Not all at once. Gradually. A layer at a time.

First it takes the edge off. Then it takes more. And it keeps going.

You stop feeling the hard things. But you also stop feeling the good things. The things that used to land don't anymore.

Numbness isn’t neutral. It has a cost.

Sobriety doesn’t just give you your mornings back. It gives you your nerve endings. The world gets louder. Sharper. More saturated.

That can be uncomfortable at first. Feelings you’ve been insulating against for years come back online. Some of them are hard. Some of them are devastating.

But some of them are the reason you’re here.

The ones that make you want to create something. Write something. Say something true. The ones that remind you that your life is actually happening and you are actually in it.

Alcohol offered relief from feeling. Sobriety offers something else entirely: access.

Access to the full range of what it means to be alive. Allowing grief and wonder to move through you.

You were made to feel all of it.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

Jessica knows nothing has a grip on her anymore.

has lived several careers in the span of most people’s one. Pediatric oncology nurse. Flight nurse for ICE running three or four flights a day across the US and Central America. Nurse practitioner. Stock market analyst. Ghostwriter. And now, full-time Substack creator running three publications at once.

Her path into sobriety doesn’t follow the standard arc. She used substances recreationally for years — festivals, the occasional MDMA, nothing that felt alarming. Then she went fully remote. No alarm. No boss. No commute. Monday started feeling like Saturday. The structure that had kept everything in place dissolved, and stimulants filled the gap. By early 2025 it had become what she calls a nosedive.

She spent nearly 20 weeks in an intensive outpatient program — group therapy three times a week, ten hours a week total. She’s been substance-free since. She was a month out when we talked.

What struck me in the conversation was how clearly she connected the dots across all three of her professional lives. In pediatric oncology, she watched children and families navigate fear and physical trauma at extremes most people never see. She came away with a conviction that healing is psychological and neurological long before it’s biological. Hockey at a competitive level reinforced it — mental toughness isn’t about being unbreakable, it’s about how fast you recover. Then she got into stock trading, which she describes as a system that strips out every variable except two: discipline and emotional regulation. If you can’t manage your nervous system when the market moves against you, the information you have means nothing.

Same truth, three different arenas.

Writing, she says, just flows. She started publishing online in 2021 on the advice she’d seen repeated everywhere: one post per week for two years, expect nothing in return. The point isn’t the audience. It’s proving to yourself you can keep a commitment. A year and a half in, someone noticed and asked her to ghostwrite their stock market content. That led to her own monetized publications. Now she runs three: NP Fellow: Become the CEO of Your Health (mental health and functional medicine, her original newsletter since 2022), Nurse in the Market (swing trading and long-term investing), and Unstuck to Publish (a Substack-building workshop that spun into its own publication almost by accident).

NP Fellow Become the CEO of Your Health

A mental health & functional medicine newsletter helping you build emotional regulation, mental clarity, and health ownership.

By Jess, The Creator

On sobriety: she doesn’t dress it up. She said she never regrets quitting anything. The pull for her is simple — no comedown waiting around the corner, nothing running out, nothing with a grip on her. Clear-headed. That’s it.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with on May 21 at 10A EDT

James Martin built one of the most recognized voices in the branding world while drinking his way through most of it. He’ll be the first to tell you that. What he’ll also tell you is that he has no idea how he pulled it off — and that clarity, not substances, is what finally let him see what he was actually capable of.

James is a branding mentor, bestselling author, and the person behind The Real Brand Life newsletter. He spent two decades helping creative people build reputations that earn trust, and it wasn’t until September 2021 that he stopped wishing the day away so he could get to the drinking part of it.

This week, he joins me on Clear Conversations to talk about what sobriety revealed about his work, his identity, and what it actually means to show up with your whole mind available.

The Real Brand Life

The Real Brand Life is a weekly space for creatives, founders, and builders who are curious about substance more than they are noise. If you’re tired of branding being reduced to trends, tactics, and templates, you’ll feel right at home here.

By James Martin | Made By James

🤝 Collaborations

Tomorrow at 12:30P EDT I’ll be sitting down with from The Divergent Talent Alchemist and the topic of conversation will be “Creating a Life You Don’t Want to Escape From.”

The Divergent Talent Alchemist (DTA) is where Jen explores how identity becomes strategy — for founders, leaders, creatives, and organizations navigating reinvention.

Over 5 years now sober from alcohol, I’ll be sharing how I’m merging my 20+ years of creative video and photo experience into what I’m now building with The Sober Creative.

I’m looking forward to our conversation!

WATCH HERE

If you are ready to shift your relationship with drinking, here’s how you can work with me.

Alcohol doesn't have to be the obvious problem to be the real one. Sometimes it's just the thing that makes incomplete recovery feel normal. The Sober Creative Method™ is 90 days, 1:1, built around restoring what alcohol has been quietly taking — your energy, your clarity, your creative capacity. Not willpower. Not labels. Just your system recalibrating.

Schedule a Free Clarity Session

If you have shifted your relationship with drinking and you want to be a part of a growing community, here’s how you can do that.

The hard part is behind you. What comes next is the work — the real creative work — and it goes better when you're not doing it alone. The Sober Creative Collective is where people on this path come to create, be witnessed, and build something that couldn't have existed before.

Join the Collective

You had dreams before the drinking took over.

Maybe you still do. Maybe they live somewhere underneath the noise.

When you get sober: that empty space in the cup is filled with time. It comes back in the mornings. In the evenings. In the hours you used to spend recovering from the night before.

That time is yours now.

That’s the substance dreams are made of. Not motivation. Not talent. Not the perfect moment. Time. Attention. Presence. The willingness to show up for something that actually matters to you.

Drinking didn’t just cost you mornings. It cost you the belief that you were someone who could build the thing you kept postponing. It kept the volume low on the part of you that wanted more.

When you let it go, that part gets louder.

The version of you that wanted to make something, create something, become something — that version didn’t disappear. It was just waiting for the space.

You’re making the space now.

That’s not nothing. That’s everything.

🧘Guided Practices

Your thoughts aren’t the problem. Your relationship with them might be.

We average somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 thoughts per day.

Most of them we never notice.

But some of them — the ones that show up when we’re stressed, overwhelmed, or just worn down — those ones we feel. And before we’ve even had a chance to examine them, we’ve already reached for a drink.

That’s what this new audio series is about.

From Thinking to Drinking: Creating Space to Choose Differently is an exploration of the space between discomfort and the decision to drink. Not a lecture. Not a program. Just an honest look at what’s actually happening inside us in those moments when the automatic response kicks in.

In the first episode, I walk through something simple — two people taking the same walk, on the same path, having two completely different experiences. The difference? What was happening inside them before they ever took a step.

That’s the thing about our thinking. It shapes everything. And most of the time, we don’t even realize it’s running the show.

This series is for anyone who’s ever wondered why the impulse to drink feels so automatic. If you’ve asked yourself that question, this is a good place to start.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

got sober at 20. Never had a legal drink in the US.

By that point he’d already moved to Australia alone with $2,000, gone off the rails on hard drugs, come back broke, and moved in with his parents. A stranger at the coffee shop where he worked saw something in him and suggested rehab.

He went. Sitting in rooms with people in their 50s and 60s who’d been at it for decades, he recognized himself in their stories. He saw where the road went.

He didn’t plan to stay sober forever. He just decided he couldn’t build the life he wanted while drinking the way he drank.

From there: Portland community college. Oregon State. Harvard PhD. Senior federal scientist. Congressional advisor during COVID. Then he and his husband rebuilt a dilapidated sailboat and sailed away from all of it. They’re currently anchored in Guatemala with almost no sailing experience when they left.

His take on fear: it’s information, not a verdict. He had an irrational fear of bears. He camped alone in Yellowstone anyway. He’s terrified of financial insecurity. He quit his job and took to open water anyway. What he’s learned is that the idea of the thing is almost always scarier than the thing itself. Once you’re in 10-foot swells with no option to turn back, you rise to it.

Sobriety taught him that first.

His Substack, Radical Paths, documents the whole transition in real time — no clean ending, no hindsight.

Radical Paths

Honest lessons for navigating radical life transitions — from a sailboat, in real-time, as I live what I teach.

By Cory Gerlach

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with on May 14 at 2:00p EDT

This week I’m sitting down with Jessica Drapluk — nurse practitioner, former pediatric hematology oncology nurse, competitive hockey player, stock market analyst, and full-time Substack writer.

Jessica built NP Fellow: Become the CEO of Your Health around a simple but hard-earned conviction: most health content gives you information, but information alone doesn’t change anything. What changes things is capacity — the ability to stay regulated, make clear decisions, and keep moving when life doesn’t cooperate.

Her path through oncology nursing, competitive sport, and trading floors gave her a framework that most wellness writing skips entirely.

This is a conversation about what it actually looks like to build internal stability that holds, and what becomes possible on the other side of the patterns that have been quietly running the show.

NP Fellow Become the CEO of Your Health

A mental health & functional medicine newsletter helping you build emotional regulation, mental clarity, and health ownership.

By Jess, The Creator

If you are ready to shift your relationship with drinking, here’s how you can work with me.

Alcohol doesn't have to be the obvious problem to be the real one. Sometimes it's just the thing that makes incomplete recovery feel normal. The Sober Creative Method™ is 90 days, 1:1, built around restoring what alcohol has been quietly taking — your energy, your clarity, your creative capacity. Not willpower. Not labels. Just your system recalibrating.

Schedule a Free Clarity Session

If you have shifted your relationship with drinking and you want to be a part of a growing community, here’s how you can do that.

The hard part is behind you. What comes next is the work — the real creative work — and it goes better when you're not doing it alone. The Sober Creative Collective is where people on this path come to create, be witnessed, and build something that couldn't have existed before.

Join the Collective

Your body has always known.

Before you could name what was wrong, it knew. The tight chest. The bad sleep. The low hum of something being off. You felt it. You just learned to reach for something that would turn the volume down.

But the signal was never the problem. It’s the choice that followed it that created one.

Grief is supposed to feel like grief. Anxiety is supposed to feel uncomfortable. The body isn’t malfunctioning when it hurts — it’s working. It’s trying to move you somewhere.

The hard feelings pass when you let them be what they are. You don’t have to fix them or solve them or explain them. You just have to stay.

And when you start trying to think your way out of the problem, you end up creating more problems when you could just stop thinking.

Thoughts happen, thinking is a choice. You can choose to let go.

The wisdom in you is older than your habits. It was there before the version of you that needed to escape.

It’s still there.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

She Was Never Sober. Then She Was Done with Everything.

grew up surrounded by cars. Her whole family was into them. She wasn’t. She played clarinet — first chair bass clarinet, nationals, all-county. That was her world.

Then she got her first car. A tech told her she needed a long list of repairs. Her dad and brother looked at it and said she didn’t need any of that. After her brother fixed the two things that actually needed fixing, something shifted. She decided nobody else was ever touching her car again. She was going to learn how to do it herself.

She became a mechanic. The only woman in the shop for most of it. She cycled through brands — worked at just about every dealership you can name — trying to find an environment where she actually belonged. At a couple of those shops, there were other women. She’d try to connect. It would start fine, and then at some point, without explanation, those women would stop letting her in. She still doesn’t know why. She stopped trying to figure it out and just moved on.

Meanwhile, she’d been smoking weed since she was 15. The automotive world doesn’t drug test. By the end, she was smoking from the moment she woke up until the moment she went to bed, working or not. It got to where she was never really in a clear headspace. And she felt alone in a way that was hard to name — not without people exactly, but without the right ones. She was using all of it to keep telling herself: keep going, doesn’t matter, keep going.

At some point she stopped believing that.

Three and a half years ago, she quit everything at once. The job. Weed. Alcohol. All of it on the same day. The first few weeks were rough. Her mind kept telling her nothing was changing, nothing would change, she’d just go back to it. But her boyfriend, her parents, her family kept telling her: a couple weeks means nothing. Give it time. And eventually the fog started to lift.

The three-month mark is where things turned. She didn’t feel the difference before that. After it, she did.

She stayed unemployed for about ten months — long enough to stop reaching back toward the automotive world and actually sit with the question of what she wanted. She found Substack. Started writing. Created digital products. Built something new.

Cozy Clarity

A soft space to unwind, reflect and grow through life’s twists and turns.

By Shelly

The writing she does now at Cozy Clarity runs on a specific conviction: awareness isn’t the same as action. Knowing something about yourself doesn’t change anything. At some point you have to put it down and do the next thing, whatever that is. Her essays don’t let you off the hook on that distinction.

Her creative process is hard to describe because she doesn’t really have one. Ideas show up during the day — at her part-time job, in passing — and she writes them into her notes app. When she gets home and starts working, more comes. She calls herself a professional at winging it. She never goes in with a plan. She just starts, and it follows.

For people questioning their relationship with alcohol or weed, her advice is simple: get to month three. Before that, it doesn’t feel like you’ve given it a real chance. After it, your body starts telling you something.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

never fit in. He knows why now.

He was 11 when his mother got cancer. The bullying at school was already happening. Nobody in his house talked about feelings — his father was born in 1920, a different world. So Jonathan just absorbed it all. Filed it away. Found no name for the unease he carried.

Then he found a drink. And eventually cocaine. His mother died when he was 17, and if he’s honest, he used that as permission. A reason. He started developing another personality on top of his own — the one that could walk into rooms, hold the attention, not feel scared. For a long time, that worked.

What he eventually figured out — years, two relapses, and a lot of research later — is that he was never broken. He was sensitive. And nobody had ever given him a map for that.

