I Was a Functioning Alcoholic and a Practicing Medium. Here's What I Was Hiding From Both.

I Did Not Get Sober to Become a Psychic Medium

I want to start there because I think it's important. I did not quit drinking in 2020 because I had some grand vision of becoming a professional evidential medium. I quit drinking because I was stuck, and I knew it, and the thing that finally broke me open was sitting drunk on my couch one night, looking up at the ceiling, and saying out loud: I need help.

That was it. No dramatic intervention. No rock bottom in the way people imagine it. Just a woman who had been holding it together on the outside for years, finally alone with the truth of what was happening.

From the outside, I looked fine. Better than fine. I was deep into a successful career at a major tech company. I was working out. I was actively training in mediumship — something I had been doing seriously for years. I was checking every box. And I was also, quietly, making sure I got home in time to have a drink. And then another one. And then the second bottle.

I was a functioning alcoholic. I kept functioning. The alcohol kept winning.

What Nobody Sees From the Outside

Here is what functioning looks like from the inside: you wake up hungover and afraid, and you make yourself a promise. Not today. Today is going to be different. You mean it completely. And then the afternoon comes, and something shifts, and before you have fully decided anything, you are standing in a store with two bottles of wine in your arms, already negotiating with yourself about why this is fine.

That loop, on repeat, for years.

I was working. I was working out. I was showing up to my mediumship training. But I had started quietly skipping afternoon practice sessions because I wanted to drink instead. I was still able to connect mediumistically — that ability was there. But the frame of mind I was always operating in was keeping me locked in place. I was sick. I was afraid. And that fear amplified everything that was already hard and drove me further into hiding.

My husband knew. Nobody else did. I was in a secret cave of my own making, and the longer I stayed in it, the smaller I got.

I knew that if I could just get sober, I would be able to move past my blocks. I knew it. I just couldn't do it.

Not yet.

The Night I Asked for Help

One night in late 2019, I was drunk on my couch. Not dramatically drunk. Just quietly, numbly drunk in the way that had become ordinary. And something cracked. I started crying — the kind of crying that comes from somewhere deeper than emotion — and I looked up and I said it out loud.

I need help.

I wasn't talking to anyone in particular. I wasn't sure anyone was listening. I just knew I had run out of ways to manage it on my own and I was done pretending otherwise.

Two months later it was January 2020, and I made one decision: one year sober. Not forever. Just one year.

And then COVID happened. The world shut down, social spaces disappeared, and the circumstances that had always made drinking feel normal and inevitable were suddenly just gone. I stayed home. I stayed sober. And at the end of that year, I looked back and realized I didn't want to go back. So I didn't.

I have never looked back.

What Sobriety Actually Did to My Mediumship

Getting sober did not give me my abilities. I already had them. What it did was remove the static.

Alcohol had me by the wrist, dragging me wherever it pleased. I was not in the driver's seat of my own life. I was managing, coping, maintaining — but I was not fully present, not fully clear, and not fully available to the work I was here to do. The connection was there, but it was filtered through fear and fog and the constant low hum of someone keeping a secret.

When that lifted, everything got sharper. Not overnight, and not all at once. But gradually, and then undeniably.

What sobriety gave me was not some elevated spiritual status. It gave me access to myself. And that access — to my own shadow, my own fear, my own pain — became the foundation of everything I now do. The shadow work I had to do to get through early sobriety, the hard work of accepting who I am and what I actually need, that became the basis of how I work with other people.

What I Can See Now That I Couldn't Before

Here is what a decade of sobriety has given me that no training could replicate: I know what it feels like to not be in the driver's seat. I know what it feels like to have something else running your life while you perform normalcy for everyone around you.

So now, when I am sitting with someone and their addiction is present in the room, I can see it. Not metaphorically. I can see when alcohol or something else has a person by the throat. I can feel the particular quality of someone who is choosing to hide versus someone who genuinely cannot find the door yet.

And because I know the difference from the inside, I know what each person needs. Sometimes they need to be held. Sometimes they need to be told the truth in a way that nobody in their life has been willing to say it. I know which is which because I have been in both places.

That is not something you can learn from a book. That is what living it gives you.

Recovery as the Foundation, Not the Story

I do not go to meetings. I am not going to tell you what your recovery should look like — everyone's path is different and I am deeply skeptical of anyone who claims to have the one right way.

But I will tell you what recovery has been for me: the single most important thing I have ever done. Not because it was the hardest, though it was. Because it was the first time I chose myself over my fear. It was the first time I said: I would rather feel everything than feel nothing.

And that willingness to feel is the entire foundation of this work.

The shadow work got me through. The accepting of who I am, what I need, what brings me comfort and genuine joy — that is what I brought into my mediumship, and it is what I bring into every room I work in.

What I Have Built on the Other Side

I am still at my big tech company job. I want to be clear about that because I think there is a version of this story that ends with a dramatic exit and a clean before-and-after, and that is not my story. I am building this in the margins, in the early mornings and the weekends, in the hours that are mine.

What I have built while sober: a mediumship practice I am deeply proud of, monthly gallery demonstrations that sell out, and the Soul Signals Podcast launching May 1, 2026 — a show about intuition, connection, and the courage it takes to live in alignment with what you actually know to be true.

None of that exists if I do not get sober. Not because sobriety is magic, but because I could not have built anything real while I was hiding. You cannot build something true from inside a secret.

If You Are Standing at That Crossroads

If you are in the middle of this right now — if you recognize the morning promise and the afternoon betrayal, if you are functioning on the outside and drowning on the inside — I am not going to tell you it is easy.

I am going to tell you that the moment you look up and say I need help is not a moment of weakness. It is the first honest thing. And everything real gets built from there.

On the other side of the numbing, there is a version of your life that you cannot imagine yet. I know because I could not imagine mine.

It is so much bigger than anything you are leaving behind.