✨Weekly Insight
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.
Jen Benford 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.
Jill DePhillip, CRNP-PMH 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.