The Sober Curator's Sobriety Story
If you've ever moved to a new city thinking a fresh start would fix the drinking -- and then found yourself alone on the couch at 2 PM on a Tuesday with a bottle you swore you weren't opening? Alysse Bryson gets it. This week I'm talking to the founder of The Sober Curator, who has 20 years sober. We get into the geographic cure, project-managing your own rock bottom, emergency heart surgery at 40, and I also say somethings about tiramisu that I probably should have kept to myself.Find Alysse at The Sober CuratorHer IG is @AlysseIntheCityMy IG is @SWilderTaylorFollow the show on YouTube
Magic, Medicine, Misery
In this episode I talk to comedian Zach Noe Towers, who spent the first five years of his stand-up career doing a shot before his set and a beer during it, convinced it made him calm and in tune with the room. He walks me through his whole magic-medicine-misery arc: the scared gay kid in St. Louis who found that alcohol helped, the 30th birthday where he woke up in a stranger's bed already late for a job he hated, and how he got sober despite worrying he wouldn't like other people in recovery.Watch Zach's comedy special Twink Death on YouTube.Follow Zach on IG @ZachNoeTowers
What Anorexia and Drinking Have in Common is Everything
There’s a specific kind of person who hears “just have dessert sometimes” and counters with a38-day countdown to her dad’s birthday cake. Misti Milner is that person, and it turns out so amI. We talk about the offhand comment from a popular kid that lodged in her brain for decades,the era when every mom in the neighborhood was doing Jane Fonda in the basement or drivingto Jazzercise, and the deeply unfun truth that anorexia does not just go away on its own no matter how hard you try. You can find Misti on the substack That's What She Said Please subscribe to Misti's substack and also watch this episode on YouTube!
She Wasn't Like the Other People in the Room
If you've ever sat in a therapist's office for months working on everything except the thing you do every single night — same. My friend Rebecca Nelson Lubin has almost 14 years sober, and she told me about going to therapy for the panic attacks she got driving over the bridge, and somehow the drinking just never came up. We get into the weekends that started Thursday and ended Tuesday, and the day at ten years sober when she hit an emotional rock bottom and picked up the phone instead of a drink. @RebeccaNelsonLubinWatch this pod at YouTube
The Diary of a Twenty Five Year-old Alcoholic
If you’ve ever woken up with an injury you couldn’t explain and just… made up a story about it, Elli gets it. She had her first drink at 13, her first blackout at 14, and then blacked out almost every time she drank for ten years, the whole time deciding she was just a bad person instead of a kid who couldn’t stop. We get into the fake Twitter account a group of girls built to bully her at 16, her mom showing up to graduation in an ankle bracelet, and the genuinely unhinged thing that finally made her quit.You can find Elli Rose Cikovic's book The Diary of a Twenty Five Year-old Alcoholic on Amazon for right now. Follow Elli on IG @ellirosecikovic