There’s a corner of this website I’m quietly proud of: the Audios page, where recordings of my talks at Cocaine Anonymous conventions between 2005 and 2016 are kept as an open archive. I didn’t put them there as trophies. I put them there because of what those rooms taught me, and because a recording can carry a message to someone I’ll never meet, at two in the morning, when it matters most. This post is about what I learned standing at those podiums.
The first invitation
In 2005 I was four years sober, working in addiction treatment, and still — if I’m honest — carrying a quiet suspicion that my story wasn’t remarkable enough to tell publicly. Then came the invitation to share at a Cocaine Anonymous convention, and with it a discovery that has shaped everything since: a convention audience is not an audience at all. It’s a room full of people who already know the script, because they’ve lived some version of it. You’re not performing for them. You’re holding up a mirror, and the room does most of the work.
That first talk taught me the difference between speaking at people and speaking to them. The moment I stopped trying to be impressive and started being accurate — about the IV cocaine and heroin, the alcoholism, the homelessness, the thirteen years, and the ordinary, stubborn daily practice that got me out — the room changed. Heads nodded. People laughed at the parts that were only funny in retrospect. Some cried. Afterwards, strangers queued not to congratulate me but to say: that bit, there, that’s me.
What the conventions taught me
Over the years that followed, speaking at conventions became a kind of apprenticeship in honesty. A few lessons stand out.
Identification beats admiration. Nobody is helped by a story they can’t see themselves in. The most useful parts of my talks are never the dramatic ones; they’re the small, embarrassing, recognisable moments of self-deception that every person in the room has privately believed were theirs alone.
The message belongs to the newcomer. Convention rooms contain people with decades of recovery and people with days. I learned to aim everything at the person with days. The old-timers don’t need me; the person who arrived hopeless and is deciding whether to come back does. If they leave with one sentence that helps them stay one more day, the talk worked.
Humour is sacred, not frivolous. Recovery rooms laugh more than any rooms I know, and conventions most of all. That laughter isn’t denial — it’s relief, the sound of shame losing its grip. Some of the hardest truths I’ve ever told on stage landed precisely because the room was laughing as they landed.
Speaking is staying sober. Every time I tell the story out loud, I re-commit to it. Carrying the message isn’t charity; it’s maintenance. I got sober in March 2001 because others did this for me, and I keep doing it partly because it keeps doing it for me.
Why conventions, specifically?
Regular meetings are the heartbeat of recovery, but conventions are something else: recovery at scale, hundreds of people gathered in one place for one purpose. The energy is different, and so is the reach. A convention draws people from across the country and beyond, including plenty who’ve drifted from meetings and come to a convention as a way back in. For a speaker, that means the stakes are higher and the audience broader — every walk of life, every length of sobriety, every stage of willingness. Learning to reach all of them at once, without losing the newcomer in the back row, is the discipline those years taught me. It’s also why I kept accepting invitations for more than a decade: few rooms on earth concentrate so much hope in one place.
Why the archive matters
A convention talk evaporates — the room empties, the chairs get stacked. But a recording keeps working. The tapes on the Audios page span more than a decade, from 2005 to 2016, and you can hear the recovery deepen across them: the story stays the same, but the understanding behind it matures. I find that more interesting than the war stories, and I suspect listeners do too.
If you work in treatment, these recordings are also a window into something we talk about a lot in my professional life: the unmatched power of lived experience, honestly told. It’s the principle behind the book I give away free, behind the peer elements of good treatment, and behind much of what I’ve built since founding Sober Services in 2008.
Have a listen on the Audios page — the recordings are free, like everything of real value in recovery. And if something in them speaks to you, or you’d like me to share my story at your event or in your community, get in touch. Carrying the message is still the best part of the job.
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