I grew up in Camden Town, 70’s London. Loud, unglamorous, full of characters — the kind of place that teaches you to read people fast, whether you want to learn that skill or not.

I spent the first half of my career as a creative director, building brands for a living — machines designed to make people want things they didn't need. I was good at it. Twenty years of it. And somewhere in that work, without noticing, I became my own first customer.

I'm an addict with decades of recovery. I've worked the steps multiple times, found sponsors, sat in enough rooms to know exactly what they can give you and exactly where they stop. I got clean. I got sober. And I still, for a long time, wasn't at peace — because nobody tells you that arrival is the lie, not the addiction.

It was in a Camden Town meeting, back in the same streets I grew up in, that an old-timer told me something I've never forgotten: ‘You can’t shoplift your recovery’ — You can't walk out with something you didn't pay the real cost for. That line has outlasted almost everything else I learned in early recovery, and it still runs underneath everything I do now.

What actually moved things wasn't a program. It was going deeper — into Jung, Bowlby, Schopenhauer and Epictetus with philosophy and Stoicism and whatever else that I could get my hands on that had weight of truth in it. I've always been a broad church, a magpie. I'll take wisdom from anywhere — Bukowski's poems, a therapist's insight, a sponsor's joke, an old-timer's warning, a cowboy on YouTube forging a sword. None of what I've built is mine alone. All of it got passed to me, hand to hand, by people who didn't ask for credit and deserve it anyway.

Along the way I became the primary carer for my aging father — the man who could never do for me what I've spent years learning to do for him. That work taught me more about forgiveness, patience, and what recovery actually costs than anything in a meeting ever did. Because we find the best in ourselves, at the service of others.

Somewhere in all of it, I stopped needing to be a benchmark. No letters after my name. I'm not a therapist. Not a counsellor. I'm a mentor. A coach. A guide — someone who's done the work and is still doing it, who's learned to listen with his ears instead of his wounds, and who got tired of watching people stall out at "recovered" when there was so much further to go — my authority comes from my proximity to, and my time in, the trenches of addiction.

Beyond Recovery is what happens next. Not a program. Not a brand. Just the truth of where the work actually leads — and the belief that if I say it out loud enough, it might help someone else stay long enough to find out for themselves.