From my infancy to preteen years, the only thing I knew about alcohol was that it made my dad mean. In May 2023, when his primary doctor told him his addiction was not only a threat to our relationship, but to his physical health — he got sober. For the first time in 19 years, we became best friends.

Now two years down the line, he’s become unrecognizable in the best way possible. But reckoning with his alcohol-free reality, he says, has been one of his life’s greatest challenges. His road to recovery was not linear, and no, it did not include Alcoholics Anonymous; one might be shocked to find that many don’t.

My father’s sobriety and his resulting changed behavior are a source of curiosity for me. It’s led me down a rabbit hole of media coverage on recovering alcoholics, how those who are sober got there and why — the humanity behind the decision to end an addiction. The people I met in the process — artist and writer Edith Zimmerman, podcaster and teacher Nadine Mulvina and author Melissa Petro, to name a few — are reflections of my father and each other, tied together by a desire for self-rediscovery. Their stories paint an honest picture of sobriety — reclaiming hobbies and interests, and learning who they are outside of addiction.

Rediscovering Hobbies: Learning How to Have Fun Again

I found Edith Zimmerman thanks to scribbled illustrations tucked into posts on The Small Bow, a substack blog and “recovery newsletter for everyone.” I’d been following the publication since May of 2024 and could pick her art style out of a lineup. She colors outside the lines, which are never quite straight, but I think that’s what makes it so appealing, so human and so fitting for stories about addiction. Zimmerman got sober in May of 2016, a date I verified in a comic about her first year of sobriety.

I read it one, two, three times before speaking with her, picking out my favorite parts and making note of questions to ask her. She told me I was “picking up on all the good stuff.”

Zimmerman spent the first 15 years of her career as a writer. She’d had a talent for drawing photorealistic pencil portraits when she was young, but the pressure of getting them right was agonizing. On occasion, however, she’ll come out of retirement and put forth a “pretty realistic portrait” for The Small Bow. She only tried her hand at comics after sobriety and has found a second career in it.

Zimmerman drawing comics. (Photo courtesy of Edith Zimmerman)

“I think people really rediscover who they actually are when they stop drinking, or like who they used to be, or who they are underneath the alcohol. I guess it’s a cliche, but when you stop drinking, you should try to think back on what you enjoyed doing as a child or as a young person — you might enjoy doing that stuff again,” Zimmerman said.

My father was no stranger to this concept. For the middle part of my childhood, I’d find him hunched over his workbench in the garage, tinkering with a remote control car, spray painting its body with custom designs or taking it apart entirely to figure out why it wasn’t running the way it should’ve been. He bought me a small green truck so I could race against his larger, silver drift car in the alley. As his drinking approached its peak, we placed our RC cars on a shelf to collect dust. Next to them was a steel cabinet where he hid bottles of hard liquor, but I’d always find them — often in his eyes, usually in his actions and eventually in the recycling bins behind our house.

One of my dad's RC cars stationed on his work desk. (Photo courtesy of Ernesto Garza)

Sometimes, he goes to hobby shops on his days off in hopes of finding an RC car that’ll help him fall back into that rhythm, because even after almost two years sober, he still complains about the need to fidget. Zimmerman echoed this sentiment when she told me that, even as we spoke, she was finding a way to occupy her hands. She said it’s what drove her to draw again.

“When I started drawing again, I just did it with a pen, kind of to force myself to care less about whether or not I got it right,” Zimmerman said. “And so the drawings are really scrabble-y…but I like doing the looser stuff and I’ve found over time that it kind of helps me connect with who I really am, or something.”

But unlike my father, Zimmerman got sober in seclusion, away from the eyes of others.

“It was almost like I went into a cocoon and came out like a butterfly,” Zimmerman said. “I mean, not that dramatic, but I didn’t have anyone watch…it was just sort of my thing I did privately for a while.”

The “Tortured Artist” Fallacy: Sobriety and Increased Creativity

Nadine Mulvina is the host of the Sober Butterfly podcast and a special education teacher in the New York City public school system, who said her sobriety has given her the stamina to be consistently creative with her aforementioned professions. Mulvina got sober on July 5, 2021, after she took a solo trip to Cabo for her 30th birthday — much of which she said she doesn’t remember.