Jonathan Hoban is the founder of Sensitivity Management, an integrative framework built on evolutionary psychology, polyvagal theory, attachment science, and the body. His central argument: sensitivity isn’t weakness. The etymology alone says it — to sense, feel, assess, perceive. It’s a survival mechanism. We’re all born highly sensitive. What differs is the conditioning.

What he calls the sensory regulation cycle explains most of what people misread as personal failure. A day accumulates stress. Energy drains. Resilience drops. By evening, you’re in what he calls heightened sensitivity — overthinking, impulsive, all your feelings pushing up at once because you don’t have enough left to keep them down. That moment — that I need to take the edge off moment — isn’t weakness. It’s a depleted nervous system doing exactly what a depleted nervous system does.

For people in or around addiction, this reframe matters. Jonathan doesn’t buy that the opposite of addiction is connection. His word is freedom. Addiction, he says, is prison — a total loss of self, running on fantasies that drift further from reality the longer it goes. What sobriety gave him wasn’t a new personality. It gave him back the one he already had.

He also pushes back on the recovery-as-hustle instinct. People come out of active addiction and immediately want to sprint. He says: don’t. Your body just went through a war. It is using energy to repair itself. The clarity people describe at three or four years out isn’t discipline — it’s a body finally learning how to regulate again. Sleep. Nap. Let it heal.

The piece I keep thinking about: he says that for him, addiction turned out to be a gift. Not because it was good, but because it made self-regulation non-negotiable. He has to manage his energy, protect his rest, recognize when he’s spiraling. If he doesn’t — month by month, the survival mode creeps back in. One drink, one drug off. He knows it. He uses that knowledge.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with of Radical Paths on May 7 at 9:00a EDT

Most people who redesign their lives do it quietly, then write about it years later with all the rough edges smoothed down.

Cory Gerlach is doing it differently. He left a senior federal science career, rebuilt a dilapidated sailboat by hand with his husband, and set off to cross oceans with almost no sailing experience. He's been documenting it all in real time — the doubt, the hard-earned lessons, the clarity that comes from choosing your challenges instead of having them handed to you.

Eighteen years sober, Cory brings a perspective on intentional living and creative work that's grounded in lived experience, not theory.

This week on Clear Conversations, we're talking about what radical transitions actually look like, what sobriety has made possible in his life, and what it means to build something meaningful when the outcome is still unknown.

Radical Paths

Honest lessons for navigating radical life transitions — from a sailboat, in real-time, as I live what I teach.

By Cory Gerlach

🎉 What I’m Celebrating

The first of May marked the completion of the April Reset. What I love about doing the Sober Creative Reset is each person’s journey is so unique. All of our paths are different, yet we are all trying to achieve a similar goal, how to find more peace and harmony in our lives.

What I believe is so important with these resets is not so much the structure, while that is important, is community. It’s having another person who is there with you, who see’s you, who knows what you are experiencing and can provide support along the way.

This work is hard. It’s very hard. And it’s quite easy to be hard on ourselves. The work becomes a process of letting that go, of shifting that mindset, of becoming more aware.

I don’t have a date in mind yet for the next one, but you’ll be sure to find out when that date is set.

I’m very proud of everyone who showed up this month. Celebrating you all.

Here are some recent reviews from Trustpilot that I’m celebrating as well.

If you are ready to shift your relationship with drinking, here’s how you can work with me.

Alcohol doesn't have to be the obvious problem to be the real one. Sometimes it's just the thing that makes incomplete recovery feel normal. The Sober Creative Method™ is 90 days, 1:1, built around restoring what alcohol has been quietly taking — your energy, your clarity, your creative capacity. Not willpower. Not labels. Just your system recalibrating.

Schedule a Free Clarity Session

If you have shifted your relationship with drinking and you want to be a part of a growing community, here’s how you can do that.

The hard part is behind you. What comes next is the work — the real creative work — and it goes better when you're not doing it alone. The Sober Creative Collective is where people on this path come to create, be witnessed, and build something that couldn't have existed before.

Join the Collective

Sobriety asks something of you every day.

There is no finish line. No moment where the work stops and you just coast. The challenges show up. The hard days show up. You meet them anyway.

But here is what you never have to earn:

The morning.

When nothing is in the way, it just arrives. Clear. The same way it did yesterday. The same way it will tomorrow.

Most people are calculating the cost of sobriety. The social awkwardness, the explanations, the thing you’re giving up. Nobody tells you to add up the other side of the ledger. Not the years or the dollars. The first five minutes of your own day, fully yours, every single day.

That return compounds.

And at some point you stop being surprised by it — but you never stop being grateful.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

My guest this week on Episode 049 is with on April 23 at 3:00p EDT

What does it look like when someone builds a life they don’t want to escape from?

This week I’m sitting down with , the writer behind Cozy Clarity on Substack. She spent years as a mechanic in an industry that didn’t always make room for her, turned that experience into something, and eventually walked away from a job without a plan — just a blank page and a decision to finally fill it in on her own terms.

Shelly writes about burnout, mental health, and the kind of personal development that asks something of you. Her work doesn’t let you stay comfortable in awareness alone. She’s interested in what happens when you stop waiting and actually move.

We’re talking about building something real, showing up for your own life, and what it means to create from a clear head.

Cozy Clarity

A soft space to unwind, reflect and grow through life’s twists and turns.

By Shelly

📖 What I’m Reading

The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer is a book that has been sitting on my shelf for some time now.

Michael presents the idea that your true self is the awareness behind your thoughts, not the thoughts themselves, and that most suffering comes from identifying with and resisting the constant inner dialogue. It outlines how stored emotional experiences create patterns that shape reactions and limit freedom, and argues that by relaxing resistance, letting go of these stored energies, and observing thoughts without attachment, you can access a state of inner openness and sustained peace. The core framework is less about changing external circumstances and more about shifting your relationship to your mind—moving from control and suppression toward observation and release.

I’ve come to find that being sober, reading is different; the knowledge feels and provides a much deeper experience. I tend to gravitate toward books that extend not only knowledge for my own experiences, but also knowledge that I can apply toward helping the clients I work with.

🎨 What I’m Creating

Yesterday, I attended an annual event here locally in Raleigh. Yoga, NA drinks, picking up litter, it was restorative, energizing and community-driven.

I’m in the process of drafting a new audio series. The tentative title is “From Thinking To Drinking - Creating space to choose differently.” So much of this work we do for ourselves is around our thinking. One could argue it’s the work. How do we manage to be with the thousands of thoughts that we have no control over each day? Before we make a choice, there is a thought that appears before that.

And so this series will explore what that looks like in action. This will live under the Guided Practices section for paid members. I believe it’s going to provide a lot of value. The first one will be coming soon!

🌀 The Sober Creative Collective News

A few things the Collective is creating right now: spent a day leading mindfulness sessions with twelve young women, weaving Native Hawaiian values — aloha as presence, ha as breath — into breath work and a simple art activity. She called it a reconnection with the part of herself that knows how to hold space without forcing anything.

Elsewhere in the Collective, members are exploring creative ways to have non-alcoholic drinks, building and sharing music playlists, and recently made custom t-shirts for a family redwood trip.

The group has also decided to work through The Artist's Way together in bi-weekly meetings, using it as a shared monthly practice. I’m excited we are doing this because I’ve not personally taken the course and it seems very fitting for all of us to learn more about our creative selves.

If you are ready to shift your relationship with drinking, here’s how you can work with me.

Alcohol doesn't have to be the obvious problem to be the real one. Sometimes it's just the thing that makes incomplete recovery feel normal. The Sober Creative Method™ is 90 days, 1:1, built around restoring what alcohol has been quietly taking — your energy, your clarity, your creative capacity. Not willpower. Not labels. Just your system recalibrating.

Schedule a Free Clarity Session

If you have shifted your relationship with drinking and you want to be a part of a growing community, here’s how you can do that.

The hard part is behind you. What comes next is the work — the real creative work — and it goes better when you're not doing it alone. The Sober Creative Collective is where people on this path come to create, be witnessed, and build something that couldn't have existed before.

Join the Collective

Sobriety is sold as subtraction.

You stop drinking. You remove the thing. Problem solved.

But anyone who’s actually done it knows the removal is just the beginning. Because what you were drinking at is still there. The restlessness. The feeling that you’re somehow behind. The low hum of not-enough that follows you from room to room. Moment to moment.

You weren’t just drinking. You were managing.

And when you stop managing, you have to start feeling. Which means you have to start releasing.

The belief that you’re broken.

That great things happen to other people.

That love is conditional on how well you perform.

That’s the longer road. And it’s the one worth being on.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

She had her first migraine at five years old. By her early twenties, she ended up in the hospital three times in eighteen months — so debilitated she had to withdraw completely from her own life. She kept taking muscle relaxants that helped with the pain. She kept not understanding why.

grew up living from the neck up. Her words. She was calculating, planning ahead, always trying to figure out the next thing. Twenty years of yoga — and still, the movement and the mental life ran on separate tracks. Never integrated. Never actually felt.

She came to sobriety sideways. She never considered drinking a problem. She’d had her own rule about it since her twenties: if she was feeling low, she wouldn’t drink. Only celebration, only amplification of good feelings. She was self-aware about it, maybe more than most. But she’d also never paid attention to what her body was doing in the absence of it.

The Reset changed that. Thirty-one days in, she noticed the space between trigger and reaction had expanded. She described it as feeling like she had a choice — even when she didn’t make a different one. Just the pause was enough. Just the chance.

What happened after was stranger. She bought a non-alcoholic beer mid-Reset, expecting to feel nothing. Instead, she felt the buzz. The relaxation in her face, the warmth through the body. Zero alcohol, full placebo. She’d spent so many years training her nervous system with a particular ritual that the ritual itself had become the signal. Her body didn’t need the substance anymore — it just needed the cue.

When the Reset ended, she tried a regular beer. It tasted like rubbing alcohol. She couldn’t finish it. She hasn’t gone back.

The body, she says, is your most honest feedback system. The problem is most of us think our feelings instead of feeling them. We sense frustration and immediately skip to the story — who’s at fault, whether we’re right, what it means. We never actually sit with the sensation. And then we wonder why nothing moves.

Sacred Business Flow

Clarity, visibility, clients. A business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

She works now as a bioenergetics practitioner and co-founder of Sacred Business Flow, helping entrepreneurs notice where their bodies resist what their minds say they want. The irony she keeps returning to: the same corporate ambition that produced her migraines is what finally drove her toward the thing that healed them. The pain was loud enough to make her pay attention. She’s grateful for that, she says. She means it.

Her creative practices run on the same principle. Watercolor, pottery. Work where you cannot rush the result. A plate takes weeks to dry and fire. Watercolor layers have to cure before you can add the next one. She uses both as deliberate training in patience — in what she calls honoring the sustain phase. Most people, she thinks, only want the beginning of a creative cycle. The dopamine of the new idea. They can’t sit through the part where nothing is happening and you just have to keep showing up anyway.

That, she’ll tell you, is where trust actually gets built. In the quiet stretch where nobody’s watching.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

If you are ready to shift your relationship with drinking, here’s how you can work with me.

Alcohol doesn't have to be the obvious problem to be the real one. Sometimes it's just the thing that makes incomplete recovery feel normal. The Sober Creative Method™ is 90 days, 1:1, built around restoring what alcohol has been quietly taking — your energy, your clarity, your creative capacity. Not willpower. Not labels. Just your system recalibrating.

Schedule a Free Clarity Session

If you have shifted your relationship with drinking and you want to be a part of a growing community, here’s how you can do that.

The hard part is behind you. What comes next is the work — the real creative work — and it goes better when you're not doing it alone. The Sober Creative Collective is where people on this path come to create, be witnessed, and build something that couldn't have existed before.

Join the Collective

Think about that. The default is alcohol. The explanation is sobriety.

You decline a drink and someone asks if you’re okay? If you’re on medication. If you’re pregnant. Nobody asks why you ordered a beer. There’s no interrogation at the open bar. Alcohol arrives without a story. The absence of it requires one.

That’s not a neutral cultural backdrop. That’s pressure. Low-grade, constant, everywhere.

And it doesn’t go away when you stop drinking. It just changes shape. A work dinner where you’re the only one with sparkling water. A holiday where your family drinks and you watch. A moment where you realize your choice will always require more management than theirs.

What has helped me is realizing that this pressure was never mine to hold.

✍🏻 Essays

The fun part about creativity is there is no requirement to do it. You have an idea and you move. Typically when I’m sitting in meditation, thoughts and ideas appear, sometimes I run with them, sometimes I don’t.

I haven’t written much poetry and I really enjoyed this process. Some moments I wanted to intentionally rhyme. Some didn’t matter.

There’s a structure here from the days when I was feeling depressed and escaping with alcohol, to letting it go and experiencing more freedom.

Even without the booze, the dark thoughts still appear. The difference is I’m able to bring more clarity to them. To be with them. To question them and move through them more quickly than I did before.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

He was top 500 in the world at Overwatch. That’s not a flex — that’s a diagnosis. For years, measured his days in games he could have been playing. Thirty minutes away from home was two matches missed. Summer vacations were 12 to 16 hours a day at the computer, waking up and running the queue before the coffee even finished brewing. His then-girlfriend was there. He barely noticed.

What broke it wasn’t rock bottom. It was a book — a self-help title in Hebrew he now calls “shitty” — that cracked something open during COVID. He started waking at 5 a.m. He started reading. Then investing. Then building. One no to one Overwatch invite, February 2021, and the games were gone.

He quit his six-figure software job in August 2023. What followed was 18 months of failed products, YouTube channels he couldn’t sustain, apps that went nowhere. He committed to reading the same five marketing books on a loop until he made his first dollar online — and nearly broke the streak one week before it happened, just because he needed something else to read.

