I have a pretty specific comfort zone when it comes to podcasts. I host. I ask the questions. I know where I’m steering the conversation and roughly where it’s going to land.
Kelley Kitley is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with 25 years in the field, 13 years of her own sobriety, and a national platform people know as America’s Social Worker. She has sat across from a lot of people who thought they were in control of the conversation. She is very good at what she does.
She invited me to be a guest on The Kelley Kitley Podcast, and I’m going to be honest: I showed up thinking I’d give her the clean, well-organized version of my story. The one with good transitions and a tidy arc.
That’s not what happened. What happened was better.
What I Shared
I’ve been sober since May 1, 2006. My last drink was April 30, 2006. That’s nearly 20 years, and I still find ways to talk about it that feel new because the life I’ve built around that decision keeps getting bigger.
Kelley asked me about where it started, and I told her the truth: I used to identify as a “professional drinker.” Not as a warning sign. As a personality. I was good at it, I thought. I was fun. I was social. I was also, under all of that, someone who needed help and had no idea how to ask for it in a way that didn’t terrify me.
Alcoholics Anonymous saved my life. That’s not a line I use for effect. It’s just true. And from the moment I got sober, I wanted to figure out how to be useful to other people who were going through the same thing.
That’s the whole reason The Sober Curator exists. I built the platform I wished had existed when I was brand new to sobriety and trying to figure out if a sober life could be a real life. Not a smaller life. Not a quieter life. An actual, full, interesting, fun, culturally engaged life. Turns out: yes. Obviously.
Why Kelley Kitley Specifically
I had Kelley on The Sober Curator Podcast back in the fall. Watching her work from the other side of the mic was something. She’s appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, People, the Drew Barrymore Show, Live with Kelly and Mark. She runs a private therapy practice in Chicago called Serendipitous Psychotherapy. She knows the clinical side and she knows the lived experience side, because she’s in long-term recovery herself.
When she tells someone to “play the tape forward” before making a choice they’ll regret, it’s not a technique she read in a textbook. She’s lived it.
Having her turn the mic on me felt like the conversation completing itself. Two women who’ve built something around sobriety, talking honestly with each other about what it actually costs and what it actually gives back.
Her Book
While you’re here: Kelley just released the 2nd edition of her memoir, MY self: An Autobiography of Survival, Recovery, & Empowerment, on April 1, 2026. It’s new enough that it covers the sober curious movement, parenting teenagers in recovery, and the grief of losing her dad. It’s the kind of book you give to someone who’s been asking quiet questions about their own relationship with alcohol and doesn’t quite know where to start.
You can find it on Amazon here.
Go Listen to the Episode
It’s Episode 37 of The Kelley Kitley Podcast on Apple Podcasts. Twenty-nine minutes. Also on Spotify and Kelley’s Substack.
Find Kelley at kelleykitley.com and on Instagram at @kelleykitley.
