A blackout crash, my brother's fractured vertebra, and a cop telling me I wasn't going home. Here's the story I shared on the Sober Motivation podcast.
I did not plan to end up in handcuffs at 21. Nobody does.
The bigger surprise came the day after. I woke up from a blackout car crash expecting to go home, and that is where reality started to sink in. The cop looked at me and said it plainly. You are in jail. You are not going home. There are multiple felonies against you. You are going to be in here for a while.
That was the moment consequences stopped being abstract.
I recently sat down with Brad McLeod on the Sober Motivation podcast and walked through the whole story. Brad is doing genuinely amazing work over at sobermotivation.com, including a newly launched app and community he runs. Have a peek when you get the chance, and feel free to reach out to him. He is a great guy, and his write-up of our conversation is worth reading for his side of it. The episode is embedded above if you want to hear it the way it actually came out. If something in it lands, or you have questions, or you just want to know me better, let me know.
How It Started: Monterey, Anxiety, and a Quiet Sip
I grew up mostly in Monterey, California. Middle of three kids. My dad is a heart surgeon, my mom is an artist, and they are still married. From the outside it looked fine, and in many ways it was.
Growing up, I was an anxious kid. Nobody called it that. They said I had a lot of energy, and I heard it constantly. But I felt it in my body my whole life, and around fifteen or sixteen it really started to show up.
And almost at the same time, so did drinking.
The first time I took a sip and felt my mind go quiet, I understood immediately why people did this. My thoughts slowed down. My body stopped bracing. It felt like relief, and that feeling is a big part of why I kept going back. It was not rebellion or peer pressure.
It was that a drink worked for me... until it didn't.
By eighteen I had a minor in possession charge. By twenty, a DUI. My mom had already found liquor in my truck at sixteen. That stuff was hard to come by at that age and I had worked to stock it up, so there were a few bottles sitting in there. Understandably, she was shocked. The pattern was clear to everyone around me. I just could not see the full angle of the drift.
That is the thing about slow drift. You know you are slightly off. You can feel it. But you have no idea you are forty-five or ninety degrees from where you meant to be until something forces you to actually look.
The crash forced me to look.
I was twenty-one. I blacked out behind the wheel of a Mazda Miata. My brother was in the car. He fractured his C2 vertebra. I woke up and the cop told me I was not going home. Five years felony probation. A hundred and twenty days in jail with credit for time served. Ninety days house arrest.
I got sober on November 28, 2006, and I have not had a drink or a drug since.
Get There Early, Sit Up Front, Stay Late
People want a dramatic pivot. A single moment where everything clicks. Sometimes there is a moment, and for me the crash was that moment. But what actually built the life I have now was something smaller and a lot less cinematic.
A mentor of mine early in my sobriety told me: get there early, sit up front, stick with the winners, ask questions, stay late. They were talking about recovery meetings. But I started applying it to everything, including school.
I started getting good grades. That led to two master's degrees, an MBA from Pepperdine and an MA in Addiction Counseling from Hazelden Betty Ford with a focus on co-occurring disorders. I say that not to brag. I say it because the degrees are a testament to the sobriety, full stop. None of that existed in the version of me that was drinking.
The other thing that carried me was what I would call faith, and I do not mean that in a religious way necessarily. I mean the willingness to walk forward without needing to know what is ahead. You do not get to see the whole staircase. You just take the next step, and then the next one, and at some point you look back and realize you built something.
Where Nineteen Years of Sobriety Actually Took Me
Fifty-plus countries. All fifty states.
At five years sober I somehow found myself flying low over the Atlantic as a helicopter pilot, taking pictures of boats. That was the job for a couple of years. Later I went after fixed-wing licensure and ended up landing Cessnas beside 737s at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, where I was living and working in addiction treatment at the same time.
I have done over three hundred and fifty scuba dives around the world. I have swum with sperm whales, pygmy blue whales and humpbacks, with dolphins and with sharks, and those are only a few of the encounters I have been lucky enough to have.
Somewhere in there I built Nomadic Addictt, without really knowing yet what it was for or who it was for. Then I landed in Bali, and Bali became home.
Adventure and sobriety are not opposites. For me they turned out to be the same thing.
Anxious moments still happen. That part of me did not disappear when I got sober. The difference is I can listen to it now. I can sit with discomfort without immediately reaching for something to make it stop. That is not a small thing. For me it is the whole thing.
If you are young and you are wondering whether you are in trouble with drinking, you are probably asking the right question at the right time. The earlier you look, the less you have to rebuild. And the life on the other side of that decision... it gets bigger than you are currently imagining.
You can find more of what I do at zacspowart.com, and Brad's full write-up of our conversation is over at sobermotivation.com.
So here is the question I will leave you with.
If you took a completely honest look at your life right now, what angle are you actually on compared to the direction you thought you were heading?
Interested in 1:1 sober coaching, sober companionship, or custom tailored sober retreats?
Whether you are navigating early sobriety, planning your first sober trip, or looking for someone to walk alongside you, I am here. Learn more at Nomadic Addictt or start the conversation.