What 30 Years Sober Means to Me

In 2025, I hit a milestone that I almost didn’t believe myself:

Thirty years sober.

I got clean at twenty, and have never had a legal drink. That is something people tend to respond to with either admiration or confusion, like I missed some rite of passage that makes adulthood official.I didn’t.

My life needed a different path.

In those early years, staying sober meant holding on with both hands while also taking on plenty of odd jobs while I was at it. I learned to pick up and carry my anxiety so I could keep showing up, regardless.

I still think about that version of myself a lot. How hard she worked for a life she couldn’t yet see. How she kept going, even when nothing felt stable. While sobriety didn’t make things easy necessarily, it did give me a fighting chance. It was a way to be present for the chaos and the joy and the long, boring stretches in between.

Here’s the truth they don’t always tell you: Recovery is less about feeling triumphant and more about repetition.

And over time, if you’re lucky and get back up after all those knockdowns, it eventually builds into something sustainable. A life you’ve shaped piece by piece. Not curated. Not perfect. But solid. Rooted in reality and not reaction. Built on knowing what matters and what doesn’t.

For me, it meant learning how to trust myself again. How to keep making decisions that aligned with the person I wanted to become, even before I fully believed I was her yet.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop evolving and growing.

Getting sober was the start. But the rest—graduate school, my career in neuropsychology, lifting, boxing, raising a family—came later. Each chapter demanded something new. Patience. Endurance. Vulnerability.

I’ve spent decades learning from the people I work with. My clients have taught me about resilience, communication, and the ways we all adapt to the world we’re handed.

I’ve learned that growth isn’t linear. But it is real, and it’s worth it.

Right now, I’m proudly sober. Still learning. Still showing up. 30 years is a good number.

If you’re in it, or near it, or wondering if a change is possible, believe me when I say:

It's very worth it.