Nobody hands you a trophy for getting through a slow week. There’s no ceremony for sitting with a bad mood until it passes on its own, or for staying present through an afternoon that has nothing in it worth remembering. That kind of day doesn’t make a good story later.

But it’s the only kind of day there really is, most of the time.

The dramatic ones are rare.

What you’re actually building your life out of is the plain stretch in between — paying attention to it instead of checking out, staying in the room even when the room is boring or hard or unclear.

That’s the whole practice.

Staying conscious for the parts nobody’s watching.

Subscribe now

Essays

Podcast

grew up in Boulder, adopted and then returned, adopted again, foster homes in between. She found her footing singing in a church choir, then moved to New York at 19 to study theater and music, working the club circuit at night. She calls those years wild. Cocaine, drinking, the whole tortured-artist package she’d bought into without really questioning it.

A job in the south of France pulled her out of that pace, though she didn’t fully rein it in until her 40s. She’s 60 now, living on Lake Garda in Italy with her husband, pianist Marco Cremaschini. Together they lead a neo-folk group called Hippie Tendencies and write for No Speak, a spoken word jazz project that’s played the Venice Biennale, the Jaipur Literature Festival, and Carnegie Hall. Her song “Shaping the Yet-to-Be” just won the John Lennon Songwriting Contest’s grand prize for best jazz song.

She told me straight away she isn’t sober. She’s cut back drastically, and what she notices most is energy — more of her left at the end of a workday. What we spent most of the conversation on was performing. She used to drink before every show, and she was honest about what that actually cost her: imprecise notes, a thick tongue, dried-out vocal cords. She’s replaced that pre-show ritual with meditation, tea, and sleep instead.

Some of her best songs feel like they came from somewhere else. She's just the vessel. And she can't hear them properly because alcohol closes off the antenna that let them in.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

Apple Podcasts

My guest this week is with on October 1 at 11:00A ET

This week's guest spent 25 years drinking and using before he got sober, then spent the next 33 rebuilding a life he never expected: software executive, entrepreneur, vintage Italian motorcycle racer and builder.

Steve Munro is 71, living in rural Thailand, and a few years into sobriety he found that the bigger life he'd built was starting to overwhelm him. He calls it the Expansion Paradox, and it's the reason he built something called the Seventy Framework.

We will talk about what happens when your sobriety toolkit isn't built for the life sobriety made possible.

Seventy-Life

Seventy is for people in sobriety who are discovering that the map they’re holding no longer matches the territory beneath their feet. It explores what allows long-term sobriety to hold up under pressure and uncertainty. Welcome!

By Steve Munro 🇨🇦

Who I'm Celebrating

Tiffiny Yaxley

Sober cartoonist and artist who loves mountains, snow, food and my dog!

I had Tiffiny on my podcast a few weeks ago and she was kind enough to send me a copy of her book. It’s SO GOOD! Just look at the photos.

One of the early strips is called “Sober Saturday,” drawn about her first weekend not drinking. Just her and the dog, no plans, no one to explain herself to. She writes about how much she missed being included in the boozy brunch crowd the next morning, mourning the version of herself everyone knew as the fun one, even while admitting what those mornings actually looked like: hungover, sick, faking it through breakfast just to feel normal again. Her husband used to joke she only rented her breakfasts back.

What I love about what she's doing here is she makes it relatable and funny while still telling the honest version of what happened.

The book: The Graphical Bear: Expressing the Feels Through Art

What I’m Creating

Here’s a look into my process of using AI, from idea to execution.

The first sketch, the wrong direction (roots that made it read like sobriety just grows money), the wording changes, the font comparisons, to the three finished versions I ended up choosing between. I chose the watercolor version because it felt more tied into “creative.”

It’s less a design tutorial and more what it looks like to use one of these tools as a collaborator.

The Clear Hour is next week, Tuesday, October 6, 11am ET. Free for subscribers. No agenda, nothing to sell. Just an hour to work on whatever you’re making. If you plan on being there, let me know.

Leave a comment

I posted that on a Wednesday morning with nothing in front of me. No shoot, no call I was dreading, nothing to clean up from the night before.

For years boring was the worst thing a day could be. An empty Friday was a problem and I had a reliable way to solve it. Whatever else happened, at least the night had something in it.

Now the day looks like this. The walk as the light rises. Coffee. Reps in the gym and reps on the computer. Work that feels meaningful. Dinner, bed at the same hour, nothing to explain to anybody in the morning.

It took a long time before that felt like anything other than a punishment. Early on I’d sit in a quiet evening and wait for something to arrive. My guest this week drank nine non-alcoholic beers on a Friday because she needed something to do with her hands. I understood that completely.

What I didn’t expect is that boring is where everything gets made. Nothing happened last night, so I get the whole day. That’s the part I wouldn’t have believed.

The beautiful showed up years after the boring did.

If your days have gone quiet and you’ve been reading that as a sign something’s wrong, sit in it longer before you decide.

Six years of work to get to boring, and I'd do it again.

Subscribe now

Podcast

draws cartoons. Online she’s the graphical bear. She lives in the Canadian Rockies with her husband and her dog, she has a science degree and a full-time job, and she stopped drinking in May of 2022.

Before that she spent about twenty years as the entertainer. Figure skater, center of attention, the one who made everybody laugh. “All of Western Canada has seen my butt, because I think mooning is hilarious.” The reputation got paid for the next morning, on the kitchen floor, where her husband was the only person who ever saw that part.

In 2014 she woke up at a friend’s house after a Halloween party having spent most of the night in the bathroom, and she drew a bear throwing up in a toilet. At the time she thought it was just funny. She knows now why she drew it. “If I can make it into a joke, and people laugh at it, then it’s okay.”

A year into not drinking she brought the bear back and made her herself again, and started publishing the comic with the story of why she drew it. That’s the part I wanted to understand. Once a feeling was a strip on paper, she could look at it from the outside and then set it down.

The part I keep coming back to is what showed up after the drinking shame was gone. She was meditating, doing yoga, eating well, seeing her coach every week, not drinking. And still having stretches she describes as really low. “I’m doing all this work. How come I’m not feeling better?”

