✨Weekly Insight
Not the applause. Not the finished thing. The act itself. The making.
That feeling — that’s not a side effect of sobriety. That’s who you are without the noise.
The noise doesn’t disappear, though. It shifts.
And somewhere in the middle of making something — the voice gets loud.
Is this good enough? Does this matter? Who am I to do this?
That’s the moment. Not for a critic. Not for feedback.
Just someone who sees you in it. Who knows what it cost to get here.
Who quietly says — keep going.
🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety
This week I sat down with Mary Peeples — writer, former editor, theater kid turned Substack essayist — whose path to sobriety and creativity is one of the more honest ones I’ve heard.
Mary started performing before she knew she was performing. At six, she had the entire Phantom of the Opera memorized. By eleven, she was playing Annie at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta and mouthing “I’m sorry” to standing ovations because she already knew it wasn’t good enough. That kind of perfectionism doesn’t go anywhere — it just changes form.
Boarding school at 15 stripped away the small-town identity she’d built around being the girl who could sing. Surrounded by other exceptional, competitive kids, she lost her footing. The eating disorder came first, then the drinking at 19 — and once it started, it moved fast. She was self-medicating undiagnosed ADHD, some PTSD, and the particular grief of not knowing who she was without a performance to anchor herself to.
By her mid-twenties she’d been editor-in-chief of a regional publication, torched the reputation she’d built, and was — in her own words — a social liability. She knew she needed to go to rehab for about two months before she actually went. She showed up still drinking. And walking into that facility, she says, was a relief for everyone.
530 days later — that was the count on the day we recorded — getting sober is not actually what she describes as the hard part. The hard part has been forgiving herself for the version of her that hurt the people she loved. For becoming, as she put it, a shell of her former self in front of their eyes.
What struck me most is how creativity has come back in layers. First the singing returned — quietly, around the house. Her dad noticed it before she did. Then drawing. Then, finally and most terrifyingly, writing — because she’d once been a writer and felt like she’d lost it entirely. Substack became the place where all those versions of herself could fight for the keyboard and figure out who she actually is now.
She’s working through The Artist’s Way. She does yoga. She journals. She practices honest communication as a daily discipline. And she’s learning to trust the creative impulse before the inner critic can dismantle it — that gap between curiosity and execution where the voices tell her she has nothing worth saying.
She does. And she’s learning to believe it.
Her Substack, Little Edits Atelier, is where that work lives.
You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.
My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations
Episode 043 with Florence Acosta on March 5 at 9:30a EST
Sometimes the most powerful creative breakthroughs don’t come from finding your voice — they come from surviving the moment you lost it.
My next guest on Clear Conversations is Florence Acosta. Florence is a former healthcare executive, Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist, and the writer behind Becoming You with Florence Acosta on Substack. At 50, she survived a massive hemorrhagic stroke that took her career, her independence, and the identity she had spent decades building around competence and control. But it also did something else — it forced her to stop.
Florence has spent her life watching what happens when people don’t deal with what’s underneath. She saw it in her patients. She saw it in her family. And eventually, she had to see it in herself.
This week, she joins me to talk about what it looks like to reclaim your voice after you’ve been strong for too long — and what becomes possible when you finally stop performing safety and start living honestly.
This one is quiet and real and hits differently.
🤝 Collaborations
When Rebecca Weston from Camino Calls invited me onto her Substack Live, I had a feeling this would be more than a casual chat — and it delivered.
What started as an introduction to our two worlds quickly revealed how much they overlap. Rebecca helps pilgrims plan their journeys on the 1,200-year-old Camino de Santiago, while I help people navigate sobriety. But the more we talked, the more the parallels became impossible to ignore — the unknown at the start, the community you lean on, the internal shifts you can’t predict, and the way both journeys ask you to shed things you didn’t realize you were still carrying.
We got into my own path to sobriety — how alcohol stopped working long before I stopped using it, and how five and a half years later, the compounding effects on my energy, creativity, and emotional depth have been something I couldn’t have scripted.
We also talked about the Dry January Reset, what it looked like to hold that container for a mixed group of people, and what they walked away with — mostly, awareness they didn’t know they were missing.
If you’ve ever felt like sobriety and pilgrimage were speaking the same language — this one’s for you.
🎉 Who I’m Celebrating
If you’ve ever felt like you have too many interests to fit neatly into one lane, The JD Letter might be exactly what you’ve been missing.
Written by Jess — a former professional basketball player for Portugal’s Women’s National Team turned writer — this Substack is built for people she calls “multi-passionate”: those who resist the pressure to pick one thing and abandon everything else.
What makes Jess’s voice worth following is her credibility. She’s not theorizing about the tension between range and focus — she’s lived it. A decade playing elite basketball, three national titles, college ball in the U.S., then a full pivot into writing, entrepreneurship, and coaching. She speaks three languages, has lived in four countries, and has tried everything from stock trading to launching a Shopify store. She knows what it’s like to carry many identities at once, and to feel scattered because of it.
The newsletter explores the messy interior of being broadly curious in a world that rewards specialists. Topics include identity, loneliness, creative direction, and what it actually looks like to build a life that holds multiple passions without constantly starting over. Her tone is personal and honest — less self-help guru, more thoughtful friend who has already asked the hard questions and is still working through them.
If you’re tired of advice that tells you to niche down and kill off the rest of who you are, The JD Letter offers a different perspective: one that takes your whole self seriously.
🌿 What’s Next
There’s a moment that happens when the ripples settle.
The water goes still. Then you can see.
You’ve been moving fast — working, managing, producing, recovering, repeat. The surface of the water is always disturbed. And when the water is clouded with what’s shaken underneath, it doesn’t show you much.
But when it goes still — even briefly — you lean over and there you are.
That’s what 30 days without alcohol does for most people. Not a dramatic transformation. Just... stillness. In the stillness, a clearer picture of what’s actually there.
The Reset is open.
I am looking forward to your conversation with Florence! I love all your conversations but this one I know is going to be incredible. The light you both provide put into one conversation is going to be spectacular!
Josh thank you so much for featuring me in this post. It’s very kind of you 🙏🏾