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.
By the end of 2012, I was drinking at home again. It still looked reasonable from the outside. I wasn’t getting drunk all the time. It felt controlled. Then December came, and with it, our wedding day. My ex-wife stayed at the house overnight the night before because she was afraid I’d get fucked up and wake up hungover on our wedding morning. So she stayed, and we had that night and the next morning together before she left with her bridesmaids to get ready.
That left me with about an hour to an hour and a half alone before people started showing up. It was around 10:00 a.m. I went to the grocery store because we needed a few things, and my brother wanted some non-alcoholic beer. While I was there, I made the decision that should have been obvious in hindsight. I told myself, Fuck it. I’ll just get a six-pack. I’d promised my ex-wife I wouldn’t get drunk on our wedding day, and in my mind, a six-pack wasn’t getting drunk. I grabbed a six-pack of Miller High Life—the same beer I’d started with years earlier—and headed home.
I put on Call of Duty Zombies, the Moon level. I had a lot going on emotionally. My parents were in town. My family was there. I was about to get married. And I genuinely believed I needed to drink a few beers and play Zombies to get centered before the wedding. I drank three or four beers over about an hour and a half. Nothing wild. Nothing reckless. Then my friends showed up. They brought out the liquor. The shots came out. And we started drinking more.
I ended up wearing the wrong suit jacket for the wedding photos. I had a black one, but somewhere between the beers and the general haze of the morning, I put on a navy blue jacket without realizing it. By the time we got to the venue, everyone immediately noticed. Wrong jacket. The venue was about twenty minutes away from the house, which meant a forty-minute round trip to fix my mistake. One of my friends—one who has since passed away—rode back to the house and grabbed the correct jacket for me while I stayed there trying to hold it together.
Right after I arrived in the wrong jacket, it was time for the first look with my ex-wife. I wasn’t sloppy drunk, but I had a strong buzz, leaning toward drunk, fully aware of what was happening but not grounded. When I saw her in her dress, she looked stunning. Absolutely beautiful. And instead of feeling joy or gratitude, all I saw was a reflection of myself—how undeserving I felt, how much of a piece of shit I thought I was. I saw myself as drunk, fat, failing, unworthy of someone that radiant. Seeing her made me see myself clearly, and I was disgusted with what I saw.
The problem was that my ex-wife could tell something was wrong, and she didn’t understand that it had nothing to do with her. She was perfect in that moment, a bright, beautiful light. The darkness was entirely mine. But she internalized it. She took my self-loathing as evidence that she wasn’t enough. From there, the wedding started to get turbulent.
She kept asking what was wrong, and I couldn’t explain it because I didn’t fully understand it myself. All I knew was that looking at her made me feel unworthy, and that feeling transferred straight onto her. My ex-wife became so anxious and overwhelmed that she got physically sick. At that point, I realized I had to stop drinking completely or I was going to destroy the entire day.
I stopped. We made it through the ceremony. We didn’t do traditional vows. No sickness and health bullshit. Nothing performative. It was basically, I love you. I love you too. Let’s get married and not fuck other people. Simple and honest. Between moments, my ex-wife was still struggling, but somehow we got through it. Once I stopped drinking, the rest of the wedding actually went fine.
We’d done what we thought was a cheap wedding, and it still came out to around $10,000, but it was incredible. The venue, a waterfront restaurant, was beautiful. The food was amazing. My ex-wife did an incredible job pulling it all together. We had close to a hundred people there, and for what we got, the cost was shockingly low. It was a genuinely great wedding, despite the chaos underneath it.
After the wedding, things started to spiral. We went to Vail, Colorado for our honeymoon, which was objectively wonderful. In my mind, we would have so much fun snowboarding and skiing like I used to as a kid. What I didn’t account for was the elevation and my fat ass. Vail sits at around two miles high and my body was completely unprepared. I couldn’t catch my breath at all. I was fat—around 230 pounds—and out of shape. I went to the gym sometimes, did some cardio, lifted weights inconsistently, mostly repeating the same lazy routines. My body wasn’t conditioned for anything more strenuous, and that reality hit me hard on the mountain. It was a fitting start to the next phase of my life: beautiful surroundings, terrible preparation, and the growing sense that something fundamental still wasn’t right.
When I was a teenager, snowboarding in the Alps, my body was an entirely different machine. I was fourteen or fifteen, and we went every single day—five days in a row. We’d wake up early, catch the bus around 8:00 a.m., be on the mountain by 9:00, and ride until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. We’d grab lunch somewhere in the middle of it and then just keep going. My brother and I could ride all day without thinking twice about it. I took some brutal falls back then. One time I was flying, caught a bad patch of snow, went straight down on my back, and smacked my head off the ice so hard I nearly knocked myself out. I just stood up and kept riding. Another day I wiped out and flipped, landing with my face down in the snow and my ankles down, twisting my back. I was so disoriented afterward that I couldn’t even use the stupid T-bar lifts—the ones where you hook one leg and it drags you up the mountain—so I walked uphill carrying my board. By the end of the week, my whole body was bruised from head to toe. I looked like I’d been beaten up but I could snowboard my ass off.
That’s why Vail was such a shock. This wasn’t about nostalgia. This was reality hitting me in the face. My fat, out-of-shape body simply couldn’t do what it used to do. This is where honesty actually matters. We spend so much time trying not to offend each other, but if you’d looked at me then, the honest response should’ve been, You’re fat, you’re out of shape, and you need to get your life together. There’s nothing kind about pretending otherwise.
My ex-wife signed up for a beginner ski class because she was from Florida and didn’t know shit about skiing or snowboarding. I went straight for the intermediate runs on my snowboard. I warmed up on the bunny hill a couple of times, felt decent, and then took the lift up to the top. That’s when reality set in. These runs were long as hell, and I had no concept of what altitude actually does to your body especially when combined with a bunch of extra weight and no activities recently similar to snowboarding. By the third lift ride, my entire body was wrecked. My muscles were burning out, my lungs felt useless, and I had to sit in a mountain restaurant for almost an hour just to catch my breath. When I finally went back out, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t ride properly. My legs shook uncontrollably as soon as I started moving. I ended up falling halfway down the mountain and basically sliding and stumbling the rest of the way. It was humiliating.
I was twenty-eight years old in 2012, and standing there, I couldn’t wrap my head around how this had happened. Fourteen years earlier, I was strong, durable, relentless. Now I was a fat wreck, gasping for air, completely humbled. That experience planted something in me—a quiet but persistent realization that I needed to get healthy again. Not optimized. Not hacked. Actually healthy.
That same trip also gave me something else: my first genuinely good business idea. By that point, I’d spent all of 2011 and 2012 bleeding money. Thousands of dollars gone. Every idea failed. Every project went nowhere. I couldn’t figure out how to make anything work. But Facebook advertising was starting to explode, and almost nobody knew what they were doing. I was learning it out of necessity to promote myself, and I realized something simple: if I could prove I could advertise well enough for my own business, other people would pay me to do it for them.
I told my ex-wife on our honeymoon my new business plan of helping people advertise on Facebook and this one finally worked. In January 2013, I had my first profit of more than a thousand dollars in a single month and by March 2013, I had my first month making over $10. After two straight years of losing money and going nowhere, I’d finally found something real and I’d put in the hustle to make it happen. To get those clients, I sent thousands of Facebook pages direct messages offering to help them with ads and offering my Facebook page as proof that I was very good at doing them for myself. While I got ignored the vast majority of the time and got plenty of toxic replies, I ended up getting hundreds of clients in more than 20 countries around the world to pay me hundreds of dollars per ad campaign to setup their ads for them.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.