One Lap at a Time. One Day at a Time.

He couldn’t finish a single lap around the track.

That’s where James S. started. Not dramatically, not at a rock bottom with a spotlight on it — just a guy, recently out of Fora Health, standing on the track across from RA, legs giving out before he made it around once. He didn’t know then that he’d run the Portland Marathon. Twice. Same track, same body, a completely different life.

We’ve known James for a while. We kept running into him at Go the Distance events, sat across from him at the FORA Freedom Awards the day before he completed a marathon, watched him keep showing up to the same rooms, the same runs, season after season. There was a conversation that got started at a fundraiser and never got finished — right when James was getting into it, we got cut off and the recording ended. Julie has been thinking about finishing that conversation ever since. This episode is it.

We've Seen Him Perform. Trust Us — You Need to Be There.

There’s a moment in our Episode 22 conversation with Skyler Ray that we still think about. He’s talking about his nine-year-old self — the kid who’d been abandoned, who had every reason to believe the world wasn’t going to show up for him — and he says he owes it to that kid to give his dreams a chance. Music gave him hope when nothing else did. That’s the kind of person Skyler is. He doesn’t perform recovery. He lives it, out loud, in front of whoever shows up.

And now he’s coming to Vancouver!

If you found us through Skyler, welcome — and go listen to his episode before June 13th. We think you’ll hear things about him you didn’t know. And if you’ve never heard of him at all, start there and then come to this show, because seeing him perform after hearing his story hits completely differently. You can listen to Episode 22 on our site or catch it directly on Spotify.

See you at the Summer Bash. We’ll be the ones near the front.

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​From a Hole in Her Lung to Leading Others Home — This Is What Six Years Clean Looks Like

​She was coughing up blood. Not a little — huge amounts of it. She was in an abandoned house with people she barely knew, and what had started as choking on a piece of meat had turned into something far worse: bacteria had entered her airway, traveled into her lung, and eaten a hole through it the size of a baseball. By the time she made it to the hospital, she was in quarantine ICU. She went into a coma. Doctors thought it was tuberculosis. She stayed there for nine weeks.

​That is where Megan C.’s road to recovery finally, reluctantly, began.

They Dumped His Alcohol and Took Him to a Meeting. He Had to Find His Own Way Back.

We almost lost Mark S. more than once. There was the night he ended up on Laguna Canyon Road after throwing a television through a window, hit by a car, left with partial paralysis. There was the bathtub in Eugene, the fistfuls of pills, the slashed wrists, the three-day coma he came out of to find out his partner of 28 years was not coming back. Every time we talk to someone whose story runs this close to the edge, we think about the people who did not make it. Mark made it. And he is sitting in his home in Oregon right now, two years and eight months sober, hosting Zoom AA meetings, doing service work, and redefining what a higher power can look like.

Mark grew up in a strict Pentecostal household in Southern California where alcohol did not exist and being gay was something his church said deserved death. He knew he was attracted to other boys before he had words for it, and he carried that shame into a decade of drinking, blackouts, and survival on the streets before he ever sat in an AA meeting. His first drink was in 1968 at a family wedding. By his early teens he was already living a double life, and by 16 his father had caught him and thrown him out. What followed were years on the streets and in the bars of Southern California in the 1970s, a time and place Mark describes with a candor that is as funny as it is heartbreaking. You need to hear him tell it.

Mark found AA for the first time around 1979 or 1980 in Laguna Beach, drunk and suicidal in a motel room. Two AA members came, dumped his alcohol, and took him to a meeting. He kept going for a while. Then he did not. That pattern repeated for decades. He moved to Oregon around 1984 fleeing the AIDS crisis. He found love. He built a life. He also kept drinking, kept destroying things, until the night he took every pill he had. After a month in the hospital and a month at Cedar Hills rehab in Beaverton, he got four years of sobriety. Then a single joint ended it. He drank again until COVID, when a friend told him about Zoom AA meetings.

That is where he found Extended Family, and that is where Julie first met him. Today Mark hosts his own Zoom meeting, does significant service work, and meets weekly with his sponsor John, who has 42 years of sobriety. He does all of this while homebound with COPD, running his meeting with more energy than most people bring to any room. What we find most powerful in this conversation, and what we think you need to hear in his own words, is how Mark talks about a higher power. He is an atheist. He says so plainly. And he has one.

Mark recorded this episode just days after losing his mother, having lost his father four months before. He talks about grief, about death, about what it means to still be here when you spent decades trying not to be. This is a conversation about surviving yourself. If you know someone who thinks AA is not for them because they do not believe in God, send them this episode. If you know someone who has tried and relapsed and tried again, send them this. If you just need to hear that it is possible to come back from almost anywhere, this one is for you.

Listen now at https://mdcr1.com/105.

