I didn’t get sober in a way that makes a clean narrative arc. There was no spotlight moment. There was a jacket I started embroidering, and there were the woods, and there was the slow quiet of sitting with myself until I could finally hear what I actually needed.
That was six years ago. And the person who came out of those early months — hands busy, nervous system slowly unknotting itself — is the reason More ∞ Joy exists.
Sobriety didn’t fix me. It freed me to find out what I actually was.
What I Used Instead
In early recovery, I needed rituals that did what alcohol used to — quieted the overstimulation, gave me somewhere to put the feeling, made me feel like I was somewhere I belonged. I found them slowly:
- Morning embroidery before anything else — hands moving, mind following
- Making my bed (this sounds small; it was enormous)
- Going outside with no agenda
- Ecstatic dance — discovering my body could regulate itself through movement
- Improv — learning to be in a room without a script
- And eventually, color
Color came last and stayed deepest. The first time I mixed pigment and watched it activate on wet fabric, something in my nervous system recognized it. Here was a sensation I could choose. Here was a conversation with something unpredictable that I could also trust.
Why Color Works the Way It Does
Substances work because they change your body chemistry faster than you can think. Color works for a similar reason — it bypasses the analytical mind and lands in the body first. You can’t think your way into why cerulean blue makes your shoulders drop. It just happens.
For people in recovery — especially those of us whose nervous systems were running hot before we ever picked up anything — color offers a path back to the body that doesn’t require you to fix yourself first. You hold a swatch. Your body answers. That’s enough.
The Practice I Built
Over six years, my daily creative practice became the scaffolding that sobriety needed to become a life rather than just an absence. The garden. The art room. Morning dyeing before the day gets loud. Ecstatic dance Thursdays. Drum circles. Improv. Yoga.
These weren’t hobbies. They were medicine. The thread connecting all of them was the same thing: they required me to be in my body, in the present, making or moving through something without a destination.
That’s what Dash-Dye is at its core. You can’t dye the past or the future. You show up for this piece of fabric, this moment, this color choice. The wind takes it from there.
Joy isn’t a feeling I found after I got sober. It’s a practice I built, one small physical act at a time.
What This Has to Do With You
I’m not assuming you’re in recovery. I’m assuming you’re human — which means at some point you’ve found yourself using something to soften the world. Screen time. Overwork. Perfectionism. Noise. Busyness. The thing that makes it a little more bearable to be in your own skin.
I’m not here to take that away. I’m here to offer something alongside it — or instead of it, if that’s where you are.
Color is a practice anyone can begin today. No experience needed. No diagnosis required. Just a willingness to find out what your hand reaches for when you hold a stack of swatches and your body is actually listening.
→ Book a session and begin
→ Read Nurture Your Nature — the earlier essay on this practice