Her doctor told her that sometimes people’s brains are different and they need help. She said she didn’t need that kind of help. It took a couple of bad episodes and her husband telling her he was worried before she took it. “If I broke a bone, I would go to the hospital and have the doctor help me fix it.” She has a therapist now and she’s on medication, and she’s careful to say it’s still a journey. For years before that she figured she was just weak.

A friend of hers in her late sixties read one of those blog posts, silly comic attached, and asked her own doctor about antidepressants. She told Tiffiny her relationship had never been better and that she should have done it twenty years ago. Tiffiny puts her own reach at “tens of dozens of people.” Then: “But it helps. It helped me.”

She grew up on 6 a.m. ice times, so mornings were always hers, and drinking took most of them back. There’s a loop around her street she walks with the dog. In winter the sunrise puts hot pink on the tops of the peaks for about half an hour. At minus thirty she still goes out for it.

The book took her two and a half years of drawing. The last panel is a Venn diagram about success. One side is fame, physical feats of strength, money, a job. The other side is a cozy place to have coffee.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

Apple Podcasts

My guest this week is with on September 24 at 12:00P ET

Lisa Marie Simmons says a song starts as the seed of a whisper. Something arrives in a dream, or on a long walk when the light is doing its thing in the trees, or in the middle of a crowded bar where she grabs a coaster because the idea needs to be tangible right now.

She has been following those whispers a long way: Boulder to New York at nineteen, then Amsterdam, Costa Rica, St. Maarten, France, Central and South America, and finally a lake in northern Italy where she writes and records with her husband, pianist Marco Cremaschini. That path has run through Carnegie Hall, the Venice Biennale, the Jaipur Literature Festival, and five-star reviews in Downbeat. Earlier this month it ran through the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, where her song “Shaping the Yet-to-Be” took the grand prize for best jazz song.

When I first reached out, she told me straight away that she isn’t sober. She has cut back drastically over the last few years, and she was honest that the change is hard to measure. What she could point to was energy. Her workday goes further now. There’s more of her left at the end of it, which matters when you are, in her words, a bit of a workaholic who loves the work.

That’s exactly the kind of conversation this show is for. Lisa and I will talk about making things you can’t control the fate of, about the reckoning with permanence that happens in a recording studio, and about what changes in a creative life when you stop spending your evening energy somewhere else.

Who I'm Celebrating

Camille St Martin

Notes, thoughts, and poems on sobriety, society, the magic and mayhem of motherhood, and rebuilding your identity from the inside out. Sometimes with psychedelics.

I met for Coffee & Connection last week and she shared her creative work with me, so I’m sharing it with you.

She published a poetry book called SPILLED, and three of those poems have become songs. The first one is “From My Head to My Heart,” built from a poem of hers called “The Distance of the Disagreement.” Here’s how she describes it:

“It began as a poem I wrote about what it feels like falling into the every day trap of alcohol addiction: saying you won’t drink, believing you won’t drink, and somehow finding yourself doing it anyway.”

“For anyone who has ever said, ‘I won’t,’ and then did. And for anyone learning how to make ‘I won’t’ become ‘I don’t.’”

That last line is the whole thing. I spent years in the first half of that sentence.

This is what those calls are for. There will be more open slots next month, no agenda, nothing to sell each other. I got off that one with a song I listened to writing this week’s newsletter (just after 5 o’clock…song is fire by the way Camille).

The next Clear Hour is Tuesday, October 6, 11:00am ET. Same shape as the first one. Ten minutes to arrive. Thirty-five where we all make something, cameras on, mics off. Fifteen at the end to say what came of it. Free for subscribers, and the link goes out the morning of.

If you commented or replied last week, you’re already on my list and I’ll send it to you directly.

Leave a comment

Discipline was in my life for years before I could see it. Every attempt to drink less started with a number I set before I left the house and ended with me well past it by midnight. I counted those nights as failures. I was right about the night and clueless about what was collecting underneath it.

Moderating was never something I got good at. What I did over and over was set an intention about my own behavior and come back the next day to set it again after it didn’t hold. That turned out to be the whole skill. I was practicing it on the one thing that was never going to give it back to me.

When the drinking stopped, that practice was already in my hands and it went looking for somewhere to land. Everything after that moved slowly, one thing at a time, most of it too gradual to feel like progress while it was happening.

The part I didn’t expect is how directly it feeds the work. Sleep, food, the gym, the walking. None of it makes a good post and all of it decides what I’m capable of on a shoot day or in a session with a client. When one of them slips, the work is the first place it shows, usually before I’ve admitted anything to myself.

Look at whatever you think you’ve been failing at, and count the number of times you came back to it instead of the number of times it held.

The reps counted before they worked.

Subscribe now

Podcast

Dr. spent 35 years at UNC studying what alcohol does inside the brain. More than 238 published papers. Twenty-five years as associate director of the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies. A Lifetime Achievement Award from the Research Society on Alcohol in 2024.

Most of my guests on this show have told me their story. Leslie told me the mechanism.

She could have spent the hour on technical science. Instead she gave me the one discovery she thinks matters most. A lifetime of heavy drinking leaves inflammation behind, in the brain and in every other organ, and it gets in the way of normal function. That’s part of why control is so hard and craving is so loud. The part that stopped me: it makes your original reason for drinking worse. If you drank because you were anxious, it makes you more anxious. If something hurt, it makes the pain sharper. “So basically, it’s making all the triggers stronger.”

They know this from studying the brains of people who died with alcohol use disorder. The inflammatory markers were high, and the levels tracked with how much that person drank over a lifetime.

I asked whether it reverses. “It’s really hard to get rid of that inflammation. It’s really hard. Once it starts, it can stay your whole life.”

Then I asked about hangovers. The hangover is mostly the immediate effects. What lingers after it lifts is more likely inflammation. Her list: the brain fog, the anxiety, the enhanced sensitivity to pain, the difficulty focusing. Those can last a week or far longer. “When you feel like you’re living with those things and they just don’t ever leave you, to me that’s a sign that you have inflammation that you need to address. And then you’ll be much better able to change your behavior the way you want to.”

