The reason this exists

I went into treatment in June 2023 with three things I wanted out of it: to change my relationship with alcohol and drugs, to finally grieve my mother, and to start living a life beyond my wildest dreams.

My mother struggled with substance use for most of my life. Then she took her own life.

I didn’t handle it, and I want to be precise about that, because the polite version helps nobody. My mother died and I drank and used harder than I ever had. Grief didn’t make me careful — it handed me a reason, and I took it. The stretch after her death was the worst of my life, and I was the one making it worse.

That’s the part nobody warns a family about. Addiction doesn’t stay inside one person. It moves, and it keeps moving long after the funeral.

If you’re in that stretch right now, or someone you love is — the numbers at the bottom of this page are staffed around the clock.

The one thing that didn’t let go of me during all of it was my best friend. She got clean in December of 2021, and something in her changed that I could not stop noticing. We’d be on the phone at night — me on my second glass of wine, her with a La Croix — and any time the conversation turned to her sobriety, she came alive. I wanted what she had. That’s the whole reason I went.

I walked into treatment thinking I didn’t belong there. Not because I didn’t need it — because I’d decided I wasn’t like the other people in the room. It took me longer than it should have to notice that we were all sitting in the same chairs for the same reason.

Once I got over myself, I liked being around them. I started thinking about how to stay in it — some way to be useful that would also keep me sober.

Then I got out, and I had to find somewhere to live.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more frightened than those first few days. The structure that had held me up for weeks was gone. Nobody handed me a plan. Nobody told me where to start. I had about a week to decide where I’d live while I tried to stay sober.

I never wanted anyone to feel the way I felt those few days.

I spent hours looking for a sober living home and found almost nothing. A handful of websites with badly chosen photos and no real information. Mostly directories: a house name and a phone number. I wanted to see the place and know whether there was a bed. That was the whole ask, and it was unanswerable without calling twenty people.

I remember the thought exactly: I’m fresh out of treatment, trying to find a house that will keep me sober, and this process would make me want to relapse.

Then it got specific. I’m a gay man, and I have a dog. I was turned away, talked around, and in a couple of cases simply misled — by houses that could have told me on day one that I was never going to work there. Nobody was cruel about it. The information just wasn’t anywhere I could reach until I’d already spent hope on the answer.

I’d just spent months learning that the ways I thought I was different didn’t matter much. Then I walked out into a system that sorted me on exactly those differences and wouldn’t say so.

That’s what Newly Sober is. Not a directory. A home states what it requires before you call. You can see whether there’s a bed tonight. Nobody finds out at the door that they were never eligible.

Every decision here traces back to those few weeks. We publish a home’s requirements up front, because the rejection that hurt wasn’t the no — it was finding out late. We don’t sell placement priority to anyone at any price, because the moment a home can buy its way in front of you, this is just a directory with better design. And someone from our team walks through every home before it goes live, in person or on video, because I’m not willing to send anyone somewhere we’ve never been.

I don’t know what’s right for your recovery, or your son’s, or your client’s. Nobody honest does. What I know is what it’s like to sit at the end of treatment with a phone, a list, and no idea which of these places would even take you.

Case managers use this platform. So do homeowners, and I’m glad they do — a discharge planner who can see real availability does better work, and a good house that fills its beds with people who actually fit stays open. Those benefits are real, and I don’t take them lightly.

But I didn’t build it for them. I built it for the person I was in those first few days, and for everyone else getting lost somewhere in the middle of this.

You should be able to just see it. That’s all this is.