I have spent more than thirteen years sober. I built Sober Is Dope, recorded hundreds of podcast episodes and wrote books about recovery, prayer and the brain. But there was one thing I had never really given people: the whole story of me.
There was a cigarette on the ground. Not a fresh cigarette. Not mine. Somebody else’s cigarette.
There was enough left on it to smoke, and my body started moving toward it before my dignity could catch up. That moment still bothers me when I think about it. By then I had already lost bigger things. My real estate career had fallen apart. A relationship that meant the world to me had ended. The beautiful brownstone in Fort Greene where I had once felt like a young king in Brooklyn had descended into chaos and eventually caught fire. I had gone from having money, property, friends, music, women, parties and a future I could see clearly to moving around Brooklyn trying to survive myself.
Those things were enormous. But somehow, it was that little cigarette that helped break me. I saw what I was about to do.
I was about to get down on a Brooklyn street for a cigarette somebody else had thrown away. And something inside me finally said: look at yourself. I broke down.
I prayed. I asked God for help. And I believe God answered me.
That experience is personal to me. I cannot prove to another human being what I heard that morning, and I have never needed anyone else to experience God exactly the way I did. I can only tell you what happened from where I stood.
I heard a voice telling me to get up. My prayer had been answered. Go to the hospital.
So I got up. December 15, 2012 became my sobriety date. More than thirteen years later, I am still here.
People Know Sober Is Dope. They Don’t Necessarily Know Pop. That is why I wrote Sober Confidential.
I have been talking about sobriety publicly for years. I built Sober Is Dope. I created the podcast. I wrote about prayer. I wrote about the brain. I wrote about addiction, identity, neuroplasticity and rebuilding your life.
I have spent a tremendous amount of time trying to take what I learned from recovery and turn it into something useful for somebody else. But teaching recovery and telling the truth about your own life are two different things.
You can teach people for years and still have rooms inside yourself that you never invite them into. Sober Confidential is me opening those rooms. This is not my instruction manual.
This is not me standing at the front of the room telling you what to do. This is me sitting across from you at a diner in New York at two in the morning, when everything is quiet, and saying: ask me.
Ask me what happened. Ask me about my father. Ask me about alcohol.
Ask me about sex. Ask me about heartbreak. Ask me about God.
Ask me about Jen. Ask me about the house. Ask me about the cigarette.
Ask me about the things I am proud of. Ask me about the things that still hurt. Ask me what I was afraid I would lose when I stopped drinking.
Ask me what still challenges me after thirteen years sober. I will answer you. That is the book. Readers can find the book and current retailer options at Sober Is Dope Books.
Before I Was the Sober Is Dope Guy, I Was a Kid From Brooklyn
Sometimes when people meet someone deep into recovery, they only know the recovered version. They see the lesson after it has already been learned. They see the person after the rebuilding.
That can flatten a human being. I was somebody before alcohol. I was Young Pop.
I was an extremely happy kid. I was sensitive. I loved books. I wrote poems. I loved girls before I even understood what love was. I would put little gifts in shoeboxes, wrap them up and give them to girls I liked.
I grew up in Brooklyn with my mother and father. Then my father died when I was thirteen. There are losses that happen to you and losses that become part of you.
Losing my father became part of me. But my life did not immediately turn into an addiction story. That is important.
There were years of life before the spiral. I graduated from college. I went into real estate. I made music. I had ambition. I had relationships. I was social. I was functional.
I was doing well. In 2005, I moved into a big brownstone on Carlton Avenue in Fort Greene. 121 Carlton.
Man, I loved that place. I had worked my butt off in real estate. I was in my twenties. I had my girlfriend. My friends were around me. We had music. Community. Beautiful people. Energy.
I felt like I had made it. That is part of what makes addiction so difficult to explain. My life did not look like a tragedy. For a while, it looked like a celebration.
The House Became the Party
Then 2007 happened. The real estate market started collapsing underneath me. Deals stopped closing. Money got tighter. The identity I had built around being successful started cracking.
I was still functioning. That word matters. Functional.
You can be functional and still be moving in the wrong direction. You can still answer your phone. You can still make money sometimes.
You can still have a girlfriend. You can still make everybody laugh. You can still be the life of the party.
You can still look like yourself. And something can be going terribly wrong. Alcohol became more important.
The house changed. I changed. People came through 121 Carlton constantly. Some were friends. Some needed somewhere to stay. I tried to help people. I wanted to be the big homie. I wanted to be the provider. I wanted everybody to be okay.
There was love in that house. There was also chaos. Eventually, the party became bigger than my ability to control it.
And then the house actually caught fire. Literally. Somebody put furniture in the boiler room.
Flames. Smoke. Sirens.
Nobody got hurt. Thank God. But the house was done.
The owner, who was also my business partner, repaired the building and told me I had to leave. She told me I had partied too long. She was right. I had.
I Didn’t Get Sober When the House Burned Down
That is another reason I wanted to write this book. People like clean turning points. The house burned down, so he changed.