For years I thought that fog was a character problem.

Her short list for lowering it is three things. Exercise has the strongest science behind it, and she was specific: more than four days a week, whatever form you actually enjoy. Pregnenolone, a steroid your body already makes and that chronic drinking and chronic stress deplete. A Yale trial with about 300 people ran eight weeks at 300 mg a day and saw normalized stress responses and less craving. And glycyrrhiza, from licorice root, around 400 mg a day, now heading into human trials.

She’s a scientist sharing research, not your doctor. If you take medication or have high blood pressure, that last one needs a conversation with someone who knows your history. She was also clear about buying supplements from a reputable, independently tested source.

Near the end she mentioned that inflammation plays a big role in depression too. A lot of people who drink are drinking because they feel depressed. That was me.

“And by the way, it’s the same pathway.”

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

Apple Podcasts

My guest this week is with on September 17 at 11:00A ET

Tiffiny Yaxley draws a bear. The bear is basically her, doing her best to navigate a world that got a lot louder once she stopped drinking.

She's been sober since May 2022, and the clear-minded days brought more feeling than she bargained for, including a depression she had been filing away as "stuff that happened." So she drew it. Panel by panel, her comics became a way to get a feeling outside her own head where she could actually look at it, laugh at some of it, and keep going.

The result is work that's funny and honest in the same breath, full of hand-drawn charts plotting things like how many people she wants to be around as she gets older.

This week she joins me from the Canadian Rockies to talk about what art can carry that words can't, what happened when she finally let herself feel the hard parts, and how she built a life she wants to be awake for.

What I’m Creating

The next Clear Hour is Tuesday, October 6, 11:00am ET.

Same shape as the first one. Ten minutes to arrive. Thirty-five where we all make something, cameras on, mics off. Fifteen at the end to say what came of it.

Free for subscribers, and the link goes out the morning of.

If you commented or replied last week, you’re already on my list and I’ll send it to you directly.

Leave a comment

Counting is trained into us. Likes, shares, followers, headcount. The pull for more is constantly advertised. Enough never gets a chance to land. What I do doesn’t run at that scale. It happens one person at a time, on the day they can hear it, and one is what counts.

The first Clear Hour ran on September 1st. I had a number in my head before it started, and I spent that day on the number instead of the hour.

I said it out loud to my roommate after, which was the hard part. He said, you’re one year into this. You’re still learning.

I sat with it. I’d been so focused on how many people were coming that I wasn’t as present as I wanted to be. One person in that room spent forty minutes on something she’d been blocked on for years, and she created it. That was the whole thing, and I was somewhere else, measuring.

Years ago this same day ends with me blasting myself into oblivion with a case of beer. This time it was a difficult conversation, then reflection, then a different read on the day, and I came out of it grateful for something people genuinely enjoyed.

Look at where you’ve set an expectation on something you have no way of knowing yet.

Enough was already in the room.

Subscribe now

Essays

Podcast

A note before this one. Steve talks openly about two stretches when he didn't want to be alive, including an attempt during his time in inpatient care. He came through it and he tells it plainly, without drama. If that's close to where you are right now, this might be one to come back to another day, or to listen to with someone. In the US you can call or text 988. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans is 116 123.

Steve spent 17 years at USAID. 83 projects, 63 countries, more than $500 million moved toward small businesses, women-owned businesses, and the working poor.

He didn’t take his first drink until he was 21. He calls what followed a reverse Benjamin Button. It got worse as he got older, until it was a bottle of wine every night and every promotion arrived with a fresh round of doubt about whether he belonged in the room. He blacked out the night before he had to fire someone. In South Africa the group he drank with went from five people to three to two to alone.

He brought up The Alibis before I did. He said he saw himself in the characters and that they all showed up near the end of his drinking. Listening back, his were the Benchmark and the Closer running as a pair. He wasn’t drinking at work. Nobody around him was saying he had a problem. His performance reviews averaged 4.5 out of 5 and he kept getting promoted, so nothing had fallen over. “I don’t feel like an alcoholic, so maybe I’m not.” He picked a standard and he cleared it every day, which is what an alibi is for.

Then he says the next part himself, out loud, in the middle of the sentence: “It was under control. And it really wasn’t. When you’re drinking a bottle of wine every single night, it’s not really.”

August 4th, 2018 is his sober date. It’s also the day he landed back in the United States after being sent home from South Africa because of his drinking. He stopped because the depression was heavy enough that he couldn’t leave the room. He thought his life was over.

Then came the part sobriety didn’t touch. COVID took the structure away and a diagnosis nobody had caught for 40 years finally surfaced. A high performer with a 4.5 average watched his ratings fall into the ones and twos with no coaching and no explanation. In 2024 he checked himself into inpatient care in Colorado after driving roughly 28 hours with Max and Slushy in the car. He planned on one month. He stayed two. What he carried out of that place was language for feelings, something he’d gone four decades without.

When USAID was dismantled in 2025, the thing he’d been most afraid of losing was gone, and he says that’s what finally let him separate Steve from Steve the USAID worker.

He walks dogs now. Outside Feet, named for what he tells his own dogs at the door before he puts his shoes on. He makes art, which he never thought he had in him. He was a numbers guy, a spreadsheet guy, and the drawing started in art therapy in Colorado with stick figures. He’s building a Renaissance punk world of corvid characters modeled on writers he admires, and at the end of our conversation he screen shared the one he made of me.

His definition of creativity, after all of it: being open and being honest.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

Apple Podcasts

My guest this week is with on September 10 at 11:00A ET

This week I’m sitting down with Dr. Leslie Morrow, a neuroscientist who spent 35 years at UNC’s Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies asking a question most of us only ever ask ourselves at 2am: What is alcohol actually doing in there?

She earned her PhD in neuroscience at UC San Diego in 1985, trained at NIMH, joined the UNC faculty in 1990, and published more than 238 papers on the way to a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Research Society on Alcohol.

