2000 days sober

My life will always exist in two parts: Before I got sober and after. I regularly have to shake hands with both parts in order to feel whole.

My most recent milestone: 2000 days — about 5.5 years — feels significant enough to celebrate. It’s also uplled me back into memories of the clumsy and anxious days of early days.

For a long time, I believed my sobriety happened in a single lightning-strike decision. Like, I woke up on Feb. 15, 2020, and said, I’m done forever. But looking back now, I can see how I’d been circling around that choice. For more than a year, my Morning Pages (shout out Julia Cameron, your work changed my life) were filled with the same refrain: I want to quit drinking.

By then, I couldn’t even remember the last fully-sober day I’d had. Had it been two years? Maybe three? When I finally committed to quitting booze (and everything else), it was about 30 days before Los Angeles went into the pandemic lockdown.

Two weeks into sobriety, I remember going to my friend’s housewarming party. I was standing frozen in the corner, unable to speak to anyone (including people I knew), and then having a panic attack in the bathroom before I Irish-Goodbye’d and silently cried the whole drive home.

When the lockdown came, it was, in a strange way, a relief. I felt like a bonafide alien in. the real world and desperately needed to disappear and recalibrate. But the pandemic also cut off the most traditional pathways to recovery. 12-step meetings and AA were online, and the only sober person I knew eventually invite me to an in-person meeting in an old neighborhood (it was an “if you know you know” type of situation).

I went in hoping that building some community might quiet the internal chaos.

Instead, it was a nightmare.

There were more than 150 people there, and I’d expected something much smaller. It felt more like an event than a meeting. My friend led us to the front row, and 45 minutes in, a woman singled me out of this massive crowd and asked me to share.

Next thing I knew, I was standing center stage in an outdoor amphitheater, staring out at more than 150 faces — some of them celebrities (this is LA, after all).

I spoke about everything and nothing for about 5 minutes. And while I know this is sort of exposure thereapy is helpful for many folks, it was traumatizing for me.

Was this what sobriety meant? Publicly debriefing my misery and confusion?

Not exactly.

For me, the healing path wasn’t outward performance, it was inward work. And I found my road through the tarot.

Tarot, often reduced to fortune-telling, is also a symbolic and philosophical journey of the psyche. The cards and the symbols are portals into understand the Self. Studied and integrated, they can become a roadmap through loss, grief, and transformation.

I’d be remiss not to also acknowledge that I also used the stimulus checks for something life-changing: aligned therapy with a Jungian therapist who totally understood my path. He had 15 years of sobriety himself and knew different modalities work for different people. That work was foundational for me in my early sobriety. And therapy is still something I continue to invest in today.

I got so into tarot that I ended up reading professionally, which led me to mediumship, which led me to spirit portraiture, and now I’m breaking off on a new path into the natural world. It’s been a trip. I’ve learned a lot. I’m on a spiritual path that really only makes sense to me and so I’m writing more to share what I’ve learned.

That’s what brings me back to this microblog — not a Substack or a Patreon or another social media platform to perform on. A place to record the onward path through my life. Because it may serve as a roadmap to someone who comes looking.

Navigating your own transformation without a road map? Join Verdant Unknown: The Mystery Plant Circle for Transformation. We start on Zoom, Oct. 5, 2025.

*This blog is not to rag on the organization that has helped millions of Americans become and remain sober; it’s simply to reflect on why this organization was not a good fit for me and led me down the path I’m on now.