The Sober Creative

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...

For 32 episodes, I’ve sat across from creative professionals who’ve chosen sobriety and discovered something remarkable: clarity doesn’t diminish creativity—it unlocks it. I’ve listened to transformation stories, watched people articulate what they couldn’t see while they were in it, and built a community around the idea that removing the fog reveals the work you were always capable of. But I have...

Anna Gibson spent years on autopilot—smoking weed throughout her day, feeling the weight of a “demon on her back,” watching her writing disappear into unproductive fog. She knew she wasn’t doing anything. She’d smoke on the clock at her retail job. She’d look at her bag and see paranoia staring back. For someone who’d been writing professionally for over a decade, the creative paralysis was destro...

Ryan Lee spent his twenties chasing numbness—ecstasy, cocaine, alcohol, repeat. He kept his corporate job intact, hit his numbers, and convinced himself everything was fine. But underneath the performance, he was stuck. Personally stagnant. Professionally functional but unfulfilled. Using substances to blur the edges of a life he didn’t actually want. On March 14, 2021, Ryan found himself lying on...

What happens when you build an entire writing career in sobriety—placing 30+ pieces in major publications while navigating your daughter’s cancer treatment, solo parenting, and financial uncertainty? Elizabeth Austin shows us that the answer isn’t just about what you accomplish, but about who you become in the process. Our conversation this past week, Elizabeth was 10 days away from her one-year s...

What if everything you’ve been told about discipline is wrong? What if the reason you can’t stick to your creative practice isn’t because you lack willpower, but because your body is protecting you from repeating a pattern it knows will end in shame? This week’s guest on Clear Conversations understands this paradox intimately. Brian Maierhofer is a somatic therapist who spent years chasing creativ...

There’s a space between “rock bottom” and “business as usual” that rarely gets airtime in conversations about alcohol. It’s where most people actually live—questioning whether their drinking serves them, curious about alternatives, but not identifying with traditional recovery language or abstinence-only approaches. Denise Hamilton-Mace has built her entire platform in that messy middle. As the fo...

What if the thing you’ve been using to take the edge off is actually keeping you from the life you’re meant to live? This week on Clear Conversations, I sat down with Tyler Donohue , the writer behind Girl Resting , for a conversation that challenges everything we’ve been told about creativity, confidence, and what it means to live authentically. Tyler’s journey from social drinker to nearly two y...

What happens when partying stops being fun and starts becoming survival? Jason from The Monkeymind Meditation Club knows this turning point intimately. Eight years ago, he was the loudest voice at the bar, the first one ordering shots, the guy who’d party until morning without question. Two-day benders turned into three-day benders, then four. Until one day he woke up in London with no memory of h...

Derek MacDonald got sober, got broken up with, and moved across the country—all in the same week. Most people would call that rock bottom. Derek called it a foundation. Four and a half years later, he’s the creator of Becoming Unobstructed, a newsletter and podcast reaching readers in 32+ countries. He’s published 450,000 words in 18 months—the equivalent of eight copies of The Great Gatsby. And h...

Alicia Cook knows something most of us spend our lives trying to avoid: what it means to transform unbearable loss into art that heals others. After losing her 19-year-old cousin Jessica to a heroin overdose when she was just 20, Alicia could have let grief silence her. Instead, she picked up her pen and began writing—not about her own addiction, but about the devastation addiction leaves in its w...

What happens when the productivity warrior inside you finally surrenders? When chronic illness forces you to abandon every achievement strategy you’ve ever known? And what if that breaking point becomes the doorway to your most authentic creative work? Cali Bird lived the high-achieving life for decades—accountant, investment banker, IT specialist, all while nurturing creative projects on the side...

Paulina Pinsky got sober on December 22, 2021, after a panic attack in an Alabama gas station—days before Christmas, ending an engagement, and moving back in with her parents at 29. Most people would wait years before writing about that kind of rock bottom. Paulina started documenting it 70 days later. What emerged from that decision is newly sober , a newsletter that captures what’s missing from...