About

I got clean from opiates, heroin, kratom, and benzos after hundreds of tries. More relapses than I can count. It took everything I had.

And then I got there — and thought that was the hard part. It wasn’t.

The hard part was what came after. Years into sobriety I realized I was just replacing one thing with another. Filling time so I wouldn’t relapse, but never actually feeling fulfilled. Something was still missing. And I knew that until I figured out what that was, the urge to use was always going to be somewhere in the background.

I tried a lot of things. I built out a box truck and hit the road. Vanlife looks like freedom from the outside and it has been, there have been real moments out here. But even that had something missing. I was drifting. Doing interesting things but not moving toward anything. No purpose. Just an endless question of what do I want to do today.

When I finally started going after something real, something that felt like what I was supposed to be doing, everything shifted. The excitement came back. Not the fake kind you chase to fill a void, but the kind that comes from actually building something that matters.

That’s what Slow Roots Sanctuary is. It’s the community I was looking for when I felt lost. The conversation nobody was having. I’m a certified life coach and I built this for the people still in that gap — sober, or out of whatever held them back, but not yet sure who they are or where they’re going.

This is what I’m supposed to be doing. I can’t ignore it. So I’m not.