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.
At the same time, my personal life was getting complicated in ways I didn’t expect. I met this absolutely stunning woman in Alcoholics Anonymous, and she really liked me, largely because of my sobriety and how solid I was in it. I developed a real crush on her, the kind that actually scared me. I was talking to my friends about it, asking what the hell was going on in my head. I started thinking things I’d never seriously thought before, like maybe I wanted to leave my ex-wife and be with this woman instead. I found myself thinking, This is who I want to be with. I don’t want to be with my ex-wife anymore.
That realization hit me hard. I felt horrible about it. I didn’t understand what was happening because this hadn’t happened before. I’d been with my ex-wife for ten years at that point. Sure, over the years there had been moments of attraction, some light flirting, occasional energy with other women, but nothing like this. I’d never felt genuinely sad that I wasn’t single, or wished I could be with someone else. Now I did. And all of it—Warzone, the gaming addiction, the success, the pressure—wrapped together into one tangled mess. Video games became the easiest way to escape that feeling. I buried myself in streaming instead of talking to my ex-wife about what was going on inside me, and the crush sat there unspoken, quietly eating away at me, leaving me frustrated, conflicted, and increasingly disconnected from my real life.
I kept asking myself why my marriage wasn’t something I felt that excited about anymore. I remembered a time when I felt like I worshipped my ex-wife, when being with her felt grounding and obvious. But after the financial disaster, the differences we had around the kids, and then the deeper I fell back into video games, it felt like we slowly started drifting apart. By 2021, once I was fully immersed in gaming again and everything around COVID had created such a deep divide between me and her family, it became clear that we weren’t on the same page anymore. The distance kept widening. My ex-wife later said that having a crush is usually a symptom of a problem in the marriage, not just a personal failure of the person who has the crush. I think she was right. It wasn’t just me. Something had already shifted between us. Her excitement about me had faded, and then this other woman showed up and that energy was suddenly there again. It felt intoxicating. It felt alive.
I remember the first time I met her at an AA meeting. There were probably thirty or more people there, sitting outside. I saw this drop-dead gorgeous woman, and without hesitation I walked straight over and put my chair next to hers. When it was my turn to share, I shared the most euphoric, polished, magnetic version of myself I could summon. Right after the meeting ended, I asked for her phone number and got it. I started texting her and coordinating meetings, and we kept running into each other again and again. Eventually she told me she was concerned that something might be developing between us that shouldn’t be, and she didn’t want to go down that road. I told her not to worry, that I was monogamous, that I was just being friendly. We hugged. We told each other we loved each other. There was a lot of emotion there, and it was very real. But afterward, I felt disgusting. I felt like I had lied to her.
If I had been honest, the truth would have sounded very different. The truth would have been that I wasn’t happy in my marriage anymore, that I was thinking about divorce, and that part of me wanted her to be my next wife. That was the truth underneath everything. But I didn’t feel allowed to say it. I didn’t even feel allowed to fully think it. It felt forbidden, like something that couldn’t be real or valid. All of this was happening in the background while, on the surface, my life looked wildly successful. Online, people either saw a guy streaming shirtless and acting unhinged or they saw success. They saw massive view counts, big money, influence. People wanted what I had on Facebook Gaming. There were months where I made $10,000, like when the GoldenEye and NBA Jam streams hit back to back. From the outside, it looked like I was winning.
Inside, my marriage was quietly unraveling, and I had no idea what to do about it or how to be honest about what I was feeling. Instead of facing it, I escaped. Most days I was either playing video games or watching other people play Warzone. I stayed glued to everything happening in the ecosystem so I wouldn’t miss a trend or a strategy, so nobody else would figure something out before I did. Hours and hours disappeared that way. All of my energy and attention went into gaming—testing new games, experimenting with Twitch and YouTube, trying to move people across platforms, trying to stay on top. You’d think it would have been enough. In many ways, 2021 really did feel like the peak. I had more attention and views than ever before. I’d finally made it. I felt incredible about myself at times.
At the same time, I also felt like absolute shit. There were moments when all the nasty comments felt true, when I believed the people telling me I was a loser or a shitty parent. I often wasn’t present with my kids because my mind was somewhere else entirely, thinking about streams, algorithms, games, and growth. I was split in half—on top of the world and quietly miserable—unable to reconcile the success everyone saw with the life that was slipping through my fingers right in front of me.
