The Sober Creative

IAN FEE took his first drink at age one, handed a sip of beer by his own dad while sitting in a highchair. He grew up in the 1970s and 80s, when parents dipped a baby’s binky in wine and nobody thought twice about it. By the time he hit his twenties, drinking wasn’t just a habit. It was the whole architecture of his social life and his career. Ian built a sales career on entertaining clients at ba...

Jen Benford grew up carrying more than most people ever have to carry. Adopted at age two or three, moved through four homes before then, her aunt and uncle raised her in those first few formative years. Not finding out until she was 19 that she had six or seven half-siblings out in the world somewhere. Through all of it, she kept moving forward and kept the weight of it buried. When alcohol enter...

I almost got off the bus. Sitting there before we took off, bags being loaded, heart racing, I seriously considered stepping out and calling the whole thing off. Five and a half years sober, and fear still shows up in the body the same way it always did. What changed is what I do with it. I kept breathing. The bus started moving. And the shift happened. This is the story of a five-day, 40+ mile tr...

Jill DePhillip, CRNP-PMH has spent years sitting with people at the hardest parts of themselves. As a certified registered nurse practitioner in psychiatric mental health, specializing in ADHD and addiction recovery, she brings something most credentials don’t come with: she’s been there. Six years sober — since April 20, 2020 — she built a clinical practice, a writing life, and a clear understand...

Marya Hornbacher came out of rehab in her mid-20s not knowing how to make dinner. She could earn a graduate degree, but she couldn’t change a tire or make a doctor’s appointment. She’d been drinking and using since her early teens, and by the time sobriety arrived, basic life skills were largely theoretical. What she built from that point forward is more than something. New York Times bestselling...

Jenn Ocken is a photographer, brand builder, and the person who gave language to something she calls creative adaptive intelligence — the human capacity to navigate uncertainty without abandoning yourself. She didn’t arrive at this framework through a research institution or a credential program. She got there through lived experience: a family where alcohol was completely normal, a father who wen...

James Martin | Made By James has spent 20 years building brands for some of the world’s most recognized companies. But the most important brand he’s ever built is his own — and he’ll tell you sobriety had everything to do with it. In this conversation, James opened up about getting kicked out of school at 17, a two-year bender that nearly derailed his life, and the moment on September 5, 2021 when...

Jess, The Creator is the kind of person who does not slow down. A family nurse practitioner, former pediatric oncology nurse, competitive hockey player, stock market analyst, and full-time Substack writer — she has built a life that runs on discipline, curiosity, and a refusal to stay average. But behind all of that output was a year that nearly unraveled everything. In this conversation, Jessica...

Cory Gerlach did not follow the script. Teenage punk. Community college. Harvard PhD. Senior federal scientist. Congressional advisor on COVID-19. And then—in 2024—he and his husband rebuilt a dilapidated sailboat by hand, quit their jobs, and sailed away from the lives they had built. He has been sober for 18 years. He got sober at 20. He never had a legal drink in the United States. What comes t...

Jonathan Hoban has spent years trying to understand why he kept sabotaging himself when things were going well. The answer wasn’t where he expected to find it. It was hiding in plain sight — in the word most people dismiss as weakness: sensitivity. As a psychotherapist, author, and founder of Sensitivity Management, Jonathan has built a framework that reframes sensitivity not as a flaw to fix, but...

There’s a version of Shelly’s story that looks like a series of detours. Mechanic to content creator. Dealership to Substack. Substances to sobriety. But spend twenty minutes with her, and you realize those weren’t detours. They were the path. Shelly is the writer behind Cozy Clarity, a Substack she describes as “a space where soft and strong collide.” Her work sits at the intersection of personal...

Carolina Wilke has spent decades studying what most of us ignore. The signals our bodies send. The tension we carry without naming it. The emotions we skip past because sitting with them feels like too much. As co-founder of Sacred Business Flow and a master bioenergetics practitioner, Carolina came to this work through her own body. Years of chronic migraines that started at age five. Hospital vi...

Orel Zilberman spent years inside the kind of addiction most people don’t take seriously. No substances. No rehab. Just a screen, a game, and a mind that had completely given itself over to the loop. At the peak, he was logging 12 to 16 hours a day on League of Legends and Overwatch — counting the minutes he spent outside the house in missed games. Everything else — school, relationships, his own...