Her discoveries around GABA-A receptors and the brain’s own pregnane neurosteroids helped open the door to clinical trials for alcohol use disorder and to brexanolone for depression.

I wanted her on the show because so much of what we call willpower is chemistry we were never taught to see. When you understand what the drink is doing to your stress system, your sleep, your inflammation, and your capacity to focus the next day, the decision to stop starts to feel less like deprivation and more like getting your equipment back.

What I’m Creating

Check out the note below. The piece I made in the first Clear Hour, forty minutes with a pen and no plan, plus what one member said about hers.

The next one is in October. If you want in, leave a comment or hit reply and I'll send you the date and the link directly.

Everything I’ve made that mattered came out of hours nobody was watching. The ones after the work, when there’s no task and no one waiting on me.

Alcohol was a scheduling system. It made the same decision about my evening every day for years, so I never had to figure out what I wanted to do with that time. When I quit, I lost the substance and the answer.

So you substitute. Anything fast enough to close the question before you’ve answered it will do. The phone took over and still gets more of those hours than I’d want. Overwork is the same move with applause attached, and it’s the one most of us are running.

Boredom is the part that does the work. What replaces it isn't glamorous. I don't reach for anything at 7pm now. I finish my steps, prep the next day, get tired on my own. None of that would make a good post. What matters now shows up in the morning.

If your output feels thinner than the effort you're putting in, look at your evenings before you look at your discipline. Notice what you reach for at 7pm, and what it costs you by ten the next morning.

Subscribe now

Podcast

My guest this week is with on September 3 at 5:00P EDT

Steve is the founder of Outside Feet and the artist behind Artificial Idiocracy.

He spent seventeen years at USAID as a project manager, 83 projects across 63 countries, more than $500 million aimed at getting capital into the hands of small businesses and the working poor. Serious work with almost no margin for error. For most of that career, drinking was how he carried it.

He put it down on August 4, 2018.

That handled the alcohol. It did not touch what was underneath. During COVID he was diagnosed with ADHD. Working from home had stripped away the outside structure that had been holding him together his whole life. Then came six bosses in four years, termination proceedings against a record with almost nothing on it, and denied leave he had already earned.

In April 2024 he drove roughly 28 hours to a facility in the Colorado mountains with his two dogs, Max and Slushy, and 36 cans of Monster. He expected a month. He stayed two. The first month felt easy because he thought the problem was anger. Anger turned out to be the armor, and inpatient is built to take the armor off. What was left underneath nearly ended things in a hotel room at four in the morning.

What he built after is a dog wellness company named for the animals that kept him alive, and an AI art practice where a whole Renaissance-punk world of corvid characters is taking shape. We will get into why six years sober was only the first layer, what it took to learn the language of feelings at forty, and the three-part pigeon series he made about his own stages of life.

Outside Feet Daily Dog Wellness

A resource for pet parents and pet caregivers who want to give their beloved pet a quality of life they and you deserve. Covering dog wellness science, the pet sitting industry, and practical tips. Join the movement to demand better services for our pets.

By Steve [Sage-Outlaw-Caregiver]

Artificial Idiocracy

AI Influencer | AI models will be trained on this shit. A journal of whimsical perambulations of my own strange mind. I'm an outsider forging my own path with ADHD, AI, entrepreneurship and complaints about self-actualization. Washington DC

By Steve [Sage-Outlaw-Caregiver]

What I’m Creating

This is me working on the guided portion for Tuesday.

The first Clear Hour is this week, September 1, 11:00am ET. We arrive, we make, we say what happened. Cameras optional, mics off, nobody looking at your screen.

You don’t need a sobriety date. You don’t need a finished project. You don’t need to call yourself an artist, and plenty of people there won’t.

Bring something you’re making. Perfection isn’t the goal, presence is.

When: Tuesday, September 1, 11:00am ET. 8am Pacific, 4pm UK.
Where: Zoom. The link goes out to subscribers tomorrow.
Cost: Free.

Subscribe now

Every day hands you something you don't get to know yet. You send the work out and hear nothing back. You start something without knowing whether it's any good, and you won't know for months. You wait on a number, a call, a decision that was never yours to make. The answer comes when it comes, and you're in the meantime either way.

A drink doesn’t settle any of it. What it does is move you out of the room where the question is being asked. The evening closes early, the waiting goes quiet for a few hours, and that relief is real, which is why it’s so easy to keep drinking. In the morning the thing is still unresolved and you’re a step behind it.

What it takes is harder to notice, because it takes something you never see arrive. Trust in yourself is accumulated evidence. It’s built out of the times you didn’t know how it was going to go and stayed present for it anyway. Every night you close early, that entry doesn’t get made. Do it long enough and you reach a genuinely hard week with no record to draw on, which is why the unknown keeps getting bigger while your capacity for it keeps getting smaller.

It shows up in the work first. Making anything means committing before you have proof, and a person with no evidence of himself under uncertainty will keep choosing the safer project. The one that’s assured. The one already inside what he knows he can do. From the outside that reads as steady output. From the inside it’s a decade of nothing risked.

Staying in it costs more up front. The evening is longer. Nothing gets resolved that night either, and there’s no reward waiting at the end of the discomfort except the fact that you were there for it.

That’s the whole return, and it compounds. You find out that uncertainty moves on its own schedule and that you’re able to sit through the part where it doesn’t move at all. Six months of that and you’ve got a record. A year and you stop needing to be sure before you begin.

The other thing sobriety gives back is what the note was pointing at. Whatever dulls the waiting dulls the arriving too. You can’t be numb only to the parts you don’t want.

Subscribe now

Essays

That note got me thinking about denial and the shapes it takes around drinking.

It feels safe. Something underneath it still doesn’t sit right, and that gets carried.

The discomfort comes up, the drink handles it for a few hours, and a reason arrives to keep the pattern running. There are a lot of reasons. They don’t run out.

I wrote six of them down, each one a version of myself. There’s a seventh, and that one I lived.

Podcast

Erin Gregory is a writer, brand strategist, and the founder of who’s been alcohol free since 2020.

