19 Years Sober. 19 Years of YES to Life on Life’s Terms

19 Years Sober.

What a ride.

As the founder of AddictionHelp.com, I wanted to share my feelings on this special day.

I have never regretted my sobriety, even as I’ve walked through moments that some would describe as “excuses to get drunk/high.”

Some were just incredible, others incredibly painful, yet the world would have told me I needed something to take or drink to “enjoy” or “forget” them.

• Facing the shame and horror of the lies, broken relationships, and the remains of my actions due to my addiction.
• Rebuilding relationships and witnessing tremendous and selfless love from family and friends.
• Going back to college sober and having a prolific year culminating in a produced play kickstarting my career.
• Meeting my bride, the love of my life, and choosing to stay in Orlando and build something together here.
• Getting married while in the middle of filming a movie and having my first “real” job.
• Jumping headfirst into excitedly building a new career in tech and media because I loved the web so much and launching my first startup company.
• Witnessing the “failure of that first company” and subsequent un-or-underemployment that spanned being hired, fired, laid off, or simply witnessing companies collapse (At least 6 of them in little more than 2 1/2 years).
• Having a wife who worked so hard, providing for our family while I “figured it out” and who, in the midst of my sojourning, never stopped believing in me, telling me that “I know who Chris Carberg is, I know who I married, and I KNOW you are going to break through.”
• Reaching a breaking point of deciding that God must want me to go back to acting or writing because I can’t do it.
• Getting that dream job opportunity at the peak of my sorrows, minutes away from throwing in the towel, working diligently, growing it successfully, and building new brands.
• Experiencing a traumatic miscarriage and walking with my wife through years of hopeless infertility.
• Finding a beautiful new church home and something of a community to be a part of.
• Leaving a company I helped build and loved, abandoning one particular product that was my brainchild, my baby, all because I couldn’t put up with the darkness surrounding me there anymore.
• Having my first child, a beautiful daughter, but temporarily losing my wife to intense mental illness in the form of nine long months of postpartum depression.
• Launching PostpartumDepression.org to help cope with the extreme pain and to witness it explode into a wellspring of hope for the nearly a million visitors since.
• Becoming a caregiver for my father as he faced a painful cancer journey, and I was in the role of the advocate for my mom and dad.
• Buying and completely renovating a home, moving in March 2020 as the world changed in the face of Covid-19.
• Welcoming my amazing son into the world while the rest was locked down.
• Returning to my passion, seeing lives saved and hope restored with the launch of AddictionHelp.com. And now, having reached and served millions of people through our brand, all while prioritizing PEOPLE over profits, we are seeing ethical and compassionate business models appear, a testament to our faith in this vision and our commitment to our community of recovery.

The mere thought of ever missing ANY of those moments is now unimaginable.

These are only a very small compilation of moments from the past 19 years and hardly scratch the surface of all that has happened.

The long and short of it is that sobriety has given me the gift of a memory of these moments and the clarity to see it accurately. And while I’ve done this 19 years in a row, I can only be sober right now, today. I live in a perpetual now, an enduring today.

Sobriety is the greatest gift I ever gave myself, and what I’ve learned along the way is that most of the world doesn’t see sobriety the right way.

You see, sobriety is deeply misunderstood.

Most believe that sobriety is seeing a drink or drug or substance or behavior and making a sign of the cross with my hands to ward off its evil, and reluctantly saying no to it, to fun, to everything.

Sobriety is not saying “NO”.

Sobriety is saying “YES!” to life on life’s terms.

I’ve been saying YES to life for 19 years and am beyond grateful.

Happy Anniversary!