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.
This period runs from 2011 to 2014, right after I first moved in with my ex-wife, and at the time it felt like I’d won the fucking lottery. I was ecstatic. Here was this beautiful woman who was madly in love with me, someone I was wildly attracted to, could talk to about everything, and build a life around. We cooked dinner together, went out on weekends, shared dreams, and for a while it felt like every fantasy I’d ever had about adulthood had finally materialized. I genuinely believed my old bachelor self would just quietly die the second I unpacked my boxes. I thought cohabitation, intimacy, routine, and love would crowd out all the chaos. In my mind, real intimacy, eating together every night, and doing life side by side would somehow take up every last inch of space that used to be reserved for me being fucking crazy.
That assumption turned out to be wildly optimistic. The part of me I expected to disappear was far more stubborn than I anticipated. At first, I tried to negotiate with it. I cut back on the behaviors that defined my bachelor apartment years. I played less Call of Duty. I stopped staying up all night drinking with my friends. I went to class, spent most evenings with my ex-wife, and kept things balanced—at least on the surface. I still drank occasionally, still played a little, still went to the bar to watch football now and then. There was even a bar within walking distance of the house, which made everything feel civilized and manageable. I honestly believed I’d finally crossed some invisible line into normal adulthood, that all the bullshit was behind me.
What I didn’t understand—just like in earlier chapters of my life—was that getting everything I thought I wanted didn’t actually make the cravings go away. It just gave me a new setting to wrestle with them. I kept telling myself I only needed a little bit of time. Just a little space to drink with my friends, to play Call of Duty, to let that energy burn itself out. Everything else was going great. My ex-wife and I were having a blast together. We were reckless in that young, intoxicating way that feels like freedom. One night we even ended up in the apartment pool together, young and reckless, laughing at how absurd and perfect the moment felt. We were having fun. Real fun. The kind that convinces you nothing serious could possibly be wrong.
By October, we’d been living together a couple of months. I’d mostly kept things under control—gentle drinking, minimal gaming, nothing that raised alarms. Then one night in early October, my friends were all online playing Call of Duty, and I missed them badly. I started drinking while playing, the way we always used to. My ex-wife went to bed, and I stayed up until around 3:00 a.m., drinking and gambling on matches, betting I could beat them. By the end of the night, I’d lost $350 betting against guys who were objectively better than me and played far more than I did. I was drunk. They were sober. I didn’t stand a chance.
That night cracked something open. Sitting there wasted, watching the losses pile up, I felt the familiar internal collapse set in. I couldn’t justify blowing $350 gambling on video game matches with friends. I saw clearly, maybe for the first time since moving in with my ex-wife, that things weren’t just going to magically improve because my external life looked good. Moving in together had given me a temporary reprieve, a distraction, but the core desires hadn’t gone anywhere. I still wanted to drink. I still wanted to disappear into video games. The environment had changed. I hadn’t.
At the beginning of October, I decided—very confidently—that I had a video game addiction. That, I concluded, explained everything. Obviously, I couldn’t just stop playing video games. This wasn’t a discipline problem; this was an addiction. I was making bad choices because of it. Never mind that I wouldn’t have gambled $350 if I’d been sober. We’d get to that part later. For now, I latched onto the diagnosis with enthusiasm. I announced to the world that I had identified the real issue, and once again, I was going to fix it.
So I did what any reasonable, self-aware graduate student would do: I started a website called gamingaddiction.net. I was fully determined to help other people overcome their video game addiction. Writing that sentence now, it sounds completely insane, but this was my actual response to the situation. I genuinely believed I was having a moment of clarity. For the next couple of weeks, I stayed committed—at least in theory. I sold off the games I believed were “the most addictive.” Call of Duty, obviously. That was the real problem, I told myself. Everything else was fine. I kept the Xbox, though, because we still needed it to watch movies together. That logic felt airtight at the time.
Then one afternoon at grad school, my ex-wife was at work—because she had a real job—while I was at school pretending to be a responsible adult. I did have a part-time assistantship, technically, but let’s be honest about where most of my energy was going. It was around 1:00 p.m. when I was at lunch and got a text from one of my closest friends: Hey, you want to play some zombies today? I hadn’t told him about my newly discovered video game addiction. He was one of the guys I played with all the time, and explaining this whole transformation felt inconvenient. My immediate reaction was pure relief. Hell yes. I needed that. Zombies sounded perfect. Goddamn, that was going to feel good.
Meanwhile, I had already told my ex-wife I was quitting video games. I’d explicitly told her she wasn’t going to come home anymore to find me drunk, playing Call of Duty. That was the expectation. That was the promise. So naturally, I told my friend I was in, got excited, and started the hour-long drive home. We’d moved to Sarasota because my ex-wife had gotten a job at a law firm that paid the bills. She covered the rent. All I had to do was go to class and not cause problems, which, unfortunately, I was already in the process of doing.
On the drive home, I stopped at a Redbox and rented Call of Duty: Black Ops so I’d be ready. I got home, fired up the Xbox, and immediately started all the ridiculous downloading and updates you have to sit through before you can actually play. I cracked open a Diet Dr. Thunder and mixed it with strawberry Smirnoff—70 proof, just sweet enough to pretend it wasn’t hard liquor—and started drinking. By the time some random survey company called me, I was already drunk, slurring through their questions while my friend waited impatiently online. We eventually played for a few hours, though it wasn’t even that great. My friend, unlike me, had a girlfriend and a life, so he logged off.
