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.
After those streams, I would be completely aggravated. I carried that agitation into my life at home. I was less present with the kids. I was irritable with my ex-wife. My business and my moods became completely entangled. When things were going well, I had a massive ego and became insufferable about how right and brilliant I thought I was. When things were not going well, I sank into depression and sadness. My ex-wife got tired of the mood swings. She got tired of how everything revolved around whether my business was up or down.
In the middle of all of this, I started getting deeply into yoga. I had done some yoga in 2021 with a friend of mine who taught yoga outdoors and ran workout classes as well. I was doing yoga a couple of times a week back then. Eventually, he went to teach at my yoga studio. I had sworn I would never go back there after my first visit, when they had started requiring masks in 2020, but he convinced me to give it another shot. In 2022, I started doing yoga there very consistently. I loved how my body felt. Yoga felt like it was releasing old tension, loosening things that had been locked up for years, helping me become flexible again. After reading Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Body and books like Mind Over Medicine, I started to recognize just how tense my body usually was. Hours of playing video games, standing in place, talking into a microphone, yelling, getting hyped, all of it kept my body wound tight.
There was one day when my body was so tense that I pulled a calf muscle just walking around the house. I heard a loud snap and collapsed. I felt like I had been shot in the calf. I heard the snap, fell down, and thought, what the fuck was that. I did not go to the doctor or the hospital. I assumed it would heal on its own, and eventually, it did. I realized I needed to loosen my body up. I needed to become more flexible physically, and I started to see that a lot of the pain and suffering I was experiencing in life was connected to how rigid my mind had become. When your mind is rigid, you cannot even see flexibility as an option. I could see it clearly in my body, though. My body was stiff, locked up, and tense, so I decided to start with that. I got into yoga with the specific intention of making my body more flexible, and it worked. As my body softened, my mind did too. Yoga ended up being one of the most important tools I had for surviving the mental strain of that period, especially the hatred, the public judgment, and the feeling that my ex-wife, her family, and even some of my friends were turning against me while my business was collapsing at the same time.
When I went through the Udemy situation years earlier, I did not have yoga. I spun out much harder back then. I was more irritable, more reactive, more ungrounded. Yoga helped me stay calm and embodied. It helped me remain flexible, not just physically but mentally, so I could keep trying new business ideas without sinking into constant suffering. I got an unlimited membership at my yoga studio and started going consistently, anywhere from three to seven classes a week. Most of the time, I went to the power flow classes. I met people there, made friends, and genuinely loved being part of that environment. It became one of the few places where I felt stable and supported during a time when so much else felt chaotic.
At the same time, I was still enjoying trips with the family. In 2022, we went to Legoland for the first time. I had terrible diarrhea during that trip, but I refused to stay home. Instead, I put myself on a liquid diet and drank Powerade all day. I had tons of energy, the diarrhea stopped, and we ended up having a great time. I remember thinking how simple and effective that solution was, at least in my experience. What worked for me was to stop eating solid food for a bit and let my digestive system recover. I was genuinely happy about how well that worked.
Later in 2022, in the fall, we went to Michigan to see my family for the first time in a few years and brought the kids with us. That trip was emotionally intense. My ex-wife and I got into several fights while we were there, including name calling and a couple of days filled with heavy tension. There was a lot coming up for me emotionally, seeing my family again after such a long time. I was already spun out about my work, and travel tends to amplify that for me ironically because of letting go. We eventually smoothed things over after a few days, but it was a bumpy ride. The marriage issues were no longer subtle at that point. They were continuing to escalate.
One thing that stood out to me on that Michigan trip was a memory from years earlier. During the hurricane evacuation in 2017, it had taken us around sixteen hours to drive from St. Petersburg to Auburn, Alabama. I remembered thinking back then that the next time there was a hurricane, I wanted to already be out of town. While we were in Michigan in 2022, a hurricane started heading toward St. Petersburg. I remembered that old thought and realized this was exactly what I had wanted. We were already gone. We decided to extend our vacation instead of rushing back. After the hurricane passed, we drove back to Florida instead of flying.
