(coming soon - the book)
The Sober Explorer
A Field Guide to Building a Beautiful Life After Drinking
You were sure the good part was over, so was I. For years I thought sobriety was the smaller life. The washed out one. An empty room where my life used to be.
I want to show you what it actually looks like. Because it’s the exact opposite of everything I feared.
The Sober Explorer is part memoir, part field guide. Built like a compass. Four directions and a center. Made to be explored, not finished.
Read it front to back and it builds into a whole journey. Open it to whatever direction is calling you today and just start there. There’s no wrong way in.
It won’t tell you you’re broken. It has one job. To get you to take one small step that changes everything.
Sample of the book:
You don't have to earn this
“Somewhere in early recovery, a lot of us pick up a quiet, poisonous idea: that we have to earn fun. Do the hard work first. Fix ourselves. Get healed enough, stable enough, sorted enough, suffer a respectable amount, and then, someday, maybe, we'll have earned the right to actually enjoy our lives.
I want to gently blow that up.
Joy is not a gold star you get for healing correctly. Joy is how you heal. Every time you laugh on a padel court, say yes to the trip, feel the sun on your face at the top of a mountain, you are not taking a break from the work. That is the work. You are teaching your nervous system, far below the level of words, that this life, the real one, the clear one, is a good place to be. That it's safe here. That there's something on the far side of the drink that's worth staying for.
So here's your permission slip, explicit and signed: you are allowed to have fun right now. Not someday when you've got more time sober under your belt. Not once you've done enough work or made enough amends or proven yourself sufficiently recovered. Not when you feel ready, because ready is a feeling that tends to show up about six months after you actually needed it. Right now. In the middle of the uncertainty and the rebuilding and the figuring-it-out. You earned the right to enjoy your life the moment you decided to be here for it.
And saying yes to joy usually starts much smaller and much closer than you'd think. It starts with the thing that's available to you this week, in your actual life, the thing that's been quietly whispering at you that you keep dismissing because it feels too small or too silly or slightly outside your comfort zone. Yes to the beginner's class where you'll be the least experienced person in the room. Yes to the morning walk that doesn't sound exciting until you're in it. Yes to the creative thing you have no idea if you'll be any good at. Yes to the invitation when staying home would be easier. Yes to the thing that made you light up for half a second before your brain talked you out of it.
None of that requires a certain number of days sober or a particular kind of life. It requires exactly one thing: the willingness to say yes.”