time went on, people got used to staying home. Even when lockdowns eased, people still didn’t want to come out in person, and the masks became this lingering psychological barrier. Attendance at my show dropped steadily. By August 2020, it was dead. I had multiple shows where nobody showed up at all. There was one exception: a single woman came because of a Facebook ad. I met her in person, and afterward I ended up attending several yoga classes she hosted. Through that connection, I also met one of my favorite yoga instructors. So even though the show completely failed as a business—months of losses at a time when our finances were already desperate—it still ended up being fun and valuable on a personal level. It built character. It connected me with people I never would have met otherwise.
By August 2020, though, I was desperate again. I didn’t know what to do next. I tried doing live streams to promote the show. I had one guy join my partner group for $1,000 and come down to see me in person. I did live streams with him. I tried focusing on local marketing. None of it worked. Once again, I felt stuck. So I went live on Facebook and asked my followers directly what I should do. Even after everything, there was still a massive gaming audience following me. People who had been with me since 2016 had now lived through two and a half years of me not gaming. They were begging me to come back. They told me this time was different. Facebook Gaming was blowing up. They said if I came back now, it would finally work.
The next day, after that live stream, I was jumping on a little fitness trampoline in the house. And that’s when it hit me. I had this clear, vivid vision of being a professional gamer. For years, I had wanted nothing more than to make money playing video games so I wouldn’t have to do anything else. That dream was one of the reasons 2019 had beaten me up so badly. I kept thinking, I could have just gone for it. I could have just committed to gaming instead of assuming it wouldn’t work. Instead, I chased other ideas that turned out to be far worse. Jumping on that trampoline, I could suddenly see it. I could see myself making real money playing Call of Duty: Warzone. It felt obvious.
From the outside, the situation was absurd. I didn’t own a single gaming system. I had almost no money. I was drowning in minimum payments and still relying on credit to survive. My ex-wife was angry, and I was depending on her financial support. I had sold every camera, every PC, every piece of streaming gear I owned. All I had left was a shitty laptop I’d bought in 2015 that couldn’t even live stream properly. No consoles. No setup. No plan. Nothing. And yet, bouncing on that trampoline, I could see it clearly. With everyone online, watching live streams nonstop, Warzone felt like the moment I’d been waiting for all along. This was it. This was the opportunity I’d been circling for years without fully committing. And this time, instead of doubting it, instead of overthinking it, I decided to act. From that moment on, I started executing.
My ex-wife was pissed immediately. She didn’t want me going back to video games, resented the idea, and made it clear she hated it. In her mind, I needed to get a real job or make real money online, not screw around playing games again. At the same time, she took on this resigned, resentful posture of, you’re going to do whatever you’re going to do anyway, which I fucking hated. No—I wasn’t just doing whatever I wanted. If that were true, I wouldn’t have asked her opinion at all. I wouldn’t have cared how she felt. The fact that I was asking meant I did care, even if we couldn’t agree.
Despite all of that, I went back to gaming. I put it out publicly that I wanted to return, and I was honest about where I was—I didn’t even have the money to buy the equipment. I asked for help. One friend, who I’d mailed a microphone to back in 2015 so we could collaborate on video courses, mailed me that same Blue Yeti USB microphone back. Another friend, who I’d given my Xbox One Day One Edition to years earlier—the one I bought in 2013—sent it back to me as well. Within a week, I had an Xbox again. It was barely good enough to run the game, but it worked. I had a low-end mic, but the audio was solid. All I still needed was a computer and a camera.
I went on Facebook Marketplace and found a guy in Tampa who had slapped together a PC from old parts. For $600, he sold me a machine that was just barely good enough to live stream. Then I found another guy selling a camera he had used to film funerals. Apparently, he was done filming funerals. I bought it from him for $200, picked up a capture card, and put everything together. Within a couple of weeks of that vision I had on the trampoline, I had a complete setup again—and I’d spent less than $1,000 total.
I hated the setup. Six months earlier, I’d had a $10,000–$20,000 professional live streaming studio, one of the nicest setups you could possibly have. Now I had this janky, thrown-together system that barely worked. The Xbox was so slow it could hardly run Call of Duty: Warzone. The PC was so weak I could only stream to one platform at a time, and even then it crashed sometimes. The camera was ghetto—blurry, pixelated half the time. Everything about it was inferior. And yet, it worked.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Games playlist.