My family. My siblings. The people who loved me most were running out of reasons to keep trying. Then one morning I woke up to chaos — angry friends, my mother upset, my father disappointed — and understood, with the clarity only a hangover really provides, that this was what people meant by rock bottom.
I'd love to tell you what happened next was clean and cinematic. It wasn't. The first three months were mostly just sitting on the edge of the bed at four in the morning, reading Marcus Aurelius on my phone, and not drinking. That's the whole technique. That's still most of it.
A craving isn't weakness, and it isn't moral failure. It's a hijacked prediction circuit running the same loop twenty times a day. Understanding the mechanism — really understanding it — changes the shape of the work.
Read the essay →You don't need willpower. You need a system. Two-thousand-year-old techniques for the hour between the craving and the consequence — used-by-emperors methods, with footnotes and a practice schedule.
Read the essay →They tell you about the cravings, the shaking, the insomnia. They don't tell you about the silence — the friend group that quietly thins, the Saturday nights without a shape. A piece on the part of sobriety that lasts longer than the withdrawal.
Read the essay →I got sober on the 14th of January, 2026. This blog is what I write between meetings — the things I wanted to read in my first month and couldn't find anywhere that didn't sound like a wellness brand or a very cheerful cult.
Every essay here is first-person. Most are slow. None are sponsored. The Marcus Aurelius quotes are there because he genuinely helped more than any self-help book I tried, which says something about self-help books and possibly about me.
I also build a small iPhone app called Sober Path, which is the pocket version of most of this writing. It is free, and mentioned properly below.
Sober Path is what came out of the early months. A sponsor library, a crisis button, thirty days of structured Stoic reading. Free on iPhone. No account, no ads. If the essays have helped, the app might too.