No. I didn’t. Life does not always give you one dramatic warning and then watch you make the intelligent decision.
Sometimes the warning comes and you keep going. Sometimes five warnings come. Sometimes twenty come.
Sometimes everybody around you sees what is happening before you can admit it yourself. My relationship had fallen apart. My financial life had changed. The house was gone. My stability was disappearing.
I still drank. That is why I am uncomfortable with the romantic idea of rock bottom. I don’t want somebody reading my story and thinking they need their own Brooklyn sidewalk before they are allowed to ask for help.
Please don’t do that. My rock bottom is not a destination. You do not have to earn recovery by destroying enough of your life first.
Then Came Jen
There is another reason Sober Confidential had to be different from everything else I wrote. Jen. People who have followed me have heard me mention my girlfriend, my partner, the woman who has been beside me through this life.
But mentioning someone is not the same as telling the story. Jen did not meet me after everything was fixed. She met me inside the collapse.
That matters. She did not walk into some beautiful recovery story after the credits rolled. We were both human beings carrying our own wounds. We loved each other inside a period that was complicated, unstable and sometimes dark.
We drank together. We cried together. We held each other up.
We almost lost things that cannot be replaced. And somehow, after all of it, I walked away with the girl. When I look at my life now, that means more to me than I know how to explain.
Because sobriety eventually stops being about what you gave up. It becomes about what you refuse to lose.
Thirteen Years Later, Sobriety Feels Different
I am not writing this from my first year sober. That matters too. I have had more than thirteen years to think about what happened.
Thirteen years to be wrong about parts of my own story. Thirteen years to understand other parts differently. Thirteen years to forgive people.
Thirteen years to forgive myself. Thirteen years to realize that addiction was not my entire life. It was a window.
A terrible window, yes. But there was a kid before it. There is a man after it.
That is one of the biggest things I want people to understand. You are not required to make the worst period of your life your permanent identity. I am a person who experienced addiction.
I am also a son. A boyfriend. A writer.
An artist. A musician. A founder.
A person who loves God. A person who still gets things wrong. A person who still has fears.
A person who still has to protect his peace. And a person who wakes up every day knowing that this second life is something I have to respect.
Creativity Tames the Beast
One of my core Sober Is Dope beliefs is that being busy is not enough. You can be busy destroying yourself. I know.
I did it. I say creativity tames the beast. That is not a medical treatment, and I am not presenting it as one. It is something I learned about myself over thirteen years of sobriety.
When alcohol left my life, I needed more than the absence of alcohol. I needed a life. I needed music.
Books. Ideas. Work.
Art. Love. Prayer.
Purpose. Curiosity. Things I could wake up excited to build.
Recovery gave me the opportunity to ask a question I had not taken seriously enough before: What do I actually want to do with the fact that I am alive? That question still drives me.
Paradise Is on the Other Side
When I was brand new to sobriety, I walked into an AA meeting in Brooklyn. I was surrounded by older people. People who had lived.
One of the men asked how long I had been sober. I told him it was my second day. He welcomed me and told me something I did not understand yet.
Paradise is on the other side. At the time, I didn’t really get it. Paradise?
I was trying to figure out how I was going to live without drinking. I was trying to survive the beginning. Years later, I understand what he meant.
He was not promising me a perfect life. My life is not perfect. He was talking about peace.
The ability to wake up and not have to reconstruct what you did the night before. The ability to love somebody without alcohol constantly negotiating the relationship. The ability to look at your mother and know she doesn’t have to wonder whether her son is going to make it.
The ability to create. The ability to remember. The ability to trust yourself again.
The ability to sit quietly without needing to escape yourself. That is paradise to me. And I protect it.
Why I Finally Wrote Sober Confidential
I did not write this book because I suddenly discovered that my story mattered. I wrote it because I finally understood that the parts I had been protecting might matter too. There is a difference.
It is easier to tell people what you learned than to show them what it cost you to learn it. It is easier to talk about neuroplasticity than heartbreak. It is easier to build a framework than talk about shame.
It is easier to tell somebody to believe in themselves than to introduce them to the younger version of you who stopped believing in himself. It is easier to talk about recovery than to tell somebody why you needed recovery.
So I finally did the harder thing. I answered the questions. I went back to Brooklyn.
I went back to my father. I went back to 121 Carlton. I went back to the relationships.
I went back to the parties. I went back to the fire. I went back to the sidewalk.
I went back for Young Pop. The dedication of Sober Confidential is only one sentence: “For young Pop, I came back for you.” That may be the whole book in seven words.
I spent years trying to help other people recover. Eventually, I realized there was still somebody back there waiting for me. Me. And I went back to get him.
Read the full POPR Desk report, What Is Sober Confidential? Inside Pop Buchanan’s 13-Year Sobriety Memoir and the Story Behind Sober Is Dope, for the memoir’s structure, publication history and the evidence boundaries around Buchanan’s account.