Looking back, extending the trip probably was not necessary, but it worked out in an oddly perfect way. Tampa was so short on rental cars after the hurricane that they were desperate to get vehicles driven back into Florida. We had rented a minivan in Michigan for three days, and they let us keep it for almost another week and drive it all the way back to Florida for essentially no additional cost. They needed the inventory that badly. It felt like one of those strange moments where circumstances aligned in our favor, even in the middle of everything else that felt unstable.
Overall, we ended up having a really nice time. My family was not able to see me as much as I might have hoped because it was the middle of the school year and everyone was busy, but we enjoyed traveling around Michigan and visiting different places together. On the drive back, we stopped in Indianapolis, which I have to say I still cannot stand. I did not like it when I was there in 2010 visiting that girl from high school, and I did not like it this time either. Indianapolis just feels gross to me. That said, they do have an excellent children’s museum, and that part of the stop was genuinely fun. The kids loved it, and it was worth the detour just for that.
After Indianapolis, we continued the drive south and ended up getting a flat tire in Chattanooga. It was late Friday afternoon, around five o’clock, and we limped into a Walmart. I went inside and talked to the tire guys, explained that we were on a long trip, had the kids with us, and really needed help getting back on the road. I leaned into being polite and earnest, and it worked. Even at five p.m. on a Friday, they replaced the tire with a new one. That small act of kindness made the difference between us being stranded and us getting home safely. We were able to drive the rest of the way back the next day without any more issues.
Considering how tense things had been between my ex-wife and me at the beginning of the trip, the rest of it went relatively smoothly. Not long after that, we took another trip to Legoland. This time, I was able to eat normally and actually enjoy the food at the restaurants, which felt like a small but meaningful victory after the last visit. It was one of those moments where everything felt simple and pleasant again, even if only briefly.
Just before the hurricane evacuation trip, I helped my mom in a much bigger way. She had really wanted a dog. She had already bought an absurdly expensive trained Belgian Malinois, which turned out to be a disaster. The dog had far too much energy for her, they did not bond well, and she eventually gave the dog away. By the middle of 2022, she was desperate for another dog and was talking about draining the rest of her financial reserves to get one. When my dad died, she had a real cushion of savings. By this point, she had already burned through a huge share of it, largely because of the first dog, even though she does receive a solid retirement income.
One night on the phone, it finally clicked for me. She was not being irresponsible or impulsive in some abstract way. She was lonely. She was grieving the loss of her previous dog, and the failure of the expensive replacement had left her even more desperate for companionship. Instead of letting her spend the rest of her money, I started looking for another option. I found a dog in Miami that was up for adoption, a massive dog, well over a hundred pounds. The listing photo showed him sitting awkwardly on someone’s bed, looking both gentle and ridiculous at the same time. My mom immediately loved him.
I drove down to Miami to pick the dog up, then drove him all the way from Miami to her small town in Mississippi to deliver him to my mom. She was incredibly grateful. The dog fit perfectly into her life. They bonded immediately. She trained him, took care of him, and everything worked out exactly the way the first situation had not. She still has him to this day. His name is Scooby, and he genuinely changed her life.
That experience opened something up for her. When we visited again in the summer of 2022, my son asked her a simple question. He said, Grandma, why do you live in Mississippi? It was an ordinary, innocent question, but it landed hard. My mom had been living in Mississippi since 2005, and in that moment she realized she did not actually have a good reason to stay there anymore. Her grandkids were growing up fast. At that point, my son was four and my daughter was seven. Time was moving quickly, and the window to be present in their lives was not going to stay open forever. By then, my ex-wife and I were already making trips to Mississippi twice a year, once in the summer and once in the winter. The pattern was clear. The distance was becoming harder to justify, especially as the kids got older. That realization planted a seed that would quietly shape what came next, even if none of us fully understood it at the time.
Then, after years of me casually and not so casually telling my mom that she should move near us, something finally shifted. One day she told me, almost out of nowhere, that she wanted me to find her a house near us to buy. I remember thinking, holy shit, really? Within a day, I found her a house right near us for sale. She bought it without ever seeing it in person. By October, right after our hurricane evacuation trip, she was ready to move. I had a plane ticket booked to fly to Mississippi to help make it happen.
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