The Indiepreneur

Join 6,701 readers for a weekly post about entrepreneurship, the life of the entrepreneur and lessons from my entrepreneurship journey.

By Orel

WriteStack came out of a pivot. Users didn’t want AI-generated articles. They wanted help with Substack notes. He listened, shifted, and built. His first paying customer arrived April 6th. He’s been building from that moment forward, recently crossing six figures — a milestone he barely stopped to mark.

He still checks Stripe more than he should. He still feels a drop in his chest when someone unsubscribes. He’s working on it. The anxiety didn’t disappear when the addiction did. It relocated.

What struck me was the throughline: the same obsessive focus that consumed thousands of hours in a game became the engine for building something real. He just needed something worth pointing it at.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 048 with on April 9 at 3:00p EDT

This week I’m sitting down with someone who comes to this conversation from a place most people don't expect: curiosity.

is a co-founder of Sacred Business Flow and a Master Bioenergetics Practitioner based in Brazil. She works at the intersection of embodiment and entrepreneurship, helping people understand why the body often resists what the mind is ready to do.

Carolina joined the Sober Creative Reset this past January out of curiosity, as an act of self-discovery at the start of 2026. What she found was something she didn’t expect: a clarity and sense of agency that had been missing, a deeper ability to notice the space between feeling something and reacting to it.

That space, she says, is where everything changes.

This one is a different kind of clear conversation, and I think you’re going to feel it.

If you are ready to shift your relationship with drinking, here’s how you can work with me.

Alcohol doesn't have to be the obvious problem to be the real one. Sometimes it's just the thing that makes incomplete recovery feel normal. The Sober Creative Method™ is 90 days, 1:1, built around restoring what alcohol has been quietly taking — your energy, your clarity, your creative capacity. Not willpower. Not labels. Just your system recalibrating.

Schedule a Free Clarity Session

If you have shifted your relationship with drinking and you want to be a part of a growing community, here’s how you can do that.

The hard part is behind you. What comes next is the work — the real creative work — and it goes better when you're not doing it alone. The Sober Creative Collective is where people on this path come to create, be witnessed, and build something that couldn't have existed before.

Join the Collective

There’s always going to be an edge. Stress that was never fully resolved. A conversation you’re avoiding. The low hum of something unfinished. Alcohol doesn’t answer any of it. It just turns the volume down long enough for you to stop asking.

When you get sober, the edge doesn’t disappear. But you stop having somewhere to put it. Which means you have to actually look at it.

That’s the harder work. It’s also the more honest one.

What’s the thing underneath the thing? The drink was never really about the drink. It was about whatever you needed to not feel for a few hours. Name that, and you’ve got something to work with.

When you feel the pull, don’t reach for a drink or a reason not to drink. Reach for the thing underneath.

Ask it: What do you need?

Then actually wait for an answer.

Most people never get that far. That’s the practice.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

didn’t have a rock bottom.

No dramatic low. No intervention. She just got honest with herself somewhere over the Atlantic, flying home from Aruba, reading Sober Curious cover to cover on a 17-week library waitlist she’d finally reached. By December 2019, she was done drinking. She never looked back.

Her story is quieter than most you’ll hear in this space. College drinking that felt normal, law school in New York that felt normal, a tech job in her thirties where everyone went out after work and showed up the next day less than stellar — and that felt normal too. The difference for Kerry was that she recognized nothing external was going to force the change. No kids on the horizon. A husband and a cat who weren’t going anywhere. “If I wanted to make a change,” she said, “I was going to have to proactively decide to make a change. The change wasn’t going to happen to me.”

So she made it.

What came out of that decision was a writing life. Kerry runs The Proactive Life on Substack — a newsletter about travel, creativity, work, relationships, and what she calls the subtle art of managing a messy, beautiful life. She writes about the tension between planning and spontaneity, between chaos and craft. She’s a project manager by trade, four years independent, and approaches both her work and her creative life with the same orientation: figure out the system, then make it more fun than it has to be.

That instinct shows up everywhere. She showed up to a hot sauce expo once unprepared and left vaguely destroyed. The second time she packed chicken nuggets for everyone in fanny packs and mapped the whole event in three laps — mildest to hottest — so nobody burned out early. It’s a small story, but it’s also exactly who she is.

She’s working on a book proposal. The writing community she’s been building around herself — a five-person writers’ group meeting in New York, events, connections made on Substack — is part of how she keeps going when the work is invisible.

That part landed with me. So much of what we make, we make alone. Kerry’s figured out that community isn’t optional to the creative process. It’s what keeps the fire going when no one can see what you’re building yet.

The Proactive Life

A newsletter about life as a series of projects—some planned, some unexpected, all worth documenting. I write essays about travel, relationships, creativity, healing, personal systems, and the messy middle between who we are and who we’re becoming.

By Kerry Hoffman

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 047 with on April 2 at 9:30a EDT

This week, I'm sitting down with Orel Zilberman — a software developer who spent years disappearing into 12-hour gaming sessions before a single book cracked something open in him. What followed was a complete rebuild: he quit his job, launched a business, failed for 600 straight days, and kept going anyway.

Now he runs WriteStack, a six-figure SaaS for Substack creators, and writes about every step of it at The Indiepreneur.

His story isn't about a dramatic rock bottom — it's about what happens when you finally put down the thing that's been keeping you small, and what you find out you're capable of on the other side.

The Indiepreneur

Join 6,701 readers for a weekly post about entrepreneurship, the life of the entrepreneur and lessons from my entrepreneurship journey.

By Orel

🌿 The Reset Begins in Two Days

Kerry didn’t have a rock bottom. She had a flight home from Aruba and a book she’d waited 17 weeks to read.

That was enough.

What she found on the other side wasn’t dramatic either. Just access. To her writing. To her creative life. To the version of herself that had been there the whole time, waiting underneath the edge she kept turning down.

That’s what 30 days can do.

Not a program. Not a negotiation. A guide who’s been on both sides of it, helping you reach the thing you haven’t been able to get to yet.

You don’t have to figure out what’s underneath alone.

I'm Ready

The negotiation alone is exhausting.

Do I drink tonight? It’s been a long week. I’ve been good. Just one. I deserve this. But tomorrow’s important. Maybe just a glass. Maybe two. Okay, that’s it.

For two years I tracked. I tried to negotiate with myself daily and failed so many times.

That internal back-and-forth cost more than the drink ever did.

When alcohol is removed from the equation, you get that time back. Not hours—years.

Every negotiation you never have to run again. Every morning you don’t spend doing damage assessment. Every evening that belongs to you from the start.

Clarity isn’t dramatic. It’s just yours, automatically.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

started drinking at eleven years old in Indiana. Tequila. Older kids. Fields and bonfires. By twenty-five, he’d been through rehab three times, survived a suicide attempt, and accumulated what he calls “dangerous and stupid adventures, some of which I can actually remember.”

Then one day he was just tired. No program. No sponsor. No structured support. He quit.

What he didn’t realize until his late forties was that he hadn’t actually dealt with the addiction. He’d transferred it.

Into work.

A PhD completed in three and a half years when most people take five. Eighty-hour weeks. Singular focus that paid professional dividends and quietly carved out the people closest to him. His marriage. His kid. Social connection. Any semblance of a hobby. The mechanism was the same — that relentless chase of the next hit — just pointed somewhere society hands you a trophy for.

“It still had the negative consequences,” he said. “I just shifted it to a different area.”

What makes Doan’s story unusual isn’t the trajectory. A lot of people who get sober from substances find out later they’ve just repotted the same plant. What’s unusual is where he is now. At fifty-one, twenty-six years since he quit drinking, he’s not in recovery from work addiction in some clean, resolved way. He’s in the middle of it. Actively working with therapists. Building small daily practices. Trying to be present when he gets home instead of turning every conversation into a monologue about his newsletter metrics.

He gets up early with his two chocolate lab sisters. No phone. No screen. Just the dogs and whatever his mind wants to wander toward that isn’t email. When work creeps in — and it does, every single day — he notices it and redirects. He’s treating it the way he once tried to treat the drinking: one small interval at a time.

There’s something worth sitting with in what he said about the skills he built during his using years — the adaptability, the willingness to experiment, the ability to read a landscape and move fast. Those same capacities are now the engine of a career that reaches 20,000+ subscribers and over 120 institutions. The thing that nearly destroyed him turned out to be the training ground.

That tension — between drive and what it costs you — doesn’t go away when the substance does. It just finds new shape.

If you’re someone who went hard at sobriety and then went equally hard at building something, Doan’s story might land in a familiar place.

How to Teach With AI

Master 'How to Teach With AI' with simple steps and guides. You can leverage AI to be more efficient in course prep, and to increase student engagement and learning. I want to help.

By Doan Winkel

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 046 with on March 27 at 10a EDT

This week, I’m sitting down with — independent project manager, writer, speaker, and self-described dot connector.

Kerry runs The Proactive Life on Substack, a newsletter about building a world, not just a career. Essays on travel, creativity, grief, work, and the beautiful tension between structure and spontaneity.

Kerry’s relationship with alcohol is one that a lot of people will recognize — not rock bottom, but a slow, honest reckoning. After 17 years of drinking, she picked up Sober Curious on a flight home from Aruba and never looked back. What she found on the other side wasn’t just sobriety — it was a writing life, a clearer sense of self, and a proactive approach to all of it.

I think you’re going to love this one.

The Proactive Life

A newsletter about life as a series of projects—some planned, some unexpected, all worth documenting. I write essays about travel, relationships, creativity, healing, personal systems, and the messy middle between who we are and who we’re becoming.

By Kerry Hoffman

🌿 The Reset is Starting Next Week

The negotiation Doan had with alcohol, he eventually transferred it to work. Same mechanism. Different substance. The cost just got harder to see.

Kerry’s version was slower. Seventeen years. A flight home from Aruba. A book she picked up and never put down.

What they both found, eventually, was that removing the thing gave them access to something they hadn’t been able to reach.

Rachael said it after January’s cohort: “What every other attempt was missing was someone who’d been on both sides of it. A guide, not a program.”

That’s what the Reset is.

30 Days.

You don’t have to negotiate this time.

Join the Reset

Here’s what most people don’t realize: alcohol doesn’t actually reduce stress, it mimics relief while it dismantles your body’s ability to manage it. Every drink disrupts your sleep architecture, spikes your cortisol, and leaves your nervous system more reactive than before. Over time, your baseline stress level rises, and the drink that once took the edge off starts becoming the edge itself.

For me, healthier stress relief looks like meditation, walking, hitting the gym, breathwork, rest, incense, music, and eating food that actually fuels me rather than drains me. These aren’t substitutes for drinking. They’re upgrades.

And I’m not alone in discovering this. Janelle walks, reads, spends time with her family, and prays. She said a moment came on June 9th, 1996, when she felt something shift and heard a voice ask: “You could get worse, but why would you want to?” She stopped drinking that day and never looked back. Her words: “I love being sober. There’s nothing like it in the world.” It’s so true.

What do you do besides drinking to help relieve stress?

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This week I sat down with — strategist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Sacred Business Flow — whose story is really about what happens when the body starts sending signals you’ve been too busy to hear, and whether you have the courage to listen.

Sacred Business Flow - Helping people move from idea to creation — from the head to the heart — and build businesses that don’t require hiding from.

Sacred Business Flow

Clarity, visibility, clients. A business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

Phil started drinking at 15, grew up in the South where it was woven into the culture, carried it through college and into his tech career in Boston, where happy hour after work was just how you connected with people. He never put a problem label on it. It was social infrastructure. It was part of who he was.

Then at 29, things started shifting in ways doctors couldn’t explain. Fatigue. Aches. Waking up exhausted. He eventually found an ancestral health nutritionist named Mary Rudick who put it to him plainly: if you’re trying to heal, alcohol isn’t going to help that. Phil didn’t fight it outright. He just found the other dietary changes easier to start with. But eventually he stopped drinking — and didn’t drink for over a decade.

During those years, a golf ball-sized tumor appeared in his neck. Multiple biopsies at Mayo Clinic couldn’t give him a definitive answer on whether it was cancerous. He walked around with that uncertainty for about a year and a half — the daily, low-grade fear that things were only going in one direction. He did the dietary work, moved to Costa Rica, started working with on the emotional and energetic side, and eventually had the tumor removed. The recovery came fast. What surprised him afterward was how much fear had been driving everything — even the good decisions. He thought he was going to die. And once that weight lifted, he started letting himself back into experiences he’d been locked out of for years, including food, including the occasional drink.

That’s the part of Phil’s story that tends to make people in a sobriety space pause. He started drinking again after his recovery, and he describes it as reclaiming agency — a celebratory beer in Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, Carolina beside him, feeling like someone who’d gotten his body back. He’s clear that this is deeply personal. He still notices that alcohol blunts his creative process — he’s a 4 a.m. person, does his best writing in those early hours, and the nights he drinks he considers himself creatively offline. It just doesn’t work for him in that state.

Which is what brought him into the January Reset. He’d been drinking here and there for a couple of years and got curious about what a pause would show him — not from a crisis, but from a desire to stay conscious about the things that govern his choices. He described the container as non-judgmental and said it gave him space to reconnect with his own journey on his own terms.

We also talked about what Sacred Business Flow is building. Phil described what he called the love-led leap — the moment someone committed to moving their idea from concept into creation. Most of his work has served people who’ve already made that decision. But he and Carolina have been noticing a whole other group: people who hold something in their heart and just aren’t ready yet. The embodiment work Carolina does — nervous system, energy, somatic practices — has mostly lived behind closed doors for private clients. They’re opening it up more broadly, at an accessible price point, for people who don’t need to know exactly what they’re building yet. Just people who want room to explore.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 045 with on March 20 at 10:00a EST

Doan has spent years inside the classroom studying what actually makes learning stick — and what gets in the way. As an associate professor of entrepreneurship, keynote speaker, and creator of the How to Teach With AI newsletter, he’s been obsessing over the relationship between mental clarity, creative engagement, and output quality long before those words got trendy.

