Hi Reader,

It's hard to imagine what you'd do if you're a touring musician whose primary instrument is the guitar, and you start to lose the use of your hands. It may seem like an incongruous response, but Paul Curreri chose to stop drinking. And it wasn't exactly an intentional choosing of sobriety. It was more, "I'm not drinking today and I'm probably not going to drink tomorrow either." And that has turned a choice that he makes every single day.

Like so many in the music industry, Paul felt connectedness to the life that alcohol gave him; the clubs and bars where everybody congregated, the vibe, but Paul knew that alcohol was taking away far more than it was giving him. He knew he was making up stories about "sober people" and what they were like, and he knew he needed to make changes to help his marriage and to help himself.

While he is still struggling with his hands, and the relatively recent diagnosis of tension myositis syndrome, he is trying to be and stay in the moment. He very recently returned to the stage for the first time in a very long time, and our conversation on Recovery Diaries in Depth is a vulnerable, emotional, sincere return to Paul's essay he wrote for us when he was five years into his sobriety from alcohol, an essay Paul had not returned to since it was published. His reading of that essay and our conversation are as genuine and as gentle as it gets.

Our conversation wanders like a contemporary folk song Paul may well have written himself; covering sobriety, relapse prevention, anger, ambivalence, chronic illness, identity loss, grief, recovery, the soothing noise of music to the din of modern life; Paul and our host, Gabe are two men living with mental illness who connect intimately and sincerely, and it's a conversation you won't want to miss out on.

All my best,
Gabe Nathan