“The Addict’s Guide to the Universe: A Roadmap to Recovery” was a podcast I started in May 2020. The plan was based on a 60-chapter outline I had written two months prior, where each episode would be me exploring a different topic related to addiction recovery.

But this wasn’t just supposed to be your ordinary self-help book about addiction: tidy, rational, and reasonable. I’m pretty sure there’s already a lot of those out there!

From the very beginning, I intended the voice and the content of the podcast to feel like a caring guide and companion. Not just for recovering addicts who had already decided on the road of recovery, but for anyone else who’s curious about what recovery entails, too.

As a therapist and a recovering addict myself, I always want my addiction clients to know that I understand their pain, their struggle, and their bewilderment — especially in early recovery.

I want to give them all the tools and information they need, yes.

But I also want to give them what so many self-help books so cluelessly leave out: hope. Along with a true emotional connection. ❤️

On that note, my other not-so-subtle aim in the podcast was to assure “my dear Addict friends” that they were all capable of positive change — not to mention, deserving of it.

I believe that we all deserve to be happy and live a life of loving service in the present, no matter what kinds of terrible or crazy stuff we were capable of, in the midst of our addictions.

But at the end of the day, I wanted the podcast to be FUN, too! Because why should any addict want to follow the path of recovery if all the resources about it are deadly dull and full of nonstop fire-and-brimstone?

I hoped that if it at least came through the podcast what a great time I was having, it would give my listeners faith that joy was in their destiny, too.

So I had these 60 chapters plotted out in one very big and definite outline. Which I was then planning to compile into one (very long and complex) book, The Addict’s Guide to the Universe.

Alas, even the best-intentioned of plans can go awry! Especially if your magic school bus of an idea has a wheel or two that’s fundamentally loose.

Throughout that first year of COVID, I was writing and producing two full podcast episodes a week. On the one hand, it was super exhilarating to create the episodes from start to finish. It was also super gratifying to see the podcast’s Spotify audience grow.

On the subject of gratification, though… I am an addict, through and through. Which meant I soon lost the forest for the trees, when it came to the topic at hand:

Recovery!

The success of the podcast was increasingly coming at the expense of my sobriety. I was using weed as a means of physical and emotional control: to immediately relax, after pushing myself into unsustainable creative overdrive.

Maybe that wouldn’t be such a big deal if I wasn’t such a big addict. Because at the same time I was suffering under the weight of My Addict’s secret shame, I was also getting external validation from my high-intensity workload.

That kept me stuck in a terminal cycle of highs and burnouts throughout that first year of the podcast.

Even worse than the weed, though, was the fact that my podcasting time was compromising my energy, love, and availability for my two young kids. I would even take my laptop to the neighborhood pool with us. For shame!

By December 2020, I was burned out in more ways than one. Not only was my weed addiction totally out of control, but I was physically and mentally exhausted. I was at a creative block that felt like a boulder — for good reason.

I took a few months off the podcast to focus on my sobriety, and in February 2021 I got clean and sober through the online fellowship of Marijuana Anonymous.

As I tell you the story of my recovery, I can’t neglect to mention the heart of it, which is my in-person Alcoholics Anonymous fellowship here in the South Bend area.

The people I’ve known and befriended through my years in A.A. have been a supportive, loving, and life-enriching spiritual constant for me, ever since my recovery began in 2017.

But as much as I love and value A.A., it doesn’t come close to the Marijuana Anonymous fellowship when it comes to helping me get and stay sober from weed. I say that with all sincerity, even though my M.A. fellowship is virtual, as opposed to in-person.

Without regularly talking to and hearing wisdom from the kinds of people who truly understand the particular insanity of marijuana addiction, I wouldn’t stand a chance of staying clean.

So, I came back to the podcast in the spring of 2021 clean and sober, and with a new intention: to start “letting go” of my original ways and means of doing the podcast, back when I’d been using.