In a world moving at the speed of a new AI tool every Tuesday, Doan brings a grounded question to the table: What does it actually take to show up at your best when the stakes are high?

We’re going to talk about presence, performance, and what it means to do your most meaningful work from a clear mind.

If you've ever felt like you're capable of more than what's been showing up on the page, this one's for you.

How to Teach With AI

Master 'How to Teach With AI' with simple steps and guides. You can leverage AI to be more efficient in course prep, and to increase student engagement and learning. I want to help.

By Doan Winkel

🎉 Who I’m Celebrating

The Sober Creative Collective recently launched and I’m celebrating one of the newest members - .

Noelle is creating Foxglove and Flour — a Cottage Vegan bakery, that promotes inclusion, clean ingredients, no artificial colors. Our mission is Baked with Magic, Rooted in Kindness!

She recently said, “From joining this collective I hope to gain a community. A community of individuals from all walks of life and talents, to be here for each other and help each other grow. To learn more about people and their journey. A safe place to share ideas, future projects, get into what feeds our souls. I love learning about people and hopefully bring light to those who feel the world is trying to dim theirs.”

If you would like to join the collective and be a part of building alongside this incredible community filled with all things sobriety and creativity, I’ll leave the link below to learn more.

What is the Collective?

For years, I reached for something outside myself to quiet the voice that said I wasn’t enough.

The drink didn’t silence it. It just turned down the volume long enough to forget the track was still playing.

Sobriety didn’t make the voice disappear either. But it gave me something the drink never could — the ability to actually hear what’s underneath it.

And underneath it? Something older than the doubt. Something that was there before anyone told me I had to earn my place here.

That’s what I keep coming back to. Not that I’ve made it. Not that I’ve figured it all out.

But that I always was enough — and the work now is just remembering.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This week I sat down with — nurse, healthcare executive, stroke survivor, and the voice behind Becoming You — whose story is really about what happens when the life you built around being the strong one gets taken from you all at once.

BECOMING YOU with Florence Acosta

Daily Inspirations about intentional living, mindset, personal development and being the truest version of you.

Florence spent nearly three decades in healthcare, eventually running a surgical center as executive director. Before that she was a certified registered nurse anesthetist — the person who brings someone to the edge of consciousness and is responsible for bringing them back. She held people’s lives in her hands as a professional routine. And by her own admission, she put herself last for most of it. That’s just what you do when you’re the one everyone leans on.

She came into her marriage already knowing what addiction looked like from the outside. Her former father-in-law was an alcoholic, and Florence — a trained nurse who could care for patients in four-point restraints at work — watched his family slowly stop trying. Not because they didn’t love him. Because they’d been trying for so long, and he was never open to receiving it, and eventually the silence just became the pattern. She gave me the sharpest image of this: the man walking out of his grandson’s first birthday party in the middle of summer, jacket pockets stuffed with beer cans. A room full of people who saw it and said nothing. Nobody wanted to cause a scene. So it went under the rug. And then more things did. And that habit of silence bled into her marriage until it ended it.

Somewhere in there — this was 2019, before the stroke — Florence joined a women’s circle. Nineteen women, meeting weekly for nine months. There was a talking basket that went around the room. Florence was always the last to speak. She’d spent so long not asking for what she needed that even naming it out loud felt like too much. That circle is where she first internalized that she mattered too.

Then, at 50, she had a massive hemorrhagic stroke — a ruptured arteriovenous malformation she was likely born with and never knew about. It took her ability to drive. It took her career. It stripped the identity she had spent decades building around competence and holding everything together for everyone else.

Here’s what got me about Florence: she’s not someone who talks about sobriety in the traditional sense. Her relationship to alcohol is through proximity — witnessing what it does to families, to communication, to the invisible architecture of a household. She knows the cost of silence around it. She knows what it looks like when people decide it’s easier to not say the thing. And she spent a long time being one of those people, too — until she couldn’t anymore.

When she came back from the stroke, she started writing. We talked about that for a while — what it means to create something when the professional identity is gone, when you can no longer define yourself by the role. She’s building a business now with her sister. She’s learning, at this stage of life, that you can go faster alone but you go farther together.

There was a moment mid-conversation where her story about the jacket pockets brought up something for me about my own brother, and I had a moment on air. Florence just sat with it. That’s probably the thing I’ll remember most — that she creates space for exactly the kind of honesty she spent most of her life not being allowed to have.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 044 with on March 11 at 9:30a EST

What does it look like when your business stops working against you — and starts working with you?

This week I’m sitting down with , co-founder of Sacred Business Flow, a strategist who spent years building what looked like success from the outside while quietly falling apart on the inside. His business was generating over $100K a month. He was also burning out, dealing with a string of health issues, and eventually facing a cancer scare that stopped everything.

What came out of that reckoning wasn’t a new strategy. It was a completely different understanding of what was blocking him — and why strategy alone never quite fixes it.

Phil also brings a perspective I don’t get to explore very often on this show. He’s not in recovery. Alcohol was off the table during his health crisis out of necessity — and when he got his health back, choosing to drink again felt like reclaiming agency. Like freedom. But lately he’s been sitting with a different question: who is the version of him that chooses not to drink from a place of power, not because he has to, but because he’s curious about what that opens up?

He joined the Sober Creative Reset in January and came away not with an abstinence commitment, but with something more valuable — real clarity about when and why he reaches for a drink, and how he wants to approach it going forward.

That kind of conscious, non-judgmental exploration is exactly what this community is built for.

This one’s going to be a good conversation.

Sacred Business Flow

Clarity, visibility, clients. A business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

🎉 Who I’m Celebrating

You already know what it’s like to give something up and find more of yourself on the other side. That’s the whole premise behind the Sober Creative.

The world of AI is moving faster than we can keep up with. isn’t telling people to avoid AI. He’s asking a harder question: what are you quietly giving away when you use it without thinking? For creative people especially, that question matters. The tools that promise to make your work easier have a way of also making it less yours — if you let them.

Slow AI

Knowing when to use AI and when to leave it the hell alone.

By Dr Sam Illingworth

Sam is one of the few voices in this space who treats your judgment as the thing worth protecting, not the obstacle to be removed. His newsletter, read by over 10,000 people, is built around intentional use — knowing when to reach for the tool and when to stay with the discomfort a little longer, because that’s where your actual work lives.

He’s also just launched something worth knowing about: the Slow AI Curriculum, a 12-month program that just earned formal CPD accreditation — 25 professional development credits, internationally recognized, and tax-deductible as a professional expense. The price goes up to £100/year this Sunday to reflect that.

Sam was also a guest on Clear Conversations and you can view our conversation here.

For anyone building a creative practice that’s genuinely theirs — one that doesn’t outsource the hard parts — this is the kind of thinking that belongs in your corner.

☀️ What’s Next

Something new is open.

I’ve been sitting with this one for a while — longer than most things I write. Because what I was trying to name isn’t easy to name.

It’s that specific feeling of choosing clarity and then standing in it, wondering what the hell to do next. Not the crisis. Not the beginning. The after.

That’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough.

What happens when the hardest part is behind you — and you look around and realize the work of becoming is just getting started?

I launched something this week that tries to answer it.

Not a program. Not a course. Not coaching.

Something I think is rarer than all of those.

There’s a quote inside from someone who’s been on this path for forty years that stopped me cold when I read it. She said something about community that I hadn’t found a way to put into words yet — and then she just did.

If you’ve found yourself on the other side of what you were using to escape and thought now what — this is worth a read.

Not the applause. Not the finished thing. The act itself. The making.

That feeling — that’s not a side effect of sobriety. That’s who you are without the noise.

The noise doesn’t disappear, though. It shifts.

And somewhere in the middle of making something — the voice gets loud.

Is this good enough? Does this matter? Who am I to do this?

That’s the moment. Not for a critic. Not for feedback.

Just someone who sees you in it. Who knows what it cost to get here.

Who quietly says — keep going.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This week I sat down with Mary Peeples — writer, former editor, theater kid turned Substack essayist — whose path to sobriety and creativity is one of the more honest ones I’ve heard.

Mary started performing before she knew she was performing. At six, she had the entire Phantom of the Opera memorized. By eleven, she was playing Annie at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta and mouthing “I’m sorry” to standing ovations because she already knew it wasn’t good enough. That kind of perfectionism doesn’t go anywhere — it just changes form.

Boarding school at 15 stripped away the small-town identity she’d built around being the girl who could sing. Surrounded by other exceptional, competitive kids, she lost her footing. The eating disorder came first, then the drinking at 19 — and once it started, it moved fast. She was self-medicating undiagnosed ADHD, some PTSD, and the particular grief of not knowing who she was without a performance to anchor herself to.

By her mid-twenties she’d been editor-in-chief of a regional publication, torched the reputation she’d built, and was — in her own words — a social liability. She knew she needed to go to rehab for about two months before she actually went. She showed up still drinking. And walking into that facility, she says, was a relief for everyone.

530 days later — that was the count on the day we recorded — getting sober is not actually what she describes as the hard part. The hard part has been forgiving herself for the version of her that hurt the people she loved. For becoming, as she put it, a shell of her former self in front of their eyes.

What struck me most is how creativity has come back in layers. First the singing returned — quietly, around the house. Her dad noticed it before she did. Then drawing. Then, finally and most terrifyingly, writing — because she’d once been a writer and felt like she’d lost it entirely. Substack became the place where all those versions of herself could fight for the keyboard and figure out who she actually is now.

She’s working through The Artist’s Way. She does yoga. She journals. She practices honest communication as a daily discipline. And she’s learning to trust the creative impulse before the inner critic can dismantle it — that gap between curiosity and execution where the voices tell her she has nothing worth saying.

She does. And she’s learning to believe it.

Her Substack, , is where that work lives.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 043 with on March 5 at 9:30a EST

Sometimes the most powerful creative breakthroughs don’t come from finding your voice — they come from surviving the moment you lost it.

My next guest on Clear Conversations is . Florence is a former healthcare executive, Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist, and the writer behind Becoming You with Florence Acosta on Substack. At 50, she survived a massive hemorrhagic stroke that took her career, her independence, and the identity she had spent decades building around competence and control. But it also did something else — it forced her to stop.

Florence has spent her life watching what happens when people don’t deal with what’s underneath. She saw it in her patients. She saw it in her family. And eventually, she had to see it in herself.

This week, she joins me to talk about what it looks like to reclaim your voice after you’ve been strong for too long — and what becomes possible when you finally stop performing safety and start living honestly.

This one is quiet and real and hits differently.

BECOMING YOU with Florence Acosta

Daily Inspirations about intentional living, mindset, personal development and being the truest version of you.

🤝 Collaborations

When from Camino Calls invited me onto her Substack Live, I had a feeling this would be more than a casual chat — and it delivered.

What started as an introduction to our two worlds quickly revealed how much they overlap. Rebecca helps pilgrims plan their journeys on the 1,200-year-old Camino de Santiago, while I help people navigate sobriety. But the more we talked, the more the parallels became impossible to ignore — the unknown at the start, the community you lean on, the internal shifts you can’t predict, and the way both journeys ask you to shed things you didn’t realize you were still carrying.

We got into my own path to sobriety — how alcohol stopped working long before I stopped using it, and how five and a half years later, the compounding effects on my energy, creativity, and emotional depth have been something I couldn’t have scripted.

We also talked about the Dry January Reset, what it looked like to hold that container for a mixed group of people, and what they walked away with — mostly, awareness they didn’t know they were missing.

If you’ve ever felt like sobriety and pilgrimage were speaking the same language — this one’s for you.

🎉 Who I’m Celebrating

The JD Letter

For people with multiple interests who are tired of eating soup with a fork. If your curiosity doesn't fit one label, this is for you.

By Jess

If you’ve ever felt like you have too many interests to fit neatly into one lane, The JD Letter might be exactly what you’ve been missing.

Written by — a former professional basketball player for Portugal’s Women’s National Team turned writer — this Substack is built for people she calls “multi-passionate”: those who resist the pressure to pick one thing and abandon everything else.

What makes Jess’s voice worth following is her credibility. She’s not theorizing about the tension between range and focus — she’s lived it. A decade playing elite basketball, three national titles, college ball in the U.S., then a full pivot into writing, entrepreneurship, and coaching. She speaks three languages, has lived in four countries, and has tried everything from stock trading to launching a Shopify store. She knows what it’s like to carry many identities at once, and to feel scattered because of it.

The newsletter explores the messy interior of being broadly curious in a world that rewards specialists. Topics include identity, loneliness, creative direction, and what it actually looks like to build a life that holds multiple passions without constantly starting over. Her tone is personal and honest — less self-help guru, more thoughtful friend who has already asked the hard questions and is still working through them.

If you’re tired of advice that tells you to niche down and kill off the rest of who you are, The JD Letter offers a different perspective: one that takes your whole self seriously.

🌿 What’s Next

There’s a moment that happens when the ripples settle.

The water goes still. Then you can see.

You’ve been moving fast — working, managing, producing, recovering, repeat. The surface of the water is always disturbed. And when the water is clouded with what’s shaken underneath, it doesn’t show you much.

But when it goes still — even briefly — you lean over and there you are.

That’s what 30 days without alcohol does for most people. Not a dramatic transformation. Just... stillness. In the stillness, a clearer picture of what’s actually there.

The Reset is open.

Secure Your Spot

What do you dream your life to be?

