There are two ways to tell my story. The short way is the numbers: thirteen years of addiction, twenty-five years of recovery. The longer way is this website, my book, and most of my working life. Let me try a middle path here — enough of the story to be honest, not so much that it becomes a performance.
London
I was born in London and came of age in the punk era, which suited me fine — I was angry, restless and looking for an identity, and the scene handed me one. What it also handed me, eventually, was a relationship with substances that I was never going to be able to manage on my own terms.
My addiction ran for thirteen years. It escalated the way these things do: what begins as belonging becomes habit, habit becomes need, and need becomes the organising principle of an entire life. For me that life came to include intravenous cocaine and heroin, alcoholism, and periods of homelessness. I won’t dress it up. It took my health, my relationships, my dignity and nearly my life, and it took them slowly enough that I learned to live without each one before losing the next.
I am deliberately sparing with the war stories, here and everywhere I speak. The details of using are not the point, and I have watched too many people — myself included — mistake the size of the wreckage for the meaning of the story. The wreckage is common. What matters is what came after.
March 2001
I got sober in March 2001, aged twenty-nine. I won’t pretend there was a cinematic moment of clarity. Recovery, for me, arrived the way it arrives for most people who stay: through other people. People who had been where I had been, who were not impressed by my story and not frightened of it either, and who showed me — patiently, repeatedly — a way to live without what I had been using to survive.
That is worth pausing on, because it shapes everything I have done since. I did not recover because I was clever or strong. I recovered because help existed and, eventually, I took it. If you are reading this in the middle of your own addiction, or watching someone you love in theirs, that is the sentence I most want you to keep: help exists, and it works when it is taken.
What twenty-five years have taught me
Sobriety at twenty-five years is not a medal; it is a practice that never quite becomes automatic. But time does teach you things, and a few of mine might be worth passing on.
First, recovery is cumulative. The life I have now — the work, the relationships, the mornings I look forward to — was built one unremarkable sober day at a time. None of it would have survived a single decision to go back, and every day I don’t make that decision adds to something worth protecting.
Second, recovery wants to be shared. I got sober because others carried a message to me, and I have stayed sober partly by carrying it to others. That principle runs through everything I have built — Sober Services, Sober Academy, EARS, my book, the speaker tapes on this site. It is not a marketing strategy. It is how this works.
Third, the past becomes useful. For thirteen years my addiction was pure waste. Since 2001 it has been the foundation of a career helping other people escape theirs — working in treatment since 2003, founding Sober Services in 2008, and today serving as Managing Director of Holina Global, a group of treatment and recovery centres across Thailand and Cyprus. The worst years of my life turned out to be the qualification that mattered most. I have come to believe that is true for almost anyone in recovery who chooses to use it.
Koh Phangan
These days I live on Koh Phangan in Thailand, where I moved in October 2020, and where I wake up grateful more often than not. The punk kid from London and the homeless IV user are not gone; they are integrated — the memory that keeps me honest and the experience that lets me sit across from a suffering person and mean it when I say: I understand, and there is a way through.
Thirteen years of addiction. Twenty-five years of recovery. The second number just needs to keep being larger than the first, one day at a time. If I can do that, so can you.
If my story resonates with you — whether you’re struggling yourself, love someone who is, or work in this field — please get in touch through the contact page. And if you’d like the full story, my book It’s Not About Me! — Confessions of a Recovered Outlaw Addict is available as a free ebook. No catch. It was written to be given away.
Get in touch
I’d love to hear from you
Every message lands with me personally. Whether it’s about your own situation, a loved one, or a professional enquiry — start the conversation. I read everything, and I reply myself.