Kerry Hoffman is a project manager. She builds systems. She connects dots. She is, by her own admission, very type A. So when she found herself going out and planning on two drinks, knowing she’d have three, and ending up with four or five — she noticed the problem. The drinking wasn’t following her rules. She was following the drinking’s. There was no dramatic bottom. No external pressure forcing...

Some guests come to these conversations with a tidy arc — the fall, the turning point, the recovery. Doan Winkel doesn’t have that story. He has something interesting and one we explored: the willingness to still be in it. At 25, after three stints in rehab, a suicide attempt, and a collection of dangerous adventures he can only partially recall, Doan made a decision that no program, sponsor, or s...

Phil Powis ❤️⚡️ walked into his mid-30s running a consulting business that looked like success from every angle. Over $100,000 a month. A growing reputation. And underneath all of it, a body slowly breaking down in ways no doctor could explain. By the time a golf ball-sized tumor appeared in his neck—with a 50/50 chance of cancer—Phil had spent years trying to outwork, outsmart, and outlast whate...

Florence Acosta spent nearly 30 years giving everything she had to everyone around her. As a nurse. As a CRNA holding patients’ lives in her hands. As an executive director managing surgical teams, patient safety, and the invisible weight of being the person everyone else leaned on. As a daughter-in-law who watched her former father-in-law disappear into addiction while his family quietly stopped...

530 days sober and still counting — this conversation will remind you what it means to come home to yourself. Mary Peeples has lived many lives inside one. The theater kid from South Georgia who played Annie at the Fox. The boarding school girl who quietly lost herself trying to fit in. The 23-year-old editor-in-chief who, by her own account, torched it all by 25. And then, the one who finally wal...

What happens when a creative person spends years completely shut down — unable to work, unable to feel, unable to create? For Justin Donaldson , a landscape artist who now travels the United States in a camper with his family, the answer was a long and honest journey through trauma, therapy, and transformation. Justin grew up in a cult, experienced serious abuse, and spent years pushing through li...

Elif Ahmad didn’t walk into a detox center or sit in a circle of folding chairs to get sober. She stood in a shower, held out her hands, and asked the universe for help. Within 24 hours, three years of cocaine addiction simply stopped. No cravings. No withdrawal. Just a complete severing of the cords that had bound her to active addiction. Her story challenges everything the traditional recovery i...

When the work of being seen becomes more important than the comfort of staying hidden Inge van de Graaf lives above a bar. Not near one—above one. The ground floor of her home is De Amer, a cultural cafe and music venue with velvet curtains, a fully stocked bar, and decades of history. For a woman navigating sobriety, this might sound like an impossible setup. But for Inge, a trauma therapist and...

Georgia Kohlhoff knows what it’s like to have food occupy every corner of your mind. As a registered nutritionist, personal trainer, and trainee psychotherapist, she spent over two decades cycling through strict meal plans, obsessive tracking, and “intuitive eating” that spiraled into chaos. She calculated that food noise consumed over 700 hours of her year—just thinking about what to eat next. Wh...

Paul Overton quit drinking 30 years ago, though he admits he doesn't keep close track anymore. Growing up in 1970s California as a Gen X kid left to his own devices, he started drinking at 12 or 13 and was introduced to cocaine at 16. His family normalized alcohol. Nobody was angry or out of control, but “everybody was definitely half in the bag most of the time once it got to past two in the afte...

December 22, 2007. Sam Illingworth woke up in a hospital bed with his heart racing, his memory blank, and a doctor offering him the simplest advice he'd ever received: "Don't drink for a month and see what happens." That month became 18 years. That choice became the foundation for a career built not on speed or performance, but on attention, dialogue, and the courage to work slowly in a world obse...

Jake Summers started drinking in high school in an alcoholic home where he “could basically do whatever I wanted.” He went to West Point hoping structure would save him from his addiction. It didn’t. He got kicked out at 21, went to rehab, and spent years drinking a fifth a day while working in finance—sneaking to the liquor store at 9 AM and drinking flask bottles in the bathroom at work. After y...