I also got my kids onto tablets during this period. My ex-wife was the one who bought them, but the reality is that the kids were soon spending an hour or two a day on their tablets, every day. They started watching YouTube Kids heavily, playing games, watching videos, watching movies, and slowly spending more and more of their time on screens. Looking back, the shift in how I showed up as a parent is obvious. There was a time when I was much more active with my kids, when I’d go to the park and play with them, be fully engaged, running around, present. By this point, that had changed. I was still around them physically, but a lot of that time was spent doing chores—washing dishes, cleaning up, handling household tasks—while my ex-wife worked. She had ramped up her freelancing by then, and financially things were improving fast. In 2021 alone, I made over $100,000 again in my business, and my ex-wife brought in solid money too. After everything we’d been through, our finances completely turned around within a couple of years, and from the outside it looked like we were finally back on a strong, positive track.
As I leaned harder into retro games in 2021, I started doing presentations showing people exactly how I was making more than $10,000 a month on Facebook Gaming. I shared my analytics, my stats, my strategies, laid it all out. What I noticed, though, was a huge disconnect between what I was doing and what other people could realistically replicate. I had a verified blue checkmark next to my name. I had millions of followers. I had a partner badge. I had years of deep digital marketing experience. Most people had none of that. I could show them the process, but when they tried to copy it, it didn’t work. They’d stream GoldenEye and get a few hundred views. I’d play the same games and pull hundreds of thousands of views. And I just kept doing it again and again. The success kept replicating for me with retro games in a way it didn’t for almost anyone else.
I went all in. I hit retro game stores and dropped thousands of dollars multiple times, buying hundreds and hundreds of old games. I scoured eBay and bought obscure titles—Harry Potter on GameCube, Top Gun on NES, all kinds of random shit. I played StarCraft. I went back and played literally a hundred different games. I started thinking of my live streams less as live events and more as videos that just happened to be recorded live. I’d do the stream, but most of the views would come afterward. I played the Family Guy video game on Xbox and that one blew up. I started wearing clothes again for some of the streams, getting into outfits, leaning into characters. My creativity was going wild.
At the same time, I started blatantly violating the non-disclosure agreement. I could feel myself crossing lines, and I didn’t really care anymore. I had reached a point where I felt untouchable. I kept looking at that partner badge, knowing it was temporary, knowing it could disappear at any time, and that actually made me less cautious, not more. I knew it wouldn’t last forever. And I also knew that there was no way I was going to sit there quietly and be a good little boy just to preserve some badge. If I had a platform and an audience, it felt pointless if I couldn’t say what I actually wanted to say. So I ran my mouth on my live streams. I pushed boundaries. I spoke openly. I stopped pretending. And even though part of me knew I was playing with fire, another part of me felt like that honesty was the only thing that made any of it worth doing at all.
I started pushing into stand-up comedy in a way that took things to an entirely different level, and it pissed people off more than anything I’d done up to that point. I was listening constantly to stand-up comics and conspiracy content, and I’d developed this belief that one of the most powerful spiritual skills a person could have was the ability to laugh at anything. If you could find humor even in the darkest, most horrific places, then nothing really had power over you anymore. That idea obsessed me. I wanted to test it. I wanted to see how far it could go.
I deliberately went looking for the darkest material imaginable, not because I supported it or believed in it, but because I wanted to see if humor could exist even there. I became focused on the act of transmutation itself—taking something unspeakably heavy and flipping it into laughter as a way of reclaiming psychological power. Some of the jokes crossed into territory I won’t recreate here, blending shock humor with imagery drawn from one of the darkest moments in human history.
What mattered to me wasn’t the specific joke. It was the fact that I felt I had crossed some internal boundary and proven something to myself. I felt proud that I’d found a way—at least in my own mind—to laugh in a place where laughter felt forbidden. To me, that felt like spiritual sovereignty. Other people did not see it that way.
Some people went absolutely nuclear. They were threatening to report my page, telling me I was going to lose my partner status, saying I’d get banned, saying they were coming after me. I’d already heard rumors by that point about how Facebook actually worked at the upper levels—that once you crossed a certain threshold, your account was no longer subject to automated enforcement. Regular accounts could be taken down by mass reporting, often by bots. Enough reports and the system would just nuke the page. But once you reached a certain status, that stopped working. At that level, only manual intervention mattered. A human being had to decide to take action. In mob terms, you were a made man.
That was my account. People reported me constantly, and nothing happened. The reports just bounced off. I talked outrageous amounts of shit. I pushed boundaries relentlessly. I even did live streams where I blatantly violated the non-disclosure agreement—saying the exact opposite of what I’d been explicitly told not to say. And nothing happened. No warnings. No strikes. No consequences. None of the other partners snitched on me. Nobody at Facebook manually intervened. And all the people who were furious enough to report me were powerless to do anything about it. I said whatever I wanted, and the platform just kept amplifying me. At that point, I felt untouchable.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.