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From a Doorway on Skidmore Fountain to the Front Lines of Recovery

Now, onto Episode 104...

A woman he had smoked spice with on his way to Rob Black’s house that same evening died from it before the night was over. He never touched it again. The structure that saved him when nothing else had. The faith he found feeding homeless people on Sunday mornings. The moment he stood in a courtroom and thanked a judge for sending him to prison.

​You need to hear this one in his own words. 🎧 Listen now at mdcr1.com/104. Read more at mdcr1.com/104b.

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Guest Background

Struggles and Turning Points

From there, Luciano made his way to Blanchet House — a shelter and transitional program in Old Town Portland where residents work in the kitchen for 90 days, serving meals to the community they now belong to. The discipline of it steadied him. The humility of it cracked something open. Sitting on the balcony at the end of his first week, feelings rushing back after months of numbing, Luciano wept. He called his family. He told them where he was.

Near the three-month mark, as he was about to be eligible to start looking for work, he relapsed. Too prideful to come clean, he ran off rather than disclose it. A friend let him stay for a month. When that situation grew unstable, he asked Blanchet if he could come back. They said yes. He came back with more gratitude and more groundedness — and relapsed again at New Year’s. This time, he owned up to it immediately. It was one of the first times he had been fully honest without running. Blanchet’s rules required them to let him go, but they gave him a week to find a plan. A peer suggested treatment. The next day, Luciano sat across from John Morgan at Another Chance and, as he put it, went “full therapist, deep level kind of stuff” before realizing he just needed to talk about his substance use. He got in. He got a job at a credit union. He finished treatment. He invited his family to his graduation. ​

Months later, he relapsed again. Ten days of bar-hopping, losing his phone, losing his wallet, losing everything. He collapsed at Laurel Hurst Park, unable to get up. Strangers walked by and called him a bum. Something in him fired. He crawled to the hospital. The next morning, he walked across the city to the offices of what was then MHAAO — now The Peer Company — and found Terry, a peer support specialist he knew from the Kings and Queens meeting at True Colors. He walked in in scrubs. He broke down. He said he had messed up. Terry said: what do you want to do?

He wanted detox. He went to Hooper. He went back to Another Chance — this time to the east side, this time as an angry, defeated, finally-honest version of himself. And this time, for the first time, he allowed himself to feel whatever he was feeling without performing his way around it.

​The Work He Is Doing in Recovery and His Community

After completing his second round of treatment, Luciano moved into a sober home through Sober Housing Oregon, one of Rob Lock’s houses. He went to one, sometimes two AA meetings a day. He took it slowly. Eventually, Rob asked him to become house manager.

​He almost said no. A friend in his home group stopped him. The role would force him to set boundaries, his friend said. Boundaries were his biggest problem. He said yes.

Being house manager was not easy. It required him to enforce rules with people he cared about. It required accountability in moments where he would rather look away. And it required him to hold steady through something he had hoped would never happen: a housemate died of an overdose.

​Luciano had to jump through a window to reach him — and found him unconscious, already past the point of saving. He held steady. He held the house together in the aftermath, organizing a celebration of life when the man’s family flew in. The family kept saying they were grateful their son had been surrounded by people who loved him in his final months. For Luciano, the loss reawakened something essential: the understanding that recovery is real, the stakes are real, and there is no performing your way through it.

The day before his second treatment graduation, Luciano stopped by Atlas Treatment Center to ask about housing resources. The founder asked what he was doing with his life. Luciano listed his options. The founder said: work here. Luciano told him he was taking a big chance on someone who did not know much. The founder said he was not taking a chance — he could see it.

​Luciano graduated the next morning. He has been Director of Operations at Atlas ever since. He is also reconnecting with his Latin culture and his queer community, dancing sober at Portland clubs, and building a life that does not require a mask.

​Luciano’s story resists easy framing. It is not a straight line from suffering to salvation. It includes relapse, and relapse again, and the slow painful work of learning that being honest is not a weakness but the only foundation that holds. It includes the LGBTQ community and the recovery community finding each other, and the particular grace of people like Terry who ask, without flinching: what do you want to do?

Nineteen months in, Luciano is not claiming to fully love himself. He is claiming something harder and more real: awareness. Acceptance. A willingness to feel whatever today brings without running from it. A belief that the journey itself is the miracle — not the destination, not the gold star, not the performance. The path you walk every day.

​If you are somewhere in the middle of your own story, Luciano has a simple message: don’t stop before the miracle happens. And if you see him — at the gym, at a meeting, on the street — go ahead and say hi. He gives good hugs.

#RealRecoveryPodcast #AddictionRecovery #SoberLiving #RecoveryIsPossible #LGBTQRecovery #HomelessnessAndRecovery #MiraclesHappen #DontStopBeforeTheMiracle #PortlandRecovery #SoberCommunity @RealRecoveryPodcast