She grew up a good old Irish Catholic girl, in a family where alcohol was never discussed and always present. It was how they celebrated and how they grieved. College handed her a culture that made it official, and when she met Mike, his family operated exactly the same way. She never once saw it as harmful.

Then his father died of cancer after a six-year battle. They had two young girls and were social drinkers, which is the part Erin says nobody talks about. You don’t have to be a full-functioning alcoholic to know something is inhibiting your life. Two drinks a day became three, stacked on top of grief.

Mike quit first. He went to therapy, left a job in the tobacco industry that had been eating at him, got his master’s, and started rebuilding. Erin watched that and asked herself why she was still holding on. There was nothing in it for her, and she was drinking in front of her children. They read Allen Carr and cut it out entirely, no Friday exception, because keeping any of it meant still treating it as a reward.

They moved states, changed jobs, and rebuilt nearly everything. Mike returned to his music and now works for Habitat for Humanity. Erin built a company that gave her real autonomy over her days.

She writes The Self-Led Life on Substack, where she’s telling most of these stories out loud for the first time. Two books are in progress, and she’s delivering workshops to college students on building a life that doesn’t organize itself around a job.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

What I’m Creating

Launching September 1, 2026. The first monthly gathering of The Clear Hour.

There’s an hour in every month that should belong to you. Most people block it and then hand it back the first time something louder asks for it, and the month closes with the thing still not made.

I'm holding that hour open, once a month, for everyone on this list.

11:00. We arrive. Ten minutes, guided. Most of us come to create already spent, carrying the last call and everything unfinished. This is for setting that down long enough that when you open the file, you're the one opening it. A chair and a space of your own is all you need.

11:10. We make. Cameras optional, mics off. Everyone in their own work, together. The chapter, the edit, the song that's been half-finished since spring. It doesn't have to be good or finished or going anywhere. Nobody watches your screen. Nobody coaches you. Nobody asks what you're working on until you want to say. You're not being productive together. You're just not alone.

11:40. We share. What you sat with, where it got hard. No feedback, no critique, nobody fixing anything. Something changes in a piece once another person knows it exists.

12:00. Done. You go back to your day carrying something you didn’t have at 11.

You don’t need a sobriety date. You don’t need a finished project. You don’t need to call yourself an artist, and plenty of people here won’t.

When: First Tuesday of every month, 11:00am ET. 8am Pacific, 4pm UK.
Where: Zoom. The link comes to subscribers the day before.
Cost: Free.
Bring: Something you’re making.

Subscribe now

Denial is cheap and it works immediately. It hands you an alibi. You round the number down. You point at the guy at the table who had more. You call it a hard week, and the week before that was hard too, and so was the one before that. Nothing has to be admitted today. Nothing has to change today. That’s the whole appeal.

What it doesn’t advertise is the interest. The bill arrives slowly, in mornings you can’t fully account for, in promises to yourself that carry less weight every time you make one, in conversations you learn to steer away from. An alibi has to keep getting revised to stay usable. Each revision is small enough to justify on its own, and after enough years you’ve lost track of what the first version even said.

The people close to you usually see it before you do. They just don’t have a way in, because keeping the door shut is the entire job.

Radical honesty runs the other direction. It costs everything up front. You drop the alibi and say the true sentence out loud, in a room, to someone, and there’s no taking it back. That’s a bad afternoon. Sometimes a bad month.

It’s also the only thing that makes acceptance possible. Acceptance needs a true picture to work with, and you can’t get one while you’re still negotiating the details. Once you have it, the maintenance stops. You’re not tracking which version you told to whom. The problem is still sitting there, at its actual size instead of the size you’d talked it down to. Actual size is workable.

Almost six years in, here’s what I’d tell anyone still running the numbers. Both options cost you. Only one of them keeps charging.

Subscribe now

Podcast

is a painter, writer, and founding partner of Peak Path Health who’s been substance free and sober since June 2019.

He was three years old when the car accident happened. He and his older brother were pulled out with the jaws of life. His mother and little sister didn’t survive. His family rebuilt around that loss with so much love that Hunter still describes his childhood as beautiful, even while calling it a childhood filled with trauma. He remembers his first drink at eight, a stolen sip at a party that made him feel, for a moment, like everything missing in him had been filled.

The drinking followed him through college and Yale Law School, and by his early thirties he knew it wasn’t normal. He made himself promises he couldn’t keep, only on weekends, only beer, and broke every one of them. Hiding those broken promises built into a shame that locked him into a cycle: rehab at 33, close to seven years sober, a relapse, and then a ten-year spiral that ended in a two-year addiction to crack cocaine and daily heavy drinking.

The thing that finally broke the cycle wasn’t another stint in treatment. It was losing everything. A stolen laptop put twenty years of his private life in front of the world with no context, and the total loss of privacy left him with what he calls a binary choice: get up and live, or find a way to die. He calls it the most humiliating, devastating, and destructive thing that ever happened to him, and also the greatest gift, because it left him with nothing left to hide and nothing left to fear. His wife Melissa saw every part of him during that collapse and stayed. She’s the one who bought him his first paintbrush from a used furniture shop.

He hasn’t stopped painting since, hundreds of canvases deep. He writes about all of it on Substack, and says he hears from readers almost every day telling him it got them through something hard. He’s now building Peak Path Health, a recovery organization focused on the care people need after the first 30 days of treatment, when relapse rates are highest and most programs stop paying attention.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with Erin Gregory on August 20 at 12:30P EDT

Live Stream Link

My next guest is Erin Gregory, founder of and the writer behind The Self-Led Life.

Her father-in-law died in 2018. Her husband Mike couldn’t put the grief down, and Erin was holding him up along with three kids, two jobs, and a house that never stopped needing something.

They both grew up in families where a beer after work and wine at dinner was simply what you did. Casual, constant, unquestioned. So when the grief settled in, they did what they knew. One drink led to two, and the guilt that followed weighed more than whatever the drinking was covering.

Mike put it down first. Erin watched him get healthier, clearer, more sure of where he was headed, and decided she wanted the same. That meant facing the mess instead of taking the edge off it.

