Melissa S. Age. 69 Sober since: 11/7/90

Melissa S. Age. 69 Sober since: 11/7/90

How do individuals turn their lives around after addiction? This chat between host Mike S. and guest Melissa S. gives a raw look at exactly that, through both reflection and hard-won experience. Mike opens up with his own struggle around repeating the 12 steps and the difference between "benign" and "malicious" envy, admitting that he can still get stuck in resentment over other people's success.

His honesty sets the tone for what follows: a conversation where sobriety is anything but neat and tidy. Melissa, a 69-year-old trans woman sober since 7 November 1990, talks through decades of drinking, cocaine and crack use, and relentless relapsing. She describes waking up in cars, strange beds, and even different states, and how her "solution to over-drinking was cocaine" until everything vanished – electricity, phone, flat, job security, and dignity.

She shares what it was like trying to get sober in AA and Cocaine Anonymous in the 1990s as a trans woman, including being treated as a "moral dilemma" at meetings and dances, being challenged for taking female service positions, and an impromptu 20-minute business meeting where women debated whether she should be allowed to stay. Through all of this, she kept putting her sobriety first. Honesty becomes the turning point.

Melissa explains how counting days through repeated slips left her "so less than, so diminished" until she finally "let all that goo spill out" with sponsors and through a series of fourth and fifth steps. Her description of early service – spending New Year’s Eve chopping lettuce in a kitchen, peeking out at 120 sober people while holding a carving knife – is both funny and painfully relatable.

For anyone who thinks they're too different, too far gone, or too ashamed to get honest, Melissa’s message is clear: "Aa is where hope lives." What might change for you if you let yourself be carried by a sober tribe, even when you feel three inches tall?