My ex-wife got home around 5:30 p.m. She took one look at me and immediately knew. I was drunk, sitting there playing Call of Duty zombies—the exact game I’d claimed was gone from my life. She was furious. She didn’t scream. She didn’t explode. Instead, she went out with her friends, trying to give me space and avoid a fight. The moment she left, I took that as permission. I called up more friends and kept playing. When my ex-wife came home later, around 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., she went straight to bed, pissed off and exhausted.
I kept playing. Zombies had that grip on me again, and I hadn’t played through all the maps in a while, so my friend and I decided to grind through them. By 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., I was drunk and terrible at the game, shouting at the TV, yelling curses at imaginary zombies. This wasn’t quiet muttering. This was full-volume rage. The bedroom wall was right up against the living room TV, separated by nothing but drywall, and I was screaming: Goddamn it. Fucking zombie. Fuck. Bitch. Eventually, my ex-wife came out of the bedroom, exhausted and furious, telling me she had to work in the morning, asking what the hell I was doing, reminding me that I’d promised I wasn’t going to do this anymore.
I snapped. I stormed out and went for a walk around the apartment complex, seething. My ex-wife eventually came to get me which helped stop the spiraling that night. By the time I went to bed, I’d been drinking hard for over fourteen hours and I ended up violently sick—throwing up, shaking, completely spent. The video game addiction diagnosis hadn’t saved me. It had just given me a new story to tell while I kept doing the exact same thing.
I woke up the next morning on the couch. My ex-wife was already at work. I felt sick, shaky, and hollowed out, staring at the ceiling thinking, What the fuck am I doing? That was the moment the story shifted again. It suddenly seemed obvious that the video games weren’t the real problem. The drinking was. I told her—earnestly, desperately—that I was done drinking forever. I swore to God it had all been the alcohol. The video games were just collateral damage. Still, I hedged. I said I’d also try not to play too many video games, but now I was convinced sobriety was the real fix. If I could just stay sober, everything else would fall into place.
Meanwhile, I still had my video game addiction website online—the one I’d already relapsed on. I kept it going anyway. I stayed sober for a few months, and as the fog lifted, the whole thing started to feel absurd. I leaned into that. I began making T-shirts about video game addiction, half-serious and half making fun of the entire concept. One of them said, My boyfriend plays video games like a job. I wish it paid like a job. Then I made versions for the guys themselves: I play video games like a job. I wish it paid like a job. I even did niche ones like I play Call of Duty like a job. I wish it paid like a job. I bought hundreds of these shirts for around $5 each through Vistaprint, fully convinced I’d flip them on eBay for $10 or $20 and finally crack the code to online business.
That plan failed spectacularly. Nobody wanted them. The shirts looked cheap, awkward, and vaguely embarrassing. I lost money and ended up with a massive box of unwanted shirts sitting in the apartment. Eventually, I gave them away as Christmas presents, which in hindsight was a strange gift to hand people with a straight face. Not long after that, I abandoned the idea of helping anyone with video game addiction altogether and settled on a new rule: I could play as many video games as I wanted as long as I didn’t drink.
Then Christmas came. My ex-wife and I traveled together to visit my parents, and after that, I planned to spend ten days away from her. At the time, this was the longest we’d ever been apart. In the entire history of our relationship, we’ve only had two ten-day separations—this one in our first year together, and another trip she took in 2023. At the end of that Christmas trip, I stopped to visit friends in Columbia, South Carolina. The same friend I’d played zombies with before was there, and he had a bottle of vodka waiting for me.
I hadn’t told him I wasn’t drinking. I hadn’t told him on purpose. I’d told my ex-wife. I’d told some other people. But these friends were kept deliberately uninformed, just in case. On the eight-hour drive from Mississippi to South Carolina, my mind looped endlessly: Should I drink? Should I not drink? Should I drink? Should I not drink? When I arrived, my friend pulled out a 750 ml bottle of strawberry Smirnoff vodka and said it was my Christmas present. That was it. Fuck yeah. Let’s go.
I drank. Nothing dramatic happened. We stayed up until eight or nine in the morning playing zombies. By the end of the night, I was a mess—sloppy, useless, barely able to function. I kept getting killed, couldn’t even fight the zombies properly. My friend and the other guy I was playing with just carried on without me. I threw up in the bathroom and passed out. The next day, I called my ex-wife, whining, apologizing, telling her I’d relapsed, promising it wouldn’t happen again. I sounded exactly like what I was.
After that, I managed to stay sober for five months. I still played video games, but I focused my energy on trying to build a business. The problem was, I was absolutely terrible at business. I couldn’t make money doing anything. I started a Facebook page right when pages first came out and paid for likes, which meant I was literally just spending money to look busy. Everything failed. Every idea fizzled. I had no traction, no income, and no clue what I was doing.
One woman did pay me $20 once to do a video game addiction intervention on her boyfriend. She asked me to send him an email explaining how his gaming was hurting their relationship. I wrote the email, sent it off, and never heard back about how it went. Whether it helped or not, I’ll never know. The fact that it even happened still makes me laugh.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Games playlist.