Not the highlight reel version. The real one. The one where your mornings feel like yours. Where your work has weight. Where you’re not just getting through the week but actually moving through it with some sense of direction.

Maybe you feel stuck. Maybe you feel lost. Maybe you feel unfulfilled.

And you can’t always explain why. Things aren’t bad, exactly. You’re functioning. People rely on you. From the outside, it probably looks fine.

But something isn’t landing the way it should. Your energy is inconsistent. Your focus breaks. You start things and don’t finish them. Stress accumulates. You get to the end of the day and wonder where it went.

You’re circling with no clear direction.

And the quiet part — the part most people don’t say out loud — is that somewhere along the way, you stopped questioning whether this is just how it is now.

That’s not acceptance. That’s what numbing looks like from the inside.

This Week on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 042 with on February 26 at 1:30p EST

This week, I'm sitting down with someone who has been, by her own count, approximately twelve different people by the age of 26 — and every single one of them shows up to the page.

Mary Peeples is a writer, former Editor-in-Chief, and the voice behind , a Substack that lives at the intersection of recovery, identity, and the kind of honesty that makes you feel less alone in your own contradictions.

At 11, she was mouthing "I'm sorry" to standing ovations. At 23, she was running an editorial room. At 25, she was in rehab — and 500 days later, she's still asking the questions that matter.

This is a conversation about what happens when you stop trying to delete your previous versions and let them all have a seat at the table.

Little Edits Atelier

Annie showed up. The editor burned everything. The drunk crashed the party. The sober girl is documenting it all. They're fighting for the keyboard. This is the live feed.

🤝 Collaborations

There’s a new section I’ve introduced to The Sober Creative — “Collaborations.”

The most powerful creative work rarely happens alone. This is a living archive of what gets made when purpose meets partnership — guest essays, mixed media projects, live conversations, and more. Different creators, different platforms, different formats. All of it rooted in the belief that sobriety doesn’t just clear the path for your own creativity — it opens the door to creating something bigger than yourself.

In a spontaneous request from my friend at WriteStack - we joined each other for a Substack Live session.

What started as a casual intro quickly turned into a real exploration of addiction in all its forms: Orel shared his 16-year battle with video game addiction and the moment on a family vacation that cracked his awareness open, while I talked about the neuroscience behind why we escape discomfort and how five and a half years of sobriety has compounded into something I never could have predicted.

We covered the trigger-thought loop, practical awareness tools, and even dug into what Orel is building with WriteStack and why authentic engagement on Substack matters more than ever in 2026.

If you've ever found yourself halfway into a distraction before you even realized you picked it up — this one's for you.

This week on Tuesday at 3P EST, I’ll be a guest on ’s series “Camino Conversations.”

Rebecca runs the newsletter The Camino Calls, where she inspires people 45+ to walk the Camino de Santiago. She has walked the Camino de Santiago over 12 times, has been living along one of its routes in Spain since 2021. She’s a guide, a storyteller, and someone who thinks deeply about what it means to commit to a path.

She hears pilgrimage language in the way I talk about sobriety. Devotion. Discomfort. Growth. Inner trails we don’t want to face.

We’ll talk about social pressure and what actually happens at the dinner table when you turn down a drink. We’ll explore what Spain’s relationship with alcohol can teach the rest of us. We’ll get into trust, walking your edge, and what it looks like to stop trying to control the narrative and just walk.

The Camino Calls

I inspire people 45+ to walk the Camino de Santiago. With 14+ years of experience, I share tips in my Sunday newsletter, host live interviews, and lead small-group walks—guiding the first 3 days so you’re confident to continue on your own.

By Rebecca Weston

🎉 What I’m Celebrating

My dear friend is running something really interesting this coming weekend (Feb 27 – March 1) — a free 3-day challenge called Design Your Creative House.

The concept is simple and beautiful: over three days, you’ll sketch a floor plan of your creative life as it actually is — not as you wish it were. You’ll name the rooms, find the heart of the home, and stand at the threshold of the one you’ve been avoiding.

It’s free, it only takes 20-30 minutes a day, and it’s the kind of inner mapping work that I think resonates deeply with what we talk about here — getting honest about what’s really going on beneath the surface before we try to change anything.

Day 3 wraps with a live open house celebration where you can share what you discovered and see into other people’s creative worlds. There are also prizes for the most courageous participants.

To join, head to Rachel’s Substack (Creative Courage with Rachel Connor) and comment “I’M IN!!!” on her post. She’ll send you everything you need by Thursday.

Which room in your creative house are you most curious about?

🌿 What’s Next

Something I want you to know before March 1st

I'm running the next Sober Creative Reset in April, and I wanted to give you the details before signup opens.

But before I get to the details, I want to share something Rachael wrote after completing the last one:

“I knew that every time I tried to stop drinking alcohol that I was one step closer to being able to kick the bottle to the door. I have read books, listened to podcasts, talked with my sober friends and family... but the one thing that was missing from my experiences was a ‘Josh’. Someone who’s been there, on both sides of the drinking, to guide, to encourage, to welcome and to ponder with.”

That’s the thing this Reset is designed to be. Not a program. Not a label. A container — 30 days of structure, daily reflections, and real support while your system gets a chance to actually recover.

Here’s what’s happening:

On March 1st, the Reset opens with early access pricing of $149 for 24 hours. After that, it goes to the regular price of $199. There are 25 people in each Reset. That's intentional — it keeps the container small enough that everyone actually gets support, not just access to content.

The Reset isn’t complicated. You remove alcohol for 30 days. You get a daily reflection prompt — not about alcohol, but about what becomes possible without it. You get weekly check-ins, a private space for accountability, and me in your corner.

Inge, who had done Dry January every year since 2020, put it this way after doing the Reset:

“Josh guides his Reset in a way that goes beyond simply ‘stimulating not drinking’... Those questions really made me think, in a way that went much deeper than I had anticipated.”

And Phil, who joined the January cohort:

“Josh created an incredibly supportive structure for allowing us all to examine our relationship with alcohol and the part we want it to play in our lives.”

This isn’t about deciding forever. It’s about 30 days of clarity — and seeing what you notice when the fog starts to lift.

If you’ve been on the fence, if you’ve tried cutting back and found yourself back in the same loop, or if you’re just genuinely curious what a month without alcohol does to your focus, your mornings, your work — this is worth trying.

Early access opens March 1st at $149. After 24 hours, it moves to $199.

25 seats. Small by design.

There will be more details at the end of the week.

Not in anger. Not in collapse. In the quiet, clear-eyed moment when you realize the life you’ve been managing isn’t the life you actually want.

Most of us spend years building coping mechanisms we mistake for character. The armor becomes so familiar we forget it was ever armor at all. Until something shifts — a diagnosis, a milestone, a single painting session, a conversation — and you catch a glimpse of who you might be without it.

That’s the beginning. Not the end of something, but the opening of it. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This past week, I sat down with , a landscape painter who travels the United States full-time in a camper with his family, painting the country one location at a time. Not as a vacation. As a life.

Justin grew up in a cult. That’s not a dramatic framing—it’s just the fact. A highly religious, highly controlled environment where substances of any kind weren’t part of the picture. For most of his life, he never touched anything. Then he finally got out, built a career as an artist, watched his Instagram following explode from 400 to 40,000 followers in a single month, and started making real money for the first time. And that’s when his body said: Okay. You’re safe now. We need to deal with your stuff.

He was diagnosed with PTSD. Couldn’t work. Had to hire someone full-time to keep his business afloat while he tried to figure out how to function. He’d spent years emotionally shut down—rage outbursts, shutting people out, unable to really receive what his wife or kids were trying to give him. He’d survived by staying locked up inside himself. Now that the survival pressure was gone, everything he’d locked away came flooding up.

He tried therapy. It was slow. Because of how shut down he was, he couldn’t access the parts of himself he needed to move forward. So he researched, and he came to cannabis and psilocybin—terrified of both, given how he was raised. But he used them intentionally, alongside serious therapeutic work, because they did something therapy alone couldn’t: they expanded his capacity to hold difficult emotions without shutting down. When the fear got too big and he would have normally closed off, he could hold it instead. Sit with it. Let it move through.

He spent roughly a year and a half doing that work. Then something shifted. He stopped becoming reactive to everything. The rage quieted. He could listen to his wife. He could receive his kids. And at some point, he realized he didn’t need the substances anymore—not as a moral stance, but because he’d built the actual capacity to do the emotional work himself. He could feel something hard, sit with it, and let it resolve. The scaffolding had done its job. He no longer needed it.

He’s now been substance-free for about two years. He doesn’t drink because it makes his body feel terrible. He doesn’t use cannabis because the situations that used to overwhelm him simply don’t anymore. As he put it: he can’t paint well on drugs anyway.

And the painting—this is where his story gets beautiful. Justin made a decision somewhere along the way to stop doing digital work that took him 40 hours a piece and start going outside with gouache and watercolor, committing to whatever happened in an hour or two, and then moving on. Plein air painting forced something out of his head and into his gut. He describes it as a merciless surrender—you sit down with a location, you have no idea what’s going to come out, and you paint it anyway. Some paintings are magic. Some are terrible. He makes a lot of both.

He talks about his practice as a three-way conversation: between himself, his subject, and the painting. You have to be the author with intention and the audience with fresh eyes—simultaneously. Without intention you don’t know when to start. Without reception you don’t know when to stop. When those three things converge, he says, that’s when it starts to feel like something real is happening.

What strikes me most about Justin is that his path through trauma and into clear-headed living isn’t a recovery story in the traditional sense. He’s not sober because alcohol destroyed his life. He’s clear because he did the work—genuinely hard, uncomfortable, sometimes terrifying inner work—and found that once the work was done, he simply didn’t need anything to cope with anymore. The coping mechanism becomes unnecessary when you’ve actually healed the wound.

He’s out there right now, somewhere in New Mexico, painting boulders in a place called the City of Rocks, his family in a camper nearby, chasing what he calls an impossible goal. And driving toward impossible goals, he says, is just fascinating.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well:

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 041 with on February 12 at 3p EST

What does it look like to circle something for years before fully stepping into it?

My next guest has been doing exactly that — living close to sobriety, collecting clear days, noticing what comes back when the blur lifts. is an American artist, writer, and creative mentor living in Paris, and her Substack, The Living Canvas, is where she writes her way through the messy, beautiful work of becoming who she actually is.

She traces the link between alcohol and the struggling artist story she'd been carrying, the survival reflex that kept her just below the surface of fully living, and what it feels like to finally choose a life that belongs to her.

This week we talk about creativity as a spiritual practice, what presence costs and what it gives back, and why the most courageous thing you can do might be to stop running from yourself.

🎉 What I’m Celebrating

Substack Unconference

Building a 500-person gathering for Substack creators in Montreal in public, from scratch. Every decision, dollar, and lesson shared as it happens.

By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

I became a founding builder of the Substack Unconference recently — and I want to tell you why.

and are doing something I’ve never seen before. They’re building a four-day gathering in Montreal for independent creators — not a conference with sponsor banners and lanyard culture, but an actual gathering of people who do this work. And they’re building the whole thing in the open, letting the community shape what it becomes before it goes public.

This line though: “You can have thousands of people reading your words every week and still feel like you’re doing it completely alone.”

Substack Unconference

You closed your laptop and had no one to tell

You publish something on Substack and it lands. The numbers look good. A comment comes in that tightens your chest because someone got exactly what you meant. You sit there for a second, wanting to talk about it. Not the metrics. The feeling. The relief that the thing you were afraid to say actually connected…

Read more

4 months ago · 64 likes · 47 comments · Phil Powis ❤️⚡️ and Carolina Wilke

That’s the thing nobody says out loud. But every one of us who creates independently knows that feeling. The post lands. The comment hits. And there’s nobody in the room who actually gets it.

That’s the problem they’re solving. And the way they’re solving it — transparently, in community, without corporate polish — is exactly how I’d want it built.

I became a Founding Builder because I believe in what this can be. And because Phil and Carolina are two of the most service-oriented people I’ve been fortunate enough to call my coaches.

The founding builder window is still open and I invite you to join us, it’s going to be special.

🎬 Behind the Scenes

One of my 1:1 members recently received her custom-made pottery piece. She is an art medicine practitioner. I did a bit of research on my end to find this hand symbol that means: protection, healing, and strength.

I’ve been fortunate in that my work has allowed me to integrate all of my being. I’ve been into pottery for about a year now and the practice itself is spacious, slow, intentional. It’s a beautiful way to share something meaningful I’ve created with my hands.

Sober Social Club has grown to about 33 members so far! Hearing from people directly in that there are not enough choices for meet ups that do not involve drinking has me feeling really great about creating this. Our next event at the end of the month is going to be at SMASH Raleigh for a night of non-alcoholic fun with table tennis, electric darts, and electric shuffleboard.

I had a big celebration this past week and had the idea of doing a giveaway. One person would receive my full Sober Creative Method 90 Day Transformation Package and one person would receive a custom-made piece of pottery. The giveaway has closed and I’ll be reaching out to the winners over the next few days. There were over 20 submissions and it got me thinking. This is important work and I want everyone who showed up to have an opportunity. I’ll be offering something special for those who don’t win as well.

Two thousand days in, I still believe the same thing I did on day one: clarity isn't a sacrifice. It's a return.

If you're wondering what your life looks like on the other side of the blur, the Sober Creative Method™ might be the place to start.

Learn More Here

“Welcome to the Sober Creative Restaurant…let me tell you about some of our specials…”

“I would like a tall glass of—no, let me stop you there, we don’t serve that here.”

“….those are some of our specials this evening, oh! And people really love the martini meatballs, yes. They are served in a martini glass.”