I knew I couldn’t afford to burn myself out again, if I wanted to stay clean. I also knew I couldn’t try to fit my topics and chapters into the tidy little outline I’d made the year before. Because what’s the use of all that tidiness, if the material is inauthentic at its core?

Especially about a subject as raw and real as recovery!

Instead, I took a cue from my current and ongoing process of sobriety: honesty, open-mindedness, and the willingness to look to a power greater than myself: Unconditional Love.

The podcast had to get real, and in order to write “real,” I had to let go of the shame I’d harbored and hid about my marijuana addiction.

Only a power as benevolent and non-judgmental as Unconditional Love could help me out with that!

As part of my writing process, I also had to open myself up to a one-day-at-a-time approach. That meant accepting daily intuition and understanding from my Higher Power, and keeping my subject matter firmly in the here-and-now.

That was the opposite of what I’d been trying to do before, which was to paint big, intelligent brush strokes about recovery that were way beyond my (or any individual’s) pay grade.

That meant I started writing more personal stories and essays about my own recovery for the podcast. I still held out hope that I might compile them into a published book, someday.

But creatively, I was giving myself much more space to explore, to get lost in the writing, and to produce episodes at my own pace — instead of allowing the podcast to dictate the pace of my life.

Not surprisingly, some of my best memories of the podcast are from this period of clean and sober time.

The episodes “The Reality of Your Insanity,” “Trust the Process,” “You Can’t Hide From What’s Inside of You,” and “Love is Beautiful” (all from 2021) are my favorite episodes from the four years I produced the podcast.

❤️

The simplest and truest reason I could give you for why I relapsed on marijuana in late 2022 is this:

I believed I wasn’t okay, just as I was.

Those feelings of inadequacy didn’t have everything to do with the podcast, but they did have something to do with it. Once again, I had hit a creative block, and I was struggling to brainstorm ways to come up with relevant topics and interesting stories for “my dear Addict friends.”

[Note from True Love to My True Self: True friends love you for who you are, not for what you can do for them. ❤️]

I knew from extensive personal experience that weed was a portal to greater creativity. So by the fall of 2022, I started to daydream about using it, more and more.

More red flags on the way! ⛳️

I had effectively dropped out of the Marijuana Anonymous fellowship. At a certain point, I was barely even making it to my in-person A.A. meetings anymore.

And this might sound totally CRAZY for an addiction therapist to say, but two years into my full chemical sobriety, there was a part of me that felt like I was disconnected from the chaos and desperation of early recovery.

Too disconnected, I thought, to really “get it,” when it came to relating to the present-day struggles of the addicts I was trying to help.

[Or maybe My Addict was just trying to come up with every reason in the book to get me to use again?]

There were also factors in my personal relationships that contributed to my weed relapse. I can’t blame anyone else, because it was one hundred percent my choice to use marijuana again.

But the bottom line was that I was putting myself in certain situations where it just seemed like the safer and easier path to not feel my feelings, anymore.

Regardless, I knew I could use the relapse as an opportunity for growth and service to others.

The biggest gift recovery had given me — relapse or not — was the gift of honesty, and the choice to let go of shame.

I knew it would be massively unproductive to hide my relapse from my podcast audience. I don’t even think I could have hidden it, with a straight face!

Instead, I allowed my listeners to bear witness to my (here-and-now) recovery journey. I wrote a 12-episode arc in which I narrated my step-by-step process through the Twelve Steps of recovery.

That Twelve Step work unfolded over the eight months that followed my relapse, and I’m proud of the rigorous honesty and self-reflection that comes through in those episodes.

Even though I didn’t end up getting totally clean from weed again that year (2023), my confidence and mental health benefited tremendously. Not just from the Step work itself, but also from the unconditional self-love I had to ask my Higher Power to provide me with.

How else could I have possibly shared my relapse and recovery process with listeners, without shame or fear of judgment?

❤️

Coming soon!

❤️