The Sober Butterfly began as a vlog in which she shared her first time traveling sober, visiting six countries in six weeks. She said the trip was inspired by a concept emphasized in AA — the idea of people, places and things — that made her realize she needed to remove herself from her ecosystem of New York City, where her addiction thrived. Since then, Mulvina’s platform has become an online space for her to swap sobriety stories with her listeners and guests.

Click "play" to listen to Mulvina describe the concept of "pebble bottoms" — or a series of smaller rock bottoms — as explained to her by one of her guests, sober coach Barbara Williams. (Cover courtesy of Nadine Mulvina on Apple Podcasts/Spotify)

“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach and there’s no singular journey to sobriety,” Mulvina said. “So I’m just trying to highlight different people’s stories and share a lot of personal anecdotes and experiences that I’ve had along the way, pre-sobriety and currently sober.”

The name of the podcast itself is meant to be representative of metamorphosis, according to Mulvina. It’s a nod to her taking flight in her sobriety and finding her wings, and not losing her social butterfly personality once she quit drinking.

“So much of my identity was tethered to drinking and I realized that I didn’t really have pastimes or hobbies and it’s funny because I always considered myself to be a creative individual,” Mulvina said. “And so often the narrative is that creatives need substances to unlock their true creative potential, and I couldn’t find that to be further from the truth.”

Addiction and Our Brains: the Allostatic Load

According to Keanan Joyner, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, there’s no direct, definitive correlation between sobriety and increased creativity — though he said he didn’t doubt Zimmerman, Mulvina and my father are feeling it. The most sound explanation, he said, is the alleviation of an allostatic load.

Keanan Joyner. (Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley Psychology)

An allostatic load, in the National Institutes of Health’s terms, is “the cumulative burden of chronic stress and life events” and can be useful in the research of substance abuse disorders.

“When you don’t have what’s called an allostatic load on you, you’re just able to perform better generally, right?” Joyner said. “And some people confuse what we call ‘within subject effects’ with ‘between subject effects.’”

What Joyner meant by that is, sometimes, when a creative is actively taking a substance, they’ll think it boosts their creativity. The more they use, the more creative they are. That’s a “within subject effect.” But if that individual were to consider the impact of their substance use over any given period of time — its “between subject effect” — it is often a harmful thing.

“Maybe on a single given occasion, getting high helps you make better art or something like that, but being in a pattern of addiction which comes with a whole other host of changes — neurologically, physiologically, psychologically, behaviorally and otherwise…it produces a higher negative asset,” Joyner said. “All of those things are bad for creativity, and so lifting that allostatic load, you’ll be more creative, a bit better at what you enjoy doing.”

And the way those struggling with addiction go about relieving that allostatic load can differ. According to Joyner, AA is the most common method people use to quit substance use — next to solo attempts, or no treatment at all. But he echoed what my dad once told me during one of his first stints of sobriety — it doesn’t work for everyone.

“The biggest thing that I want to get across to anybody who is trying to research this topic is just that there is a plethora of recovery options and they need not work for everybody. The only thing that we need to do is figure out who it works for so that we can sort that person to that option, and they don’t need to be in competition,” Joyner said.

Joyner said that, while he knows many people who are grateful for AA, an alternative for it might be SMART groups, which don’t imply religiosity as much as AA might. It stands for Self Management and Recovery Training and is grounded in Rational Emotive Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

“We should be supporting SMART groups, we should be supporting more people being able to get off a therapy waitlist,” Joyner said. “I would hope that the state of California would invest more heavily in training more clinical psychologists, masters of social work, et cetera, so that there could be more providers for people who need individual psychotherapy to recover as well.”

Recentering the Narrative: the Intersection of Recovery and Storytelling

Melissa Petro, author and writing coach, has engaged in several recovery methods: therapy, rehab and AA. The first is where it was suggested to her that she had a drinking problem, the second she hated and the third she was drawn to due to its parallels to memoir writing — one of her specializations.

Melissa Petro. (Photo courtesy of Gotham Writers)

“There’s always a dialect between the protagonist — who you were then and who you are now, this older, wiser self — who can look back at your earlier life experiences. And no matter how dramatic or painful or terrifying those were, the narrator — with emotional and chronological distance — is able to hold them and present them with more levity and insights than we had at the time,” Petro said.