*sidenote—this is true. I did eat this in a restaurant once.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This past week, I was fortunate enough to sit down with two guests.

The first was , a trauma therapist and medicine woman who lives above a bar. Not near one. Above one. The ground floor of her home is De Amer, a cultural café and music venue with a fully stocked bar, velvet curtains, and decades of history. She walks past shelves of liquor every single day.

Inge spent most of her life terrified of being seen. She named her practice after a tree because it felt safer than using her own name. She called herself a “regression therapist” because it was explainable, professional, contained. But the work she actually does goes far deeper—guiding people across thresholds from conscious problems to unconscious origins, from who they think they should be to who they actually are.

At 14, she bought herself a bottle of sherry. She thought it was disgusting but drank it anyway. Over time, drinking became her way of coping with the uneasiness of not living the life she was meant to live. She was married, had two kids, took care of everything, kept telling herself “this is the life I choose.” But it wasn’t.

Nine and a half years ago, she was diagnosed with a throat tumor. The oncologist asked: Do you smoke? No. Do you drink? “Oh, well, you know, the odd glass.” A complete lie. She had a bottle of whiskey always ready. She’d function—go to work, take care of the kids—but that bottle would be sitting there waiting when she came home.

Here’s what she realized: when things show up in the throat, it has to do with expressing oneself. She wasn’t expressing herself. She was keeping everything just below the throat. She wouldn’t speak up. She wouldn’t say what she really wanted. She was making herself small. Drinking was how she coped with that.

A year ago, she changed her business name to Praktijk van Inge. Started calling herself medicine woman, gatekeeper, guide. The fear of rejection that she calls her life theme showed up louder than ever. But she did it anyway.

This past month during the Reset experience, both she and her partner decided: no alcohol on their upcoming vacation. Previous holidays always meant bottles of whiskey, bottles of wine. This time they looked at each other and said, “what are we going to do?” Both answered: uh-uh. We’ll leave them in the store.

Inge’s work reminds us: the things we avoid saying, the parts of ourselves we keep hidden, the lives we’re not living—these show up in our bodies. Drinking helps us avoid feeling that discomfort. But the only way through is to finally let yourself be seen. Not as a polished professional. As a person doing the actual work.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well:

The second guest was , a classical pianist and sound healer who quit cocaine without detox, without rehab, without 12-step meetings. She walked away on her own terms and never looked back.

At 17, after performing her honors recital, Elif’s mother decided she didn’t want her anymore. Put her into the streets. Never really spoke with her again. That loss led Elif to believe she had lost all hope. At 28, addiction became almost a suicide thing. She was heavily into cocaine, which turned to crack. She’d function—go to work, handle her responsibilities—but she was using to numb how desperate everything felt.

During active addiction, Elif started watching Sylvia Brown, a psychic on Montel Williams. She’d think: “How does she do that? I want to do that.” So she started reading Sylvia’s books, exploring that world.

She was in the shower one night and felt the walls closing in. She had to make a decision: continue on the path she’d been on, or open herself to transformation and healing. Born into a non-Orthodox Muslim household, she said: “Jesus, I need your help.” In that moment, she felt his presence wrap around her like a blanket of warmth. From that moment, everything changed.

Here’s what Elif teaches: recovery doesn’t have one path. The traditional system tells us there’s only one way—meetings, steps, sponsors, labels. But healing can come through prayer, through energy work, through spiritual connection. She became a Reiki master teacher, helping people move away from labeling themselves as addicts and toward understanding addiction as an experience—one that doesn’t have to define who they are.

Elif’s story reminds us: when we were little, we fell down and got back up. Where in our lives did we stop being like that? Where did we start taking everything so seriously instead of just dusting ourselves off? Children are still deeply connected to themselves and to the non-physical world. Can we go back to that? Can we remember that there’s more support than we see with our physical eyes?

The non-traditional path saved her life.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well:

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 040 with on February 12 at 3p EST

What happens when an artist realizes the tools meant to help are actually slowing him down? traded digital precision for gouache and watercolor—not for nostalgia, but because traditional painting forced him to stop outsourcing his instincts to the machine.

He discovered that commitment breeds clarity, that time constraints pull you out of your head and into your gut, and that sometimes progress means letting go of what doesn't work. Now painting full-time from a camper while traveling the U.S., Justin's work captures landscapes in single sittings—one shot, one chance.

This week, we're talking about deep listening, his nuanced relationship with substances—overcoming PTSD through therapeutic mushroom use, why he doesn't drink (it makes his body feel like trash), and how he found peace without needing anything.

It's a conversation about living at peace with your mind and body, and what becomes possible when you trust your instincts.

🎬 Behind the Scenes

The next Sober Creative Reset is being created!

I questioned whether or not to keep these resets the same because if it worked so well the first time, why change it for the others?

The format will be similar, but as you know, being creative is a big part of the process. My soul comes alive when I create and so the inspiration behind these resets will be “seasons.”

All of the email prompts will have new illustrations to go along with each theme.

Every reset will be it’s own experience.

This was a quote from Inge in the January Reset:

“His most important tip for me: see each time as a choice, don't make it about "never drinking again for the rest of my life". That nuance unlocked something in me. For the first time since I've been doing resets, I'm seriously considering choosing non-alcoholic on a structural basis. That wasn't an option before, now I find it very attractive.”

It will start on April 1st and more details will be available soon. If you want to be notified, click the link below and you’ll be put on the list.

The Sober Creative Reset

Alcohol didn't just numb the pain—it dimmed everything.

The highs, the lows, the full spectrum of what it means to be alive. For years, I chose comfortable darkness over uncomfortable brilliance.

With sobriety, learning to hold your own light is awkward as hell at first. You squint. You stumble. You want to dial it back down. But each day you stay with it, something shifts. The brightness that once felt blinding starts to feel like home.

And that discomfort you were avoiding? It transforms into the most alive you've ever felt.

This is the work—not just removing what dims you, but learning to stand fully in what illuminates you.

✍🏻 Essays

I didn’t have a problem with drinking.

I had a life that included drinking. Tailgates. Kegs on the back porch. IPAs after eighteen-hour days on set. Miller Lite in the fridge where the rotten milk used to be.

This wasn’t concerning. This was just normal.

I didn’t think of myself as someone who drank too much. I thought of myself as someone who drank. The same way I was someone who played fantasy football or worked in film. It was a fact. Neutral. Unremarkable. Woven into the fabric of how I moved through life.

There was never a question of should I be drinking? Not because I avoided it, but because it didn’t exist. There was no alternative self to imagine. No other version. I was this person. The person with a beer in his hand at the cookout. The person who drank until seeing double was the cue for bed.

The loop felt complete. Work, unwind, repeat. Show up, perform, recover.

I didn’t know the recovery was counterfeit. I didn’t know the unwinding was actually draining me.

That was the trap.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This past week, I sat down with , a registered nutritionist and trainee therapist who could have passed a nutrition exam years before she became a nutritionist. She knew about protein. She knew vegetables mattered. She knew that drinking less alcohol would help.

She knew what to do. She just couldn’t do it.

Here’s what Georgia teaches: as women enter menopause, alcohol tolerance plummets. Estrogen helps metabolize alcohol. When it declines, alcohol hits harder, amplifying every perimenopause symptom—hot flashes, brain fog, anxiety.

We use alcohol the same way we use food. To regulate. To soothe.

Georgia spent two decades trapped in food chaos—a disordered relationship starting at age ten. She calculated she was spending 730 to 1,095 hours per year just thinking about food. Not eating. Just thinking.

Here’s what she finally understood: “knowing what to do and being able to do it are two completely different skills.” Years of trying to solve a psychological problem with nutrition solutions never worked because none of it addressed why she was doing what she was doing.

Her framework—the 3 U’s: Understand, Unlearn, Unlock—addresses the psychological patterns driving behavior rather than just providing another meal plan.

Georgia’s work reminds us: knowing what to do and being able to do it are two completely different skills. The thinking problem underneath is what keeps you stuck.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well:

My Next Guest(s) on🎙️Clear Conversations

This week I’ll be fortunate to have 2 guests on the show!

Episode 038 with on February 3 at 10a EST

What happens when you’re a trauma therapist living above a bar and you decide to get sober? Inge van de Graaf spent decades hiding behind professional titles and safe business names, terrified of rejection, keeping herself small.

Then she did the work she guides others through—facing the fear, stepping over thresholds, reclaiming her real name. Now she calls herself Medicine Woman, Guide, and Gatekeeper. She works with regression therapy, plant medicine ceremonies, and deep subconscious healing in the forests of Drenthe.

Her story isn’t about quitting drinking and finding peace. It’s about what becomes possible when you stop performing safety and start living from your center—even when there’s a fully stocked bar on the other side of your bedroom.

Inge van de Graaf

Nuchtere inzichten over traumaverwerking, spiritualiteit en authentiek leven. Voor gevoelige mensen die vastzitten in beperkende patronen en die verlangen naar de vrijheid om zichzelf te zijn.

Down-to-earth reflections on trauma processing, spirituality, and authentic living. For sensitive people who are stuck in various patterns and long for the freedom to be themselves.

Episode 039 with on February 5 at 10a EST

What if recovery didn't look like what you've been told it should? This week's guest, Elif Ahmad, walked away from three years of cocaine use without rehab, without a 12-step program, and without relapse.

She did it her way—and then went on to become a certified Reiki Master Teacher, hypnotist, and recovery support specialist who's spent years helping others rewrite the script from "I am an addict" to "I had an experience with addiction." Now, as a classical pianist and sound healer, Elif is living proof that there's no single path to recovery—and that healing isn't interested in keeping customers.

Join us for a conversation about harmony, autonomy, and what becomes possible when you trust your own way forward.

Elif Ahmad

My name is Elif. Harmony is who we are. Creator of the Musical Life Show . Music means "harmony". Musical Life = " harmonious life". Classical pianist, sound healing. Here, I share my deepest insights and soul knowledge.

🎬 Behind the Scenes

The first official Sober Creative Reset has finished!

Here are some quotes from members:

”What am I Carrying forward: I want to carry forward the promise to myself that I cherish and honor this body that I have been given; it is mine to care for and I hope that it will last me a long time. I have plans to do many things with it…and so I best take care of it - and not putting alcohol in it is one of them: the benefits of not consuming alcohol are still unfolding for me. I am eager to know where it will take me and what awaits me there. “

“Thank you all for sharing this journey with me. It has been eye opening for me in a big way. I’m feeling so much more grounded and peaceful. Wishing all the best in next steps - mine will be booze free for now as I intend to continue this journey to see where it goes. Big hugs to all. ❤️”

“My main take aways from this month’s reset are:

• ⁠Increased awareness of my own habits and why I drink

• ⁠The relaxed and gentle invitation to explore what not drinking brings and how it adds to my quality of life.

• ⁠I really liked the interaction and sharing with others who are making the same journey.

As to the future: I am going to continue on this sobriety path, and who knows, I might do this for a very, very long time. And last but not least: Thanks Josh for your kind and thorough approach and your wise input. You’re a great guy!”

“This has been an invaluable month however, and I so appreciate this opportunity to reset and rethink my relationship with alcohol. The clarity and confidence I have right now is exactly what I needed to reframe and also to be available to my mom to my studies and the rest of my life. Josh thank you so much for. Not only the space but you’re amazing support. Blessings to you all.”

“Hi everyone! I feel very grateful to have participated in this challenge! Thank you all for sharing your challenges and wins... it was so inspiring! Josh, thank you for holding this container! I had some powerful insights about my relationship with alcohol. I was able to create space to see why I make the choices I make, and it was extremely valuable!”

I’m a bit speechless to be honest. I couldn’t have asked for this experience to be what it was. Each person showed up incredibly beautiful in their own way.

The next reset is scheduled for April. If you want to be notified when the details become available, click the link below to be put on the list. I hope to see you there!

The Sober Creative Reset

Life will always present challenges. Some days will be really hard to get through. You’ll question whether or not you’re doing things right. The word “why” will replay over and over.

Yet, the solution isn’t to escape with a drink. It’s to acknowledge that this is part of the experience, give yourself compassion and ask: How can I become more aware of what I need in this moment?

Insight emerges from that awareness.

🧘Guided Meditations

One Minute Breathing Reset

A practice for preventing the evening spiral

Cravings don’t hit by the time you are walking out of the store with a 6-pack.

They start waking up in the morning wondering if you will drink today. Midday dealing with traffic or conflict with someone else. At the end of the day when you’re running on fumes but pushing through anyway.

When you crack open the bottle, what you’re really craving is relief from a nervous system that’s been in overdrive all day. Or even deeper is an unmet need you don’t know how to process yet.

For years, alcohol was how I dealt with accumulated stress and depression. The easiest solution at the time was to drink until things “settled.” This was me trying to shut off a system I didn’t know how to regulate.

Getting sober was challenging because I had to stick through the cravings. And at times, that was really intense. The tool that was always there working in the background, but I never fully grasped its power was breathing.

This one-minute breathing reset is a tool to add to your basket. Use it as many times as you need. One minute, multiple times a day, adds up to a completely different evening.

The craving you prevent is the one you never have to fight.

The Sober Creative

One Minute Breathing Reset

Sometimes you don’t need a long practice. You just need a moment…

Listen now

4 months ago · Josh Woll

💡Disrupt the Pattern

The room feels effortless for nearly everyone else. You feel like you’re working overtime just to appear relaxed.

A thought surfaces: “I don’t belong here like this. I need something to loosen me up.”

Alcohol promises connection. But it actually removes your access to the one thing that creates real connection: presence.

