One Step at a Time — Until the Road Led to 30 Doors

Some people go to hell once. Deena Feldes went many times — and she'll tell you she knows exactly how to get back there if she ever wants to. The fact that she doesn't is the whole story.

From the Bathroom Floor to Everything

That's Kathryn L. — coming up on fifteen years sober — and she means every word of it. Not as a cautionary tale. Not as a rock-bottom speech. As a daily choice to remember where she started so she never stops appreciating where she is.

Kathryn grew up south of Boston in a house where alcohol was as ordinary as furniture — a stocked liquor cabinet, homemade sambuca her father made from scratch, parties of a hundred people with pig roasts and kegs of beer. She took her first sip young and felt something she'd spend years chasing. By middle school she was sneaking pints of Southern Comfort into her backpack. Her senior superlative was "most dedicated to social life," and she wore it like a badge of honor. What followed were decades of blackout drinking, tumultuous relationships, a brief marriage that ended almost as soon as it began, the sudden death of her mother at 25, and a father who told her a week later to get over it.

One sock. One moment. Thirty-plus years later, he still carries it.

He was out of money and out of reasons. At the end of a long night with nothing left, Paul O. had a plan and a bridge in mind. He ran a quick inventory of the people in his life — and convinced himself, one by one, that they'd be better off. Then he got to his mother. And something stopped.

That moment — where his mother's unconditional love became the only thing standing between Paul and the end — is where this episode begins. But it is not where it ends. What comes after that bridge is a story about 13 years of sobriety, a trip to New Zealand that unraveled all of it, a completed First Step that took 13 years to finish, and a lesson about burgundy socks that we promise you will carry long after you stop listening. You need to hear this one.

Rejection Brought Her Here. Recovery Is Keeping Her.

There is a moment Tiffany D. describes that we haven't been able to stop thinking about. She is driving back from Arizona on a highway somewhere in Klamath County, blacked out, swerving, her car starting to smoke — and she does not remember passing Las Vegas. Not a blur of lights. Not a vague sense of having been there. Nothing. Vegas was just gone.

She tells that story not to shock you, but to get to the part that hit her hardest: it wasn't her own life she thought about first. It was everyone else on that road. That shift — from "I could have died" to "I could have taken someone's family" — tells you everything about where Tiffany's head and heart are now. And she's only one year in.

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.

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.

When You Finally Say Yes to Your Own Life

Brian R. told us something in this episode that we haven't stopped thinking about. He was talking about the Native elders in his community — men and women who drank hard when they were young and eventually had to stop or die — and he said his whole life was preparing him to do the same thing. To stop. To become an elder. To do good. Hear it in his voice and you'll understand why we've been wanting to get him on the show for over a year.

Brian is a Klamath tribal member, an artist, and now a community radio DJ in Portland. His road to sobriety runs through two DUIs, a COVID isolation spiral, and a urine test result that stopped his intake counselor mid-sentence. He walked into that IOP intake room planning to lie his way through the program. Something shifted. You need to hear what he says happened next — and what he did with it — because listen to Episode 109 is the only way to get the full story.