Two Years, No Filter, No Guests — Just the Truth

There's a moment in this episode where Julie goes quiet for just a second before she says it, and we want you to hear it the way she said it — not read it summarized here. Her sponsor picked her up for a meeting recently, and before they pulled away he looked at her and said: I just want you to know you're my favorite person. I love you more than anyone. Julie is an only child. Her mother once told her she never should have had a child. She spent six months to age eleven with nannies. And this man — her sponsor of nearly five years — said those words with nothing behind them, no conditions, no angle, nothing owed. Julie says she's not sure she'd ever had that in her whole life before recovery. You need to hear what that moment sounds like in her voice.

Share with your Friends & Family

This is Episode 110, and it's just us — Julie and Peter, no guest, no script, no polish. We're two years in and we wanted to stop and actually talk about what those two years looked like, because if we're being honest, year two was not what we planned.

Peter was diagnosed with sublingual carcinoma — cancer at the base of his tongue — in March 2025. He's a podcast host. The irony of that didn't escape either of us. By April he was starting treatments, and by the time it was over he had lost 80 pounds and gone from camping nearly 12 times the year before to zero. No barbecues, no hosting, no being the Peter that Peter usually is. And somehow — because we had pushed ourselves to record sometimes five days a week before his treatment started — we never missed a single Friday release. Not one. One hundred and four episodes, every week, without a gap.

At the same time, Julie was navigating her own parallel storm: laid off, severance gone, unemployment running out, interviewing for a new job while Peter was heading into treatment. She said it plainly — it was the year of survival. And then she said something else that stopped us: "It might have been the year of survival, but as far as listeners go, we flourished." Someone told Julie the podcast saved their life. If you want to know what it feels like to hear that, listen to the way she says it.

We've had 108 guests walk through this show. One hundred and eight people who shared the kind of stories you don't tell strangers — trauma, addiction, incarceration, grief, abuse, shame, and the slow hard work of getting to the other side. Julie said it the way only Julie can say it:

"I don't know how many people can say they know a miracle or have had a miracle in their life. I know 108 of them. I've had 108 miracles in my life. These people probably shouldn't have made it, didn't know they could have — and they did."

— Julie P. Lewis

There's something else in this episode we're not going to give away here — what Julie shared about her own healing, what two particular guests said on this podcast that helped her finally begin to work through something she hadn't spoken about until age 55 or 56. We'll tell you it involved two grown men and a kind of courage that she says she didn't expect, and it changed something in her. You need to hear it directly.

We also talk about what's coming — the round tables we're planning, the peer services conversation we're building out, the Oregon Humanities Grant we've applied for (Fred Meyer-funded, decision in June), and our third year attending the Oregon Recovers Walk and the GTD — Go the Distance 5K in September. True Colors Recovery has new guests coming. Mordecai is joining us. And we want to do a cancer recovery episode with Doyle Smith from Episode 56 — because cancer is recovery too.

We're going into year three knowing something we didn't fully know before: the podcast doesn't just document recovery. For both of us, it has been part of our recovery. Peter wore it through chemo. Julie wore it through IOP and a new job and a sponsor who loves her the way parents are supposed to. And if even one of our listeners listening to those 108 episodes heard something on this show that kept them going, then every single Friday was worth it.

Year three starts now. We'd love for you to be in it with us.

#RealRecoveryPodcast #Recovery #Sobriety #RecoveryPodcast #AddictionRecovery #SoberLife #RecoveryCommunity #MentalHealth #Hope #Podcast #PeerSupport #WeDoRecover #Oregon #Portland

@RealRecoveryPodcast @GTDGoTheDistance @SkylerRayMusic @4DRecovery @TrueColorsRecovery @OregonRecovers