This episode breaks down the performance trap—and what becomes possible when you stop managing perception and start trusting that you’re already enough.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This past week, I sat down with , facilitator of The Men’s Circle, who quit drinking 30 years ago—though he’ll tell you he doesn’t keep close track anymore. Growing up in 1970s California as a Gen X kid left to his own devices, Paul started drinking at 12 or 13. His family normalized alcohol. Nobody was angry or out of control, but “everybody was definitely half in the bag most of the time once it got to past two in the afternoon.”

For years, Paul worked as a dance teacher traveling the world. He always felt a hole inside that he tried to fill with substances, sex, and other addictive patterns. Eventually, he recognized the problem and told his partner he needed to stop.

But removing alcohol was just the beginning.

Paul describes trauma as an onion that needs peeling. On the outside: behaviors. The next layer in: unmet needs. Deeper still: wounds. At the core: attachment issues. “I had to figure out what my unmet needs were that were causing those behaviors on the outside,” he told me. Understanding this took years of slowly peeling back layers.

Here’s what most people don’t understand: the nervous system governs everything about how we show up. We medicate our nervous system states with substances. Alcohol shifts you from sympathetic to dorsal. The body becomes dependent on substances to shift states rather than learning to do it naturally.

Seven months ago, Paul started The Men’s Circle. It meets twice weekly—once online, once in-person for walks. On Sunday walks, they hug in greeting. Paul set this tradition wordlessly because he knew he needed practice and the other men did too. At first, the hugs were stiff. Men leaned in with shoulders but kept hips back. But over time, the hugs became easier. Breathing slowed. Shoulders dropped. Something in the body learned it didn’t need to defend itself.

“A lot of men aren’t closed off by nature,” Paul said. “They’re just well-trained.”

Sobriety doesn’t just remove the substance. It reveals what’s underneath—the unmet needs, the wounds, the parts of ourselves we never learned to regulate. Paul’s work reminds us that most men don’t need fixing. They need to be less alone, more regulated, and more connected over time. Through consistency. Through learning what their nervous system is actually doing. Through touch that tells the body it’s safe.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well:

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 037 with on January 29th at TBD

This week I'm sitting down with — a Registered Nutritionist and trainee therapist who spent two decades knowing exactly what to eat but couldn't stick to it.

Georgia works with high-achieving women to bridge the gap between knowing and doing, especially around midlife, PCOS, and the mental loops that make food choices feel impossible.

What does this have to do with sobriety? Everything. Because the same patterns that keep you negotiating with the biscuit tin at 4pm are often the ones that keep you reaching for wine at 8pm.

As Georgia writes, she knew that drinking less alcohol would help—she could have passed a nutrition exam on it—but knowing what to do and being able to do it are two completely different skills.

If you've ever wondered why willpower fails you, or why "just be kind to yourself" hasn't solved anything, this conversation will reframe everything you thought you knew about discipline, structure, and what it actually means to have your own back.

Flourishing Health

For high-achieving women who know what to eat but can't figure out why they can't do it.

By Georgia Kohlhoff

🎬 Behind the Scenes

This new format I’m working with the Disrupt The Pattern series has me working multiple days in a row in order to prepare. The topic is researched. The written format placed and revised. Then it’s a process of memorizing because I don’t want to use a teleprompter. It’s challenging and I appreciate that it is.

Here’s a short few clips I put together that hopefully will have you laughing as I did.

What becomes visible when you slow down enough to see it?

The practices. The patterns. The path forward that's been there all along.

If you're ready to explore what 1:1 coaching could unlock, book a free clarity session.

No pitch. Just an honest conversation about where you are and where you want to go.

Reserve Your Session

P.S. You can view past newsletter editions here.

Replacing alcohol with something else isn’t just about finding a substitute.

It’s about understanding what you were actually reaching for.

That evening drink wasn’t really about the alcohol. It was about the exhale. The permission to stop performing. The signal that work is over and you can finally soften.

When you remove alcohol, that need doesn’t disappear — it just becomes visible.

Most people panic at this point. They search for “healthy replacements” and end up with a cabinet full of fancy teas they never drink and a meditation app collecting dust. Because they’re trying to replace the liquid, not the function.

The real question isn’t “what can I drink instead?” It’s “what was I actually trying to accomplish?”

Relief. Transition. Permission to recover.

When you name the real need, you can meet it directly. A walk that marks the end of your workday. Ten minutes of stillness before you shift into evening mode. A ritual that signals: this part of the day is over.

The difference is ownership. You’re no longer outsourcing your ability to decompress to a substance that stops working the moment it wears off. You’re building capacity to create your own reset — one that’s reliable, sustainable, and actually restores you.

That’s not replacing drinking. That’s reclaiming the ability to come home to yourself.

🧘Guided Meditations

Sitting With Difficult Emotions

A practice for creating space between feeling and reaction

Most of us have been taught the same response to difficult emotions: fix them, avoid them, or numb them out.

Anxiety shows up? Distract yourself. Sadness arrives? Push through it. Craving hits? Reach for something—anything—to make it stop.

But what if the problem isn’t the emotion itself? What if it’s our relationship with it?

This month’s guided meditation is about learning to stay when everything in you wants to run. It’s about rewiring the survival mechanism that says discomfort equals danger, and discovering that you can be with difficult feelings without being controlled by them.

What you’ll practice:

• Locating emotions in your body instead of getting lost in mental stories

• Creating space between what you feel and how you react

• Using breath to send compassion instead of resistance

• Sitting with discomfort for long enough that it starts to shift

This isn’t a quick fix or a relaxation exercise. It’s 15 minutes of actual practice—the kind that builds the muscle to pause before pouring the drink, sending the angry text, or reaching for the familiar escape.

The gap between stimulus and response? That’s where your power lives.

The Sober Creative

Sitting With Difficult Emotions

This guided meditation supports the practice of staying with difficult emotions without trying to fix or escape them. The focus is on noticing what’s present and creating space between feeling and reaction…

Listen now

4 months ago · 5 likes · Josh Woll

Guided meditations are released monthly for paid subscribers. Each one addresses real challenges of building sustainable sobriety and creative practice—cravings, overwhelm, self-doubt, and learning to stay present even when it’s hard.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This past week, I sat down with Professor , creator of “Slow AI,” who got sober on December 22nd, 2007—after a blackout at his best friend’s 22nd birthday party left him in a hospital bed with what he thought were heart palpitations. The doctor told him: “Don’t drink for a month and see what happens.” That month became 18 years.

In his early twenties, Sam was the extrovert’s extrovert—but he was also blacking out constantly. Waking up with no memory of the night before. Getting mugged while drunk and not remembering any of it. Jumping off 30-meter cliffs in Croatia without checking the water below. He became “the clown and the fool and the joker”—a character people expected, a version of himself that wasn’t true.

Here’s the thing: Sam was excelling. He finished top of his year at university. Edited the newspaper. Ran a radio station. Played squash. He was productive. He was functioning.

But he wasn’t living.

After he quit drinking, everything changed. He became president of the Theatre Society. Went to Japan on a scholarship to study the intersections of science and theatre. Started performing poetry publicly—work he says he “wouldn’t have been able to do any of that if I had still been drinking.” Today he’s a Full Professor at Edinburgh Napier University, founder of Consilience (the world’s first peer-reviewed science and poetry journal), and runs a Substack with over 6,000 subscribers, challenging how we think about AI.

When I asked him how sobriety increased his creativity, he gave me two words: sharpness and fearlessness.

Here’s what he told me:

“You can function, right? You can function. Because you’re good at it and you can kind of do it in your sleep, but you’re doing yourself a disservice because that’s all you’re doing. You’re not living. You’re just functioning.”

Sam now wakes at 5 AM every morning thinking, “The day is going to be good.” He lives in the hills outside Edinburgh. Runs. Writes. And every night before bed, he goes through the 300 newsletters he subscribes to, leaving meaningful comments on most of them. That’s his routine. That’s how he goes to sleep. Because he loves community—”that’s what my entire research is around and like what I’m about as well.”

His work with Slow AI asks the question most people aren’t asking:

“We’re using AI to accelerate output, but why the hell are we doing that, man? This is a tool. We should be using AI to free up time for ourselves so that we can have real human connections with other humans rather than just accelerate towards this meaningless output.”

Sobriety doesn’t just give you back your mornings. It gives you the sharpness to think clearly and the fearlessness to step outside the roles that drinking locked you into. It moves you from functioning—doing things in your sleep because you’re good at them—to actually living, building work that matters in the spaces between disciplines where neither science nor art alone holds all the answers.

Sam’s capacity to live didn’t just grow when he got sober. It “exponentially grew.” And 18 years later, he’s still building—still teaching, still writing, still showing up at 5 AM ready for whatever the day brings.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well:

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 036 with on January 22nd at 2:00p EST

This week I'm sitting down with , a men's group facilitator and Certified Trauma Support Specialist who's been navigating sobriety for 27 years—and whose path includes something we don't talk about enough in recovery spaces.

Paul's journey led him to therapeutic psychedelic work in his late 40s and early 50s, using these experiences alongside EMDR therapy to clear trauma, shame, and grief that alcohol had been covering up for decades. No recreational use. No habit formation. Just deliberate healing work, spaced years apart, treating these substances as medicine rather than escape.

Paul's building something rare in men's work: spaces where men learn to show up without armor, stay present when it's uncomfortable, and practice the kind of steady, regulated connection that most of us never learned was possible.

If you've ever felt the gap between sobriety dogma and actual healing, or wondered what recovery looks like when it's about integration rather than abstinence alone, this conversation will matter.

Paul Overton

Helping men drop performance, untangle conditioning, and return to presence, honesty, and a grounded sense of self.

🏔️ January Reset

We have just reached the halfway point through the first-ever Sober Creative Reset!

I’m beyond thrilled to witness the incredible engagement and support each member is sharing within our WhatsApp community. It’s truly inspiring, which is why I’ll be doing 3 more this year. April. July. October.

Every person below who’s shared these words took the same first step: they decided to try something different.

Ready for your own reset? Join the waitlist and I'll let you know the moment the next cohort opens.

Notify Me

What becomes visible when you slow down enough to see it?

The practices. The patterns. The path forward that's been there all along.

If you're ready to explore what 1:1 coaching could unlock, book a free clarity session.

No pitch. Just an honest conversation about where you are and where you want to go.

Reserve Your Session

P.S. You can view past newsletter editions here.

Joy isn't standing in front of you when the fog clears.

It's the path that opens — leading to the work.

The morning routine you actually keep. The creative project you show up for even when it feels flat. The moment of gratitude you pause long enough to actually feel.

The gap between removing alcohol and experiencing genuine contentment is where most people get stuck — because our brains aren’t wired to notice the good we’re building. We dismiss the small wins, rush past the quiet victories, and wonder why sobriety still feels empty.

The practices matter. But only if we’re paying attention long enough for them to change us. Maybe it’s a really good thing to give ourselves permission to slow down.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This past week, I sat down with , creator of “Perfection is the Enemy of Progress,” who got sober on December 4th, 2019—after relapsing in Cambodia following four years of recovery. In his early twenties, he was drinking a fifth a day, sneaking to the liquor store at 9 AM, drinking flask bottles in the bathroom at his finance job.

Jake spent years caught in the guilt-fear-shame cycle: wake up telling himself he wouldn’t drink today, drink anyway, feel intense shame, wake up the next morning scared it would never resolve itself. There was this quiet voice saying “this is dumb, this is going to head towards disaster”—constantly drowned out by an extreme voice saying “I need this right now. I need my relief.”

After getting sober, he felt confident enough to start a mango farm in Cambodia. Four years sober, everything was going well. Then he relapsed during a ritual toast with fermented banana moonshine. He’d drifted away from his recovery. Wasn’t talking to sober people. Thought he was cured. His mom had to come rescue him.

When he came home and started over, he didn’t keep recovery siloed from the rest of his life. He built his entire life around his recovery this time.

Here’s what he discovered:

“In my first stint in recovery, it was very siloed. I had this career and these aspirations and this adventurous side. And then I had my recovery. And I let enough distance get between those two lives that I put myself in a risky position again.”

Now Jake wakes at 4:30 AM for a sacred two-hour creative block. He lights a candle, makes coffee, writes in his basement. If he sticks the landing in that morning block, the rest of his day is playing with house money. He’s working on his memoir The Mango Tango and building a life with enough white space for opportunities to come to him.

Sobriety doesn’t just give you back your mornings. It gives you the ability to build a life where recovery isn’t separate from who you are everywhere else—so the practices that sustain you don’t fade into dangerous gaps where relapse finds room to grow.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well:

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 035 with on January 15th at 9:00a EST

This week I'm sitting down with —a poet, professor, and the creator of Slow AI.

Sam's work challenges the speed trap most of us fall into with technology, using poetry, games, and AI as tools for deeper reflection rather than faster output.

Eighteen years ago, Sam made a choice that changed everything: he quit drinking. That decision didn't just clear the fog—it opened up a different kind of creative practice, one built on care, attention, and the courage to move slowly in a world obsessed with acceleration.

We'll talk about what sobriety unlocked in his work, how he teaches creative thinking in ways that honor complexity instead of flattening it, and why slowing down might be the most radical thing a creative can do right now.

Slow AI

Get weekly Slow AI prompts that help you think with more intention, create with less pressure, and develop a calmer, more human way of using AI.

By Sam Illingworth

🎬 Behind the Scenes

Yesterday was the first event of Social Sober Club, a local meetup group I started in order to build community here in the Raleigh, NC area.

Our first event was at 321 Coffee in the farmers’ market location.

321 Coffee is a coffee shop and roaster built on inclusion. 321 currently employs over 50 adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). They are the ones roasting the coffee, taking the orders, and making the lattes. They are demonstrating the value of an inclusive business model.

