What Recovery Teaches Us with Sahar Vasquez | Episode 527

What Recovery Teaches Us with Sahar Vasquez | Episode 527

How do people cope with the challenges of staying sober? This conversation with Sahar Vasquez offers a raw, funny, and honest look at what recovery can actually look like in real life. Sahar, a mental health advocate, teacher, and person in long-term recovery from alcohol and benzodiazepine misuse, talks about growing up in Belize, crippling anxiety in her teens, and how pills and alcohol became her fastest escape.

She explains how easy access to benzos through local pharmacies fed her addiction and led to blackouts, seizures, and a broken jaw before she finally said, "Enough is enough." She shares how early recovery meant moving into her own place, sitting with uncomfortable feelings, grieving alcohol and pills like a breakup, and slowly building a life that didn’t need substances. Exercise, tennis, running, and yes, “900 hours of TV” all feature as practical tools.

Teaching six- and seven-year-olds becomes part of her new identity: she gets to show up, model emotional regulation, and feel “unconditionally loved by a little human who sees no fault” in her. Sahar and host Charlie keep things light while still being serious about the stakes of addiction.

They talk about having multiple sober birthdays, relapse without shame, and the idea that, as Charlie puts it, "recovery is progress, not perfection." Sahar’s favourite advice, from a long-sober father figure, is simple and stubborn: "Just keep on keeping on." This episode will resonate with anyone juggling mental health and substance use, feeling guilty about the impact on family, or wondering if a different version of themselves is still possible.

You’ll hear about advocacy in schools, the comfort of quit-lit like *Beautiful Boy* and *Scar Tissue*, and why Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” hits so hard in recovery. Ready to ask what a life beyond alcohol and pills might look like for you?