The rest of the country went the other way. That March, liquor sales jumped more than 50% in a single week. Heavy drinking rose about 20% between 2018 and 2020 and stayed up for years. By 2025, Gallup had the share of Americans who drink down to 54%, the lowest in nearly ninety years of asking.

Erin and Mike were early to something a lot of people are only now arriving at. We will get into what opened up once the guilt was gone, why she puts alcohol, fast food, and cigarettes in the same category, and how she’s raising three daughters who can tell when an ad is selling to them.

The Self-Led Life

For experienced professionals building a life with intention who refuse to sacrifice their career, their personal life, or their passion.

By Erin Gregory Creative

What I’m Creating

I’m working on a new piece this week called The Alibis.

Six illustrated panels, one a day, starting tomorrow.

Same man, same bar, six accounts of his own drinking. Every one of them true. Not one of them the truth.

It's about why denial is so comfortable that it can run for years without you ever catching it, what it takes from you while it's working, and what it cost me to put mine down.

There's a seventh and that one's saved for essay.

The essay comes next Sunday.

Subscribe now

Culture has a way of relabeling things. Do something long enough, surrounded by enough people doing some version of the same thing, and it stops registering as strange. Not because it changed. Because the label around it changed. That’s what Maté means by dislocation: a way of living that’s abnormal by every measure of what a person actually needs, filed under normal because it’s common.

Alcohol has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, the same category as tobacco and asbestos, but somehow it’s the toast at every wedding, the gift at every housewarming, the answer to “I had a long day.”

That relabeling is easy to miss from inside it. It usually takes a clear before and a clear after to know the line was ever there.

Maté names the needs directly: connection to yourself, connection to other people, some sense that any of it means something. Alcohol is what dislocation reaches for. It just made the absence easier to ignore for a few hours.

Sobriety is what it looks like to actually have those three things again: a self worth staying connected to, people worth being present with, days that mean something.

Subscribe now

Podcast

is a writer, connector, and nurturer who’s been alcohol-free for nearly ten years, with her ten-year mark coming on September 1st.

Her first memory of alcohol is from a dinner party at her parents’ house around age five, sneaking sips while the adults were turned away in conversation and eventually passing out on a beanbag while the room laughed above her. By college at UC Davis she was living two lives, sober with a Christian group during the week, drinking and partying every time she drove home, a split she later called more of a rush than the alcohol itself.

She carried that split into her 30s. After moving into real estate in 2006, she built a hidden daily system: sober for school drop-off, drinking through the day, vodka in water bottles during home inspections for over a decade, timed naps so she’d look sober by the time her kids got off the bus. Two DUIs and a therapist calling out her drinking sent her to treatment for the first time in January 2016. It didn’t hold, and she relapsed within months.

Her second treatment stay later that year worked because it required something different, an entirely new identity rather than just stopping the behavior. She’s been sober since, and now writes on Substack as Dana Kay about recovery, grief, and connection.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with Hunter Biden on August 13 at 3P EDT

Live Stream Link

This week on the podcast, I’m sitting down with .

Before you land on the two words most people reach for when they hear that name, I want you to know what this conversation actually is: a man whose worst chapter played out in public, who found his way back through a paintbrush because it was the one thing left that didn’t ask him to explain himself.

Seven years ago, at what he describes as the point where he could no longer trust his own mind, he started painting: alcohol ink, acrylic, pointillism, gold where the ordinary needed to be made holy.

We’ll talk about the three names he gives to fear: judgment, humiliation, ridicule, and what it meant to face each one by name. Why humiliation stopped arriving in waves and started living in the air around him like weather, and what it took to change that. And what he means when he says you cannot scroll and paint at the same time: presence as the actual mechanism, not a metaphor for it.

This is a conversation about what recovery gives you, told by someone who spent years assuming it would only take from him.

Where's Hunter?

Where the true thing gets said, in my own hand.

By Hunter Biden

What I’m Creating

One of the women from January’s Reset messaged me recently. Still not drinking. Eight months in.

That's the only metric that matters. Not sign-ups, not how the cohort format performed. Whether the thing holds once nobody’s checking in.

So this year I ran the Reset twice, and I recently, I decided to stop treating it as a seasonal offer. It’s year round now, one-on-one from the first session, built the way I wish something had existed for me.

Because the part almost nobody names is that the fog isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when alcohol is still in the loop and recovery never fully completes. Tension builds, a drink softens it, the body never finishes the job, and the next day starts a little behind. Do that enough years in a row and it stops looking like a cycle. It just looks like how you are.

I’ve spent over two decades in film, in an industry where drinking was just how things were done, and for a long stretch that pattern felt normal to me too. Six years without it, I found out the energy and clarity I thought I’d lost weren’t gone. They’d been sitting underneath recovery that never finished.

That’s what the Reset actually rebuilds: more consistent energy, clearer mornings, less noise, more trust in your own direction. Not a new personality. The one that was already there, before the fog became the baseline.

Start Your New Normal

There are moments we all experience. A bad day, a fight, a deadline, a feeling nobody wants to sit with alone, and a drink shows up to handle it. For a few hours it works. The edge softens, the noise settles, and the problem feels, for a little while, like it left the room.

Then morning comes and it’s back. The fight is still unresolved. The deadline is still late. The feeling is still there, now with a hangover riding along. Almost everyone I’ve talked to who’s stopped drinking landed on the same math eventually: if the reason survives the drink, the drink was never touching it. It was just buying a few hours of distance, charged to tomorrow.

That's the thread running through every version of this story I've heard. Whatever's underneath still has to be faced. Drinking only adjusts the volume while the music keeps playing.

Subscribe now

Essays

In this one I get into how belonging and alcohol got fused together for me long before I was old enough to notice it happening. I trace the wiring back to a first drink I can't fully place, through the escalating chaos of a Daytona Beach spring break, and into the central tension underneath it all: turning down a drink can feel like turning down your place in the group.

I make the case that belonging is the real thread running through nearly every drinking ritual, tailgates, weddings, dance floors, and that pulling alcohol out of those moments leaves the need for connection fully intact and unmet.