Since there were 4 of us, I broke us up into pairs, set my timer for 20 minutes. Once that was done, I rotated with each person, and we were all able to spend time with each other.

The plan as of now is to do 2 meetings a month, where there will be this coffee + conversation at a different local spot, and the other one will be activity-based: local nonprofit, square dancing, video games, lots of options!

I’m looking forward to building this further and giving people more options to connect without having to feel that alcohol needs to be involved.

📖 What I’m Reading

This week, I started Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson, Ph.D. - a neuroscience-based self-help book that teaches how to rewire your brain for greater well-being, resilience, and happiness.

The core premise is that our brains have a “negativity bias” — we’re wired to notice and remember negative experiences more than positive ones as an evolutionary survival mechanism. This means positive experiences often pass through our minds like water through a sieve, while negative ones stick like Velcro.

Hanson introduces a four-step process called HEAL to counteract this:

1. Have a positive experience — Notice or create something good

2. Enrich it — Stay with the experience for 10-30 seconds, intensify it, feel it in your body

3. Absorb it — Imagine the experience sinking into you, becoming part of you

4. Link (optional) — Hold both the positive experience and a negative memory simultaneously, letting the positive soothe the negative

The key insight is that most positive experiences are “wasted” because we don’t take time to install them in our neural structure. By deliberately savoring positive moments and holding them in awareness longer, we literally change our brain’s structure through neuroplasticity.

The book emphasizes that small, everyday positive experiences (a good cup of coffee, a moment of connection, accomplishing something) are the building blocks of lasting happiness — not just major achievements. It’s practical neuroscience applied to daily life, showing how taking an extra 20 seconds to really absorb good moments can gradually shift your baseline emotional state toward greater contentment and resilience.

What I hope to gain is another way I can speak about how science, the mind and the body interact with alcohol, and the HEAL method sounds like rich medicine when it comes to letting go of what doesn’t serve you.

What becomes visible when you slow down enough to see it?

The practices. The patterns. The path forward that's been there all along.

If you're ready to explore what 1:1 coaching could unlock, book a free clarity session.

No pitch. Just an honest conversation about where you are and where you want to go.

Reserve Your Session

P.S. You can view past newsletter editions here.

This is the real cost.

Not the hangover. Not the embarrassment. The erosion of clarity, intention, and presence — the quiet theft of the life you actually want to live.

It’s not about quitting something. It’s about choosing something. That shift from escape to embrace — that’s where the door opens.

This isn’t about willpower. It’s about knowing what you’re building toward, and refusing to let anything blur that vision.

✍🏻Essays

“Josh doesn’t drink anymore.”

I heard it everywhere. Wrap parties. Social gatherings. Each time it stung.

Not because I was ashamed. Because I didn’t know who that person was.

You know the feeling. Walking into a room and not knowing how to act. Staring at a text invitation wondering if you should go or stay home where it’s safe. Every conversation too loud. Every silence too heavy. Your script is gone.

The biggest fear wasn’t what other people thought. It was not knowing how to be this version of myself. Who am I if I’m not the person who drinks?

Five years sober, I’ve learned: identity doesn’t form through belief. It forms through proof. Going to the event. Facing the difficult conversation. Leading the production. Saying yes when it scares you. Each action becomes evidence your brain collects about who you are.

Week 10 of my 10-part series: the terror of the identity void, how alcohol blocks the feedback loop that builds self-concept, and the mirror practice that helps you notice who you’re becoming.

A Small Shift Inside The Sober Creative

🧘Guided Meditations

I’m making a few simple changes.

Guided meditations are now a subscriber-only feature with the new price being $5/month and $50 annual subscription.

This isn’t meant to act as a paywall. It’s meant to be a container.

Meditation isn’t content. It’s a practice. And practices work best when they’re protected from noise, scrolling, and half-attention.

Why This Matters

Clarity doesn’t come from consuming more. It comes from creating space.

The guided meditations inside The Sober Creative are designed to:

• Regulate your nervous system before you create

• Replace alcohol as a default off-switch

• Support focus, presence, and emotional steadiness

• Build momentum through consistency, not intensity

This work compounds when it’s practised—not skimmed.

What Subscribers Get

• Access to the full meditation library

• New meditation added monthly

• Practices designed for focus, regulation, and creative output.

• A quieter, more intentional space to engage

No hype. No labels. Just tools that work.

What Stays Free

Essays. Notes. Reflections. Conversations.

The door stays open. The deeper room is optional.

This isn’t about doing more. It’s about creating from a clearer place—and giving that clarity somewhere to live.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This past week, I did something I’ve avoided for 32 episodes: I turned the microphone on myself.

For a year, I’ve been asking other creatives the vulnerable questions about sobriety and creativity. But I hadn’t shared my own story—not the full version. Not the part about being the kid with braces and big glasses getting called “Poindexter.” Not the depression that started growing in high school. Not the years of smoking weed even though it made me paranoid, drinking to escape feelings I didn’t understand.

My first drink came from my older brother—sitting by a pool at his apartment, handed me a Budweiser. I remember thinking, “Why the fuck are you drinking this thing? It’s disgusting.” I wish that disgust had stuck. But once you get past two, there’s no going back. For me, two was typically nine or ten.

I was what people call a functional alcoholic. I could push through, have some days I wouldn’t drink at all. But the itch would come back. Going to the gas station to buy a 12-pack and finish it that night became normal.

The shift started at Orange Theory Fitness. I was on the treadmill, supposed to be running hard, but I wasn’t. The coach came over: “What’s going on?” I told him I’d had a heavy night of drinking. He said, “You’re not going to be able to get further if you continue to drink like that.”

That moment was a whisper. It didn’t stop me the next day, but it sparked forward momentum. I spent years tracking my drinking in my phone notes, looking for patterns. There were none—just drinking or not drinking. I read Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind. None of it was enough yet.

Then I made a public commitment: one year, no alcohol. Posted it on Instagram. August 19, 2020. After three months, I felt it in my body—this just wasn’t part of my life anymore. That was five years ago.

Here’s what changed: I found meditation (10 years now), therapy, different coaches. I wake up at 4am now—used to think people who did that were crazy. But now my eyes open and instead of “how am I gonna get through this?” it’s “what’s possible today?”

It’s been a creative’s life for over 20 years doing video and photo work. The Sober Creative lets me integrate my passion for health and wellness and sobriety into my creativity. It’s a full integration of everything I’ve worked on throughout my life.

Starting this past week: the 31-Day Sober Creative Reset. 31 individual emails, weekly meetings, an awareness tracker, and community support through WhatsApp. It’s not about labels or forever—it’s about trying something new for one month.

Sobriety isn’t about perfection. It’s about waking up and asking: what becomes possible when I stop escaping and start fully experiencing what life gives me?

The Sober Creative

Episode 033 - The Mic is Flipped: Choosing No to Drinking Is Choosing Yes to Yourself

For 32 episodes, I’ve sat across from creative professionals who’ve chosen sobriety and discovered something remarkable: clarity doesn’t diminish creativity—it unlocks it…

Listen now

5 months ago · 10 likes · 9 comments · Josh Woll

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well:

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 034 with on January 8th at 10:00a EST

What happens when the path you're supposed to want stops being enough?

Jake Summers went from West Point to rehab, finance to a mango farm in Cambodia, recovery work to renewable energy—each chapter teaching him something about leaving, starting over, and knowing who you are when the thing you built disappears.

This week, we're talking about the ROI that doesn't show up on a resume, the difference between brand and identity, and what it actually means to build something that scales beyond the rooms you've been in.

Perfection is the Enemy of Progress

My personal Substack

By Jake Summers

P.S. You can view past newsletter editions here.

What’s Next For You?

The 31-Day Alcohol-Free Reset is happening now.

You didn’t miss out because there will be 3 more opportunities this year.

The Reset is a focused experiment to see what your creativity feels like when alcohol is no longer in the way.

Clear mornings. More stable energy. Work that flows instead of stalls.

If you’ve been curious, click the link and enter your email to be notified when the doors open.

Notify Me

Not sure yet?

Alcohol may be quietly influencing your focus, energy, or creative confidence more than you realize.

I created a short 5-minute assessment to help you see how it’s showing up for you — without judgment or pressure.

Free Assessment

Already clear — just want to talk it through?

You can book a free 1:1 clarity session.

No pitch. No pressure. Just clarity.

Reserve Your Session

Each step forward is an act of becoming.

Thank you for being here.

Josh

This one has the feels.

When I was in it, there was no way to feel what I feel now. I had to go through it. No one could say or do anything to change me. I had to make the decision myself. It’s not easy. And the truth is, it never will be. We are meant to face resistance. Challenges. Things that test us. Push us. Leave us feeling like what’s the point?

You know the whisper. It’s quiet. It’s asking more of you.

And when you answer, you wake up each day more alive than before.

✍🏻Essays

Staring at the popcorn on the ceiling. Thirty-one million seconds ahead of me. Day 1.

The commitment I’d broken repeatedly was now unbreakable. Each morning I’d told myself, “I’m not drinking today.” This time, it had to stick.

But here’s what I didn’t expect: the hardest part wasn’t trusting others to believe in me again. It was trusting myself.

You know the feeling. Making a plan and doubting it before the day starts. Committing to something and feeling the certainty slip. Telling yourself “just one”—the seed of doubt sprouts. Six beers later, trust wilts into nothing.

Five years sober, I’ve learned: trust doesn’t rebuild through willpower or grand gestures. It rebuilds through evidence. Small, unglamorous follow-through. The gap between “I don’t want to” and “I did it anyway.”

Week 9 of my 10-part series: how broken promises create a baseline you can’t escape, why your brain stops believing your own predictions, and the awareness practice that starts rebuilding trust—one observation at a time.

💡Disrupt the Pattern

The family gathering. The tension spikes. Old patterns resurface.

And there’s the thought: “A drink would make this easier.” It promises to smooth things over, to take the edge off the stress.

But what if the drink is taking you offline from the clarity you actually need?

This episode breaks down what’s really happening when you reach for alcohol to manage family stress—and what changes when you stay present instead of numbing out.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This past week, I sat down with , creator of “For the Masters: AI Creative Mastery,” who got sober around October 2024—over 60 days after years of smoking marijuana throughout her entire day. She wasn’t just smoking recreationally. She was smoking on the clock at her retail job, experiencing paranoia, watching her writing disappear into unproductive fog.

Anna spent years caught in the same cycle: smoke, feel unproductive, feel unhappy about being unproductive, smoke more. She’s a professional writer with over a decade of experience, but she couldn’t work. She couldn’t get it done. She described it as feeling like “a demon on your back”—doing things you don’t want to do, trapped in a pattern you can’t escape.

Then she found my newsletter. A simple “hey, thanks for subscribing” message became what she calls “a sign”—an angel popping up in her life at exactly the right moment. She made a decision that would transform everything.

The shift wasn’t gradual. Within days of getting sober, Anna went from creative paralysis to writing 3,000 words every morning. She now finishes entire articles before most people start their workday.

Here’s what she discovered about what clarity unlocks:

“I write 3,000 words a morning now, which is insane. I literally finish an article a morning. Every morning.”

That productivity revealed something deeper: her creative potential had been there all along, just obscured by the fog. Now she’s on a mission to help mid-career creatives close what she calls the “taste-skill gap”—that frustrating space where you can see what great work looks like but can’t consistently make it yet.

She’s building a library of over 100 AI prompts, teaching creatives how to use technology as a thinking partner without losing their authentic voice. And she told me something that captures the risk of autopilot living:

“I don’t want your 30 years, 40 years, 20 years, 10 years, five years of experience creatively to go down the drain because you used AI and now you don’t know how to not use it.”

Sobriety doesn’t just give you back your time. It gives you the clarity to do deliberate work that actually matters—work you’ll be proud of in five years.

The Sober Creative

Episode 032 - When Sobriety Cleared the Fog: How One Writer Went from Paralyzed to 3,000 Words a Day

Anna Gibson spent years on autopilot—smoking weed throughout her day, feeling the weight of a “demon on her back,” watching her writing disappear into unproductive fog. She knew she wasn’t doing anything. She’d smoke on the clock at her retail job. She’d look at her bag and see paranoia staring back. For someone who’d been writing professionally for over a decade…

Listen now

5 months ago · 6 likes · 5 comments · Josh Woll and Anna Gibson

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well:

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 033 with on December 31th at 10:00a EST

What happens when the host becomes the guest? This week, I'm flipping the mic on myself—sharing my story, the messy parts, and the beautiful ones. Also what's coming next for The Sober Creative.

It's equal parts reflection, confession, and an open invitation for you to ask me anything. Fair warning: I might actually answer.

🎬 Behind the Scenes

Crafting 31 daily emails for the upcoming Sober Creative Reset. Yes. 31 individual emails. All different. All taking each person along a journey. Short. Guided. Intentional.

I think my holiday vacation will come in February…maybe. 😂

P.S. You can view past newsletter editions here.

What’s Next For You?

The 31-Day Alcohol-Free Reset begins this week.

This isn’t about labels.

It isn’t about forever.

It’s a focused experiment to see what your creativity feels like when alcohol is no longer in the way.

Clear mornings. More stable energy. Work that flows instead of stalls.

If you’ve been curious, this is the moment.

Start the 31-Day Reset

Not sure yet?

Alcohol may be quietly influencing your focus, energy, or creative confidence more than you realize.

I created a short 5-minute assessment to help you see how it’s showing up for you — without judgment or pressure.

Free Assessment

Already clear — just want to talk it through?

You can book a free 1:1 clarity session.

No pitch. No pressure. Just clarity.

Reserve Your Session

Each step forward is an act of becoming.

Thank you for being here.

Josh