Recovery Through Practice

I didn’t get sober in a way that makes a clean story. There was no spotlight moment. There was a jacket I started embroidering, there were the woods, and there was the slow quiet of sitting with myself until I could finally hear what I actually needed.

I was 33. The person who came out of those early months, hands busy and nervous system slowly unknotting itself, is the reason More Joy Studio exists.

Sobriety didn’t fix me. It freed me to find out who I actually was.

What drinking was doing for me

Looking back, I can see that I drank because the world was too loud and I didn’t know why. Bright rooms, crowded conversations, the constant work of reading what everyone else seemed to understand without trying. Alcohol turned the volume down.

Shortly after I got sober, I was diagnosed as autistic. Suddenly my life made a different kind of sense. I hadn’t been failing at being a person. I’d been masking an undiagnosed nervous system, and alcohol had been one of my tools for doing it. I write more about that turning point in Embracing Neurodiversity.

Taking the drink away didn’t take away the overwhelm. It just meant I had to find other ways to meet it.

What I used instead

In early recovery, I needed rituals that did what alcohol used to do: quiet the overstimulation, give the feelings somewhere to go and help me feel like I belonged somewhere. I found them slowly:

• Morning embroidery before anything else. Hands moving, mind following.
• Making my bed. It sounds small. It was enormous.
• Going outside with no agenda.
• Ecstatic dance, where I discovered my body could regulate itself through movement.
• Improv, where I learned to be in a room without a script.
• And eventually, color.

Color came last and stayed deepest. The first time I watched dye 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 how you feel faster than you can think. Color works in a similar way, without the cost. 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 long before we picked anything up, 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. (I explore how that works in Color as Somatic Language.)

More joy is possible

In those early months, I needed something to hold onto that wasn’t a promise of being fixed. I started telling myself, over and over: more joy is possible. Not perfect joy. Not joy all the time. Just more than I had yesterday.

It became my motto, and later it became my business. Every session, every dye, every portrait I make still comes back to that sentence. It’s the line at the bottom of every page on this site, because it’s the truest thing I know.

The practice I built

Over the years since, my daily creative practice became the scaffolding that let sobriety turn into a life instead of just an absence:

• The garden, where I learned patience from things that grow at their own speed.
• The art room, where I work before the day gets loud.
• Dyeing in the morning, when the light is soft and the wind is kind.
• Ecstatic dance, drum circles, improv and yoga, where I practice being in my body with other people.

These weren’t hobbies. They were how I took care of myself. What connected all of them was the same thing: each one asked me to be in my body, in the present, making or moving through something with no destination.

That’s what dash-dyeing 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. 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.

Practice, not perfection

Recovery taught me that a practice is something you return to, not something you get right. Some mornings the dye goes exactly where I hoped. Some mornings it blooms into a color I didn’t plan. Both are part of it.

That’s also why I love stains. A stain isn’t the end of a garment. It’s the beginning of its next life. I write about that idea, which I call Chromatic Kintsugi, in Embracing Stains as Places for Transformation.

What this has to do with you

I’m not assuming you’re in recovery. I’m assuming you’re human, which means that at some point you’ve used something to soften the world. Screen time. Overwork. Perfectionism. Noise. Busyness. Whatever 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.

If you’re struggling with alcohol or substance use, you don’t have to figure it out alone. In the U.S., the SAMHSA National Helpline is free, confidential and open around the clock at 1-800-662-4357.