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.

One Line That Changes Everything

There is a moment in this episode where Jerry B. says something we hadn't heard before. He'd spent nearly a decade completely sober — not drinking, not using — going to work, coming home, watching TV, going to bed. And yet. "I was so dry by then," he said, "I was like flammable. I was exactly the same person as I had been when I was drinking — just without the alcohol."

We had to sit with that one.

Jerry grew up in a family where recovery was the air he breathed. His dad has 53 years in Alcoholics Anonymous. His mom found sobriety when Jerry was young — and the moment she came home from treatment is one of the most tender things in this episode. You'll want to hear it in his words, not ours.

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.

​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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