I close on The Sober Creative Collective as a working answer, a room built so belonging doesn't run through what's in your hand.

Podcast

is a singer, songwriter, producer, and bass player who has been playing gigs for close to 40 years, a lot of them in the blues scene.

He grew up in Milwaukee, a city that regularly ranks near the top nationally for excessive drinking, and by college in Madison he was drinking roughly a dozen beers most nights, medicating a shyness he calls "criminally vulgar." A five-year stretch living in Cleveland, where drinking culture barely existed, showed him how much of the habit was really the city talking. He moved home, fell back into it, and stayed there through his 20s and 30s.

Nine years ago he left a career in medical physics to chase music full time. About five years ago a stomach problem made alcohol physically unbearable, right as he was already cutting back on his own, and he's had maybe three or four drinks a year since.

These days most of his creative energy goes into Inside Sky Chant, a project built on ancient mantras meant to calm whoever's listening, an outgrowth of the meditation practice he picked up after reading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth fifteen years ago.

JOMO is a golden monkey in a patchwork waistcoat who teaches meditation online with his creator, Jason, at .

Jason built the show a few years back after his own drinking got out of hand, what he'd call in England being a "sesh head." He learned to meditate to climb out of it, loved what it did for him, and started teaching others, only to find that most people got scared off by meditation's usual look: silent rooms, tricky postures, sunset backdrops.

So he built Jomo, named for the term monks use for the swirl of chattering thoughts everyone is fighting, and made the whole thing simple and a little goofy on purpose. They started on TikTok, where early viewers were confused and occasionally rude, but the audience kept building past 600 live sessions and over two million visits.

Jomo's core message centers on sitting with whatever comes up instead of trying to drown it out, a version of the same work sobriety asks of a person.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with Dana Kay on August 8 at 1P EDT

This week I’m sitting down with , a writer and connector who’s been alcohol-free for over nine years.

She writes about what addiction actually feels like from the inside: sneaking sips of wine at her parents’ dinner parties at five years old, two DUIs decades later, faking urinalysis results for two years just to stay out of jail. Dana went to treatment in 2016, twice. The first attempt didn’t hold. The second one changed her life, and she’s spent years since figuring out exactly what made the difference.

We’ll get into that, plus the disease-versus-decision debate that follows every recovery story, and how she went from hiding her drinking to building a public life around love, expression, and owning what she calls her “magic.”

Come sit with us Saturday.

Dana Kay

💜all about every kind of love thing. ✨ Connection is the joy. Acceptance is the work. Noticing is the fuel ♾️ 🍯 🕊️

If something here landed and you want to talk about what's possible when you change your relationship with alcohol, let’s explore that together.

Real friends show up before you even ask. They notice you’ve gone silent for two weeks and call anyway, without making you explain yourself first. They sit with you before a hard conversation and stay through it, because that’s what caring about someone actually looks like. None of that requires a drink to happen, and none of it disappears once the night is over.

Alcohol never actually did any of that, even on the nights it felt like it did. It softened the edges and made things feel lighter for an hour, and that relief was real, it just was never the same as being cared for. But it never asked how you were actually doing, and it never remembered the hard week that sent you looking for it in the first place.

A real friend does both of those things, and keeps doing them long after the moment has passed.

🎙️Podcast

is an entrepreneur and author of Wild Ride to Sobriety. He grew up in a family where drinking was the family sport, learned to read a room’s drinks before anyone asked for a refill, and built a career on the idea that alcohol was his edge in sales. In 2017, his rehab used aversion therapy: eighteen shots of vodka, whiskey, red wine, and white wine, swished and spit into a bowl while a nurse he called his bartender kept the pours coming. Ten days later he walked out, drove forty minutes home, and found divorce papers waiting in his garage. He’s since lost 85 pounds, built a morning routine around journaling and cold plunges, and is working on a second book about the friends who shape where your life ends up going.

hosts the podcast The Growth Mixtape and writes The Restless Leader on Substack, for people who built a successful career and now find themselves restless, wondering what the second half is for. He quit drinking on a Monday after Easter in 2022, collapsing into his wife’s arms and telling her he had to stop. Less than a year later, his son collapsed at a restaurant with a mass pressing on his brain, and the family spent a terrifying night in the ER before emergency surgery. Bob says getting sober and nearly losing his son, landing so close together, are why he stopped wasting days. Last month, at 55, he wrote his first song at a songwriting retreat, about the drive with his mother the week he moved her into a retirement home. He heard it fully produced for the first time on a Sunday morning and played it for his family. They all cried.

coaches people through what he calls the second act, the stretch of life after 40 when the setup is finished and the real question shows up: what now. Born with spina bifida and the only wheelchair user in his group growing up, he started drinking at 19 to feel like everybody else. Ten years of going out with his brothers turned into twenty more sharing wine on the couch with his wife. In January 2018, on a flight home from Barcelona, he committed to 100 days without a drink. He hasn’t had one since. He led a team of coaches at One Year No Beer, then built his own practice, the Life Design Collective, arguing against the idea that your life has to be fully figured out by 40. His office in rural Ireland is lined with bookshelves he built before he could really afford them, filled with books he’s been collecting for years.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with Jeff “H” Harrington on July 23 at 12P EDT

This week I'm talking with . He's a singer, songwriter, producer, and bass player who has been gigging for close to 40 years, a good chunk of it in the blues scene, though he's never made music his main income.

He left his first career as a medical physicist about nine years ago. He hasn't played out much the last couple years, a shift that traces back to sobriety. He's introverted, and once he stopped drinking, he realized he doesn't like crowded rooms much anymore. He hasn't had a drink in around five years. Before that he drank like a lot of Wisconsinites, meaning too much.

What finally got him to stop was a stomach issue tied to the acidity, arriving right as he was already cutting back on his own. He told me growth matters more to him than anything, and alcohol never helped with that.

Looking forward to talking through all of it: the gigs, the pullback, and what's opened up since.

Inside Sky

Inside Sky makes chant music, and there will be a new song every month.

By Jeff Harrington/InsideSkyChant

If something here landed and you want to talk about what's possible when you change your relationship with alcohol, let’s explore that together.

