How I got here
from there.

I started trying to get sober at eighteen. What followed was about six years of attempts that looked like progress from the outside and felt like drowning from the inside: two years here, nine months there, six months, five months. I was not lacking willpower. I was lacking an understanding of why I kept ending up in the same place.

I had a difficult adolescence. I was not comfortable in my own skin, I had what I would now recognize as conduct disorder, and I found substances early and leaned on them hard. Xanax, opiates, morphine, marijuana, and others. I was also prescribed Adderall at nine years old, which is its own conversation. The substances were one thing, but the behavior underneath them was the real issue. I was disruptive and chaotic to the people around me because chaos meant attention, and attention was the closest thing to connection I knew how to get.

I got sober for real at 24, after my second marijuana-induced psychosis. That was the line. Not a rock bottom in the cinematic sense, just an undeniable, clinical moment where I could see clearly that what I was doing was incompatible with being a functioning person. I had been using the 12 steps on and off, I had tried Refuge Recovery and SMART Recovery, I had tried other things. None of it fully stuck until I started actually examining the patterns underneath the use, and learning to intercept them before they ran me.

I have a sponsor. I use the 12 steps as one tool among several. I believe that recovery modalities should be diversified the same way a financial portfolio should be diversified, because leaning entirely on any single system creates its own kind of dependency. The 12 steps can become another addiction for some people, a place where codependency finds new air to breathe. That is not a criticism of the program. It is an observation about what happens when any structure replaces the internal work instead of supporting it.

Before freelancing, I spent four years working in rehab and mental health spaces. Recovery support specialist, sober house manager, ABA therapist working with children and teenagers with autism and developmental delays, running recovery groups, doing case management. Before that, my first job ever was in sales, and I was good at it. But addiction scattered everything. My resume looked like a timeline of someone who could not stay anywhere long enough to matter, and I had to be creative about framing what I actually knew how to do.

When I found Upwork, I started where I could: cold calling contracts. I over-delivered, not in a way that violated my own worth, but in a way that made me impossible to forget. If I was hired to make calls, I showed up with CRM recommendations and campaign ideas and a genuine interest in the outcome of the business. I progressed from cold calling to closing roles to consulting, and then to building outbound pipeline architecture, training SDRs, writing sales playbooks, doing CRM migrations, working directly with founders and CEOs. I made $30k in my first four months. That number came from an accumulated skillset that looked like chaos on a resume but was actually a very specific kind of competence.

Today I run Impello Agency, a sales agency with over 13 case studies. I coach people who are where I was: capable, scattered, and underselling themselves to a market that does not know how to read them. I help them get clear on what they are genuinely good at and build a plan to get paid for it. I do this from Chiang Mai, Thailand, and before that, other places. The location is flexible. The discipline is not.

I built Sober Adventuring because I needed something like this and it did not exist. Not content that treated sobriety as a clinical condition or a spiritual event, but something practical and honest, from someone who had actually been through it and had not sanitized the details. That is what I am trying to be here.