Once someone’s able to see this disconnect, Petro said, they’re encouraged to “make better choices and take better actions” toward their goals. The spirit of a 12-step program, according to Petro, is comparing who one used to be to their better selves, and reminding oneself of who they’ve chosen to be.

“People would describe what it was like then, when they were drinking, versus what it’s like now. And even if they didn’t comment explicitly on their sobriety and their transformation, it was apparent in the framing of their narratives that they were no longer in pain or suffering as a result of their drinking,” Petro said.

These 12-step programs helped Petro realize she was ready to edit her life and narrative. She described herself as a “closeted artist” before she got sober, one that was potentially “enchanted by her own brilliance.”

“Some of the things I’ve produced then — it was great writing, but it didn’t have any insight. It didn’t have any transformation, it didn’t make an argument,” Petro said. “It was just like these dizzying scenes of catastrophic things that I had done or had happened to me.”

She’s taken these learnings with her into her own workshops. In July 2025, she plans to host a language arts one titled, “Writing for Shame Resilience: Turning Shame into Your Superpower,” drawing from her memoir “Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification,” which explores the weaponization of shame and her journey as a former sex worker. Petro began writing “Shame on You” just before getting sober. She had to pause briefly to decenter the “tortured artist” fallacy discussed by Mulvina and create some emotional distance from the material.

“If I do include my personal experiences in my writing or in the classroom, it’s always in service of the purpose of being there — so it’s called a professional use of personal self,” Petro said. “Like if I’m going to tell you a story right now, it’s going to be to answer your question. It’s not going to be because this thing happened last night and I need to get it off my chest.”

After 20 plus years of sobriety, Petro is more confident in her teaching abilities than ever. Just as she’d walk someone through the steps of recovery in a 12-step program, she walks young writers through the steps of becoming the writers they want to be.

“I’m not crippled by my feelings or my own bad behaviors in ways that I was when I was drinking, so I can show up wholeheartedly for my students and be there for them versus kind of being there for myself trying to fulfill some sort of unmet need,” Petro said.

On the Outside Looking In: Documenting the Recovery of Others

Laura Foster is a fine art photographer based out of Bristol, England. Though not a recovering alcoholic herself, her mother battled alcohol abuse throughout her childhood and has now been sober for a few years. Foster is particularly experienced in documentary photography, which she told me is just a means of “using photography to tell a story, tell a narrative” and “as a tool for communication, similar to documentary films, just through stills.” The most notable projects on her website are two that depict alcoholism and recovery — in chronological order, “Serenity” and “In Order to Bloom.”

“I think talking about my mom is what made people really comfortable with me…it’s quite intimidating, but I think they found it really interesting or helpful to talk to the child of someone who’s been through that,” Foster said. I told her my journalistic approach is similar — especially with this project. I speak of my father often, with honesty and compassion, and noted that Foster is no different with her mother.

Foster posing for a photo on her website. (Photo courtesy of Laura Foster)

“In Order to Bloom” is what first drew me to Foster. This collection of photos was taken in collaboration with one of her friends, Georgia, whose mother also struggled with alcoholism. I don’t personally know any children of addicts, so I’ve been isolated in my life’s events — but to speak with Foster about retelling her mother’s experiences brought a quiet sense of comfort.

“There was this idea of addiction and alcoholism, [which] especially can be something that’s so behind closed doors and people don’t realize how common, how everyone kind of pictures that really dramatic version of it — like if you met my mom, if you met Georgia’s mom, you would never guess,” Foster said.

Sobriety, My Dad and Me

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, “28.9 million people ages 12 and older had an alcohol abuse disorder in the past year.” This is the last one of those statistics my dad will be a part of.

Watching him regain his footing in his journey toward self-rediscovery, I imagine, is how he felt when I took my first steps — uncertain, and a little scared that I’ll stumble over, but ultimately confident in my ability to stand back up. In real time, I’m witnessing my dad become a version of himself I yearned to see when I was younger — one that is mentally present for holidays, my accolades and every conversation we have in between.

Zimmerman asked me what that was like, because she told me that among her reasons for getting sober was her desire to have children. And even then, she thought the day might never come for her.

“I had this sense that I had squandered a decade, and also had these sort of magical karmic thoughts, like I drank too much for too long, surely there’s a price to pay — like maybe I won’t be able to have kids at all, or like maybe I won’t meet anybody,” Zimmerman said.