I didn't just get sober.
I had to learn how to live.

I started using substances when I was 14. My biological father went to prison when I was 3, as he also struggled with addiction. At the time I couldn't articulate what I was looking for. I just knew I wanted escape. Agency. Belonging. Something that felt like direction when everything around me felt uncertain.

By 16 I was using methamphetamines, and used daily from 17 to 20. By my early 20s, I had a radical encounter with faith that delivered me from that addiction and for a while, it held. I got sober. I started building something. I decided to go back to school to become a drug and alcohol counselor because I wanted to use what I'd been through.

Then life got complicated. I relapsed in 2009 and spent the better part of my undergraduate and graduate years drinking heavily, even as I was earning a Master's degree in Social Work. I got a grievance from the state board of psychotherapists because of my substance use. I was building my career and losing myself at the same time.

I got sober again in 2018. And this time, something was different.

What I figured out, slowly, through trial and error, is that sobriety alone was never going to be enough. Willpower isn't a foundation. It's a temporary support beam. What actually kept me sober was building a life so full, so intentional, and so structurally sound that there was no room for substances in it.

In 2019 I started going to the gym and lifting weights. I changed how I ate. The next year I learned how to snowboard, found new friends, and connected with a new community. In 2022 I graduated with my MSW and focused on building my career. Last year, I started a business. Piece by piece, I have built the domains of my life, not just one area, but all of them simultaneously. Relationships. Health. Identity. Purpose. Work. Emotional resilience. Accountability.

What I was doing, without fully knowing it yet, was building holistic protective factors across every domain of my life. And when all of those pieces started working together, when the whole system was strengthened, not just one part of it, that's when everything changed. That's when I became someone who didn't need substances anymore. Not because I was white-knuckling it. Because I had built something worth protecting.

I am a therapist, coach, and person in long-term recovery. I earned my Master of Social Work from MSU Denver. I have spent years studying identity formation, habit building, and what makes recovery sustainable, as a clinician, as a coach, and as someone who has lived every stage of this process.

I built THRIVES, an 8-week self-leadership and recovery architecture intensive. I built Tymblocc, a productivity app designed for neurodivergent brains. And I built The Recovered Leader because I needed it to exist and it didn't.

All of the energy I used to put into substances, the obsession, the planning, the resourcefulness, I now channel into building my business, my health, my relationships, and my life. Recovery didn't make me smaller. It made me sharper. More focused. More intentional. More free.

That's what I want for you.

Not just sobriety. A life built with direction, structure, and purpose. A life where recovery is your competitive edge, your life hack, your superpower, the thing that sets you apart from everyone still numbing out and calling it living.

You did the hard part. Now let's build what comes next.