I came out of the gym the other morning and saw this ad. A false promise is what comes to mind. This “belief” that by drinking a Stella, somehow my life becomes better? Sure, you can be doing this with friends at a bar or maybe on a private yacht, but what does the life become the next morning?

For me, it was saying fuck, I don’t ever want to do that again. I think that statement holds true in many ways. For someone in recovery, you’re never too far from (going back) to that life. For someone who wants to experience what life is like without a daily drain session, then you’re never too far from the life (you want to build).

🎙️Podcast

Three more conversations. Three different stories about what sobriety actually makes possible. I keep doing this because each conversation continues to prove what is added to our lives when alcohol is removed.

is a transformation coach and brand strategist who built her practice for the people she calls creators, feelers, and rebuilders — people who were never meant to fit one description or become smaller to survive in a room that wasn’t built for them. She was adopted at three, had her first drink at fourteen, and spent years carrying weight she didn’t have language for. The thing that finally changed her: attending the funeral of a birth father she’d never met, listening to strangers stand up and say he used to walk to AA meetings and make the coffee. His name there was Coffee Pot. She opened a note on her phone and wrote down two things she was going to do.

Five days on the Salkantay Trek to Machu Picchu. Over forty miles. Seven thousand to fifteen thousand feet of elevation. I was shaking at breakfast on day one before we'd hiked a single step. On the morning we left, I was sitting on the bus seriously considering getting off and going home. I stayed. Reaching Machu Picchu, I had a moment sitting and looking out at the wonder of it all. I was trying to hold it — the scale of everything, how small I felt inside it, the fact that I could feel all of it was the gift.

is a psychiatric nurse practitioner who specializes in ADHD and addiction recovery — and she shows up with her own story, not just her credentials. She knew alcohol was a problem at 26 and spent years falling down and getting back up before she finally went to treatment during COVID. Five weeks in the mountains of Pennsylvania, quarantined alone, watching Bumblebee on a DVD player they slid under the door, with a bird feeder outside the window. She came out holding one word: willingness.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with Ian Fee on July 2 at 12P EDT

Ian Fee used to describe himself as the life of the party. He was the guy people wanted at the table, the one who turned a regular Tuesday into a story worth telling.

He bought into the “work hard, play harder” life fully — and for a long time, it looked like it was working. Then it stopped. Alcohol had hollowed out the relationships, the health, the clarity. The version of himself he was performing had nothing underneath it.

He got sober in 2017 and wrote about the whole thing in his book Wild Ride to Sobriety. He’s still the life of the party. That part was always true.

This week we talk about what it took to find out what else was.

If something here landed and you want to talk about what's possible when you change your relationship with alcohol, let’s explore that together.

Book a free 20-minute call →

You know the cycle. You say you’ll just have one. You don’t. Then comes the shame.

The shame is heavy enough that you can’t put it down, so eventually you stop trying.

Fuck it. Doesn’t matter anyway. And then you do it again.

That cycle isn’t really about drinking. It’s about what breaks down every time you say you’re going to do something and you don’t. The trust you have in yourself. Your own word.

Break it enough times and you stop believing yourself. Not just about drinking. About everything.

What sobriety builds — slowly, and for real — is the evidence that you can do hard things and get to the other side. That when you say you’re going to do something, you do it. That you’re someone you can count on.

Everything else keeps growing from there.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

Three conversations dropped while the newsletter was on pause. Here's the short version summary of each.

is a Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted journalist and New York Times bestselling author who's been living out of a camper since 2022, logging tens of thousands of miles across America doing ground-level reporting no one else is doing. The line that stayed with me: "Sobriety was how I became the person I don't see in the world."

is a photographer who gave language to something she calls Creative Adaptive Intelligence — the human capacity to navigate uncertainty without abandoning yourself. Her father's open heart surgery taught her that choosing to feel fully is its own form of love, and she's been building from that truth ever since.

spent 20 years building brands for some of the world's most recognized companies, and he'll tell you sobriety had everything to do with the best work he's ever done. The line that stayed with me: it's not that alcohol blocked his creativity — it kept him in recovery for most of the day.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with on June 18 at 2P EDT

Jill has spent years learning to sit with people at the hardest parts of themselves. As a psychiatric nurse practitioner specializing in ADHD and addiction recovery, she brings something most credentials don’t come with: she’s been there.

Six years sober, she built a practice and a writing life from pieces she once thought were evidence against her.

I think her story is going to stick with you.

Jill’s Substack

Psychiatry, ADHD, and addiction recovery care, with real talk, soft landings, and the occasional chaos. Notes from a psychiatric NP navigating the mess and the medicine.

By Jill DePhillip, CRNP-PMH

🎙️Special Clear Conversations

Saturday, June 20 at 11am EDT — Substack Live

I just finished the 5-day Salkantay Trek to Machu Picchu, and I’m going to tell you the whole story. The highs, the lows, all of it. This will be live and casual, come ask questions. After that, a full recap with photos and videos from the trail.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to do something like that with a clear head, come join me Saturday.

🤝 First Sober Creative Collective Workshop: Why Sensitivity Is Strength

Wednesday, June 18 at 11am EDT with

Most of us were taught that sensitivity is a liability. Something to manage, suppress, or push through.

This Wednesday, the first Sober Creative Collective Workshop challenges that directly. The topic is Sensitivity Management — specifically, how our sensitivity is one of our most finely honed alert systems, and what it costs us when we ignore it. We’ll look at the sensory spiral: how a trigger or stressor event drains energy, raises sensitivity, and lowers resilience — until we intervene. And we’ll work through practical regulation tools that don’t require hours. Twenty to forty minutes, done consistently, can change how your nervous system functions.

If you’ve ever felt like the world is a lot — and you’ve been using alcohol to turn the volume down — this one was built for you.

The workshop is exclusively for Collective members. Membership is $49/month for the first three months, then $79/month.

Join and attend Wednesday →

If something in this newsletter landed and you want to talk about what's possible when you change your relationship with alcohol, let’s explore that together.

Book a free 20-minute call →

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