There’s a moment Josh Woll keeps coming back to. He’s a kid on a bike. Another kid corners him, pulls him off, takes the bike, and tells him they’re going to fight.
Josh looks at him and says, “I’m not going to fight you. I don’t know how to fight.”
He tells the story now with the kind of clarity that only comes after years of looking inward. Because that little boy — the one who didn’t know how to throw a punch — that little boy didn’t disappear. He grew up. He learned to numb the feeling of being that small. And eventually, like so many of us, he found something to put between himself and the parts of life that hurt.
For Josh, that something was alcohol and drugs. For more than five years now, it hasn’t been.
When the Heart Closes
One of the things Josh said in our conversation stopped me. He talked about what it means when your heart is closed — how you can walk through years of your life that way without realizing it. You’re functioning. You’re achieving. You might even be winning awards. But you’re not actually here.
Josh would know about the achieving. He’s spent more than two decades in video production and photography. He has a Peabody and an Emmy. He started out shooting weddings because he loved the small details — the glance, the pause, the thing that happens between the planned moments. That eye for detail eventually carried him into long-form documentary work, including three years on Kyle Larson vs. The Double, the Prime Video documentary chronicling NASCAR champion Kyle Larson’s attempt to race both the Indianapolis 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 on the same day. It premieres this Thursday, May 21.
Three years of his life inside one story. That kind of work demands presence. You can’t fake it through a camera.
The Loneliness Nobody Warns You About
If you’ve ever tried to stop drinking or using, you already know the thing people don’t talk about enough: it can be brutally lonely. So much of how we’re taught to socialize — especially as adults — happens with a drink in hand. Take that away and you’re suddenly standing in a room that used to feel “easy”, and now it doesn’t. Josh was honest about this. The early days weren’t a montage of glowing mornings and green juice, and everyone’s story is different, but once you get over that three-month hump, there can be so much joy on the other side.
The friendships that were built on a shared blur don’t always survive sobriety, and the new ones take time to find. And the days, they get longer.
When you stop spending your evenings checked out and your mornings recovering, you suddenly have hours of your own life back. Hours you can actually feel.
Getting High on Life Is Not a Bumper Sticker
We got into the territory I think a lot of people are quietly curious about: what happens to the part of you that wanted the high in the first place? That craving doesn’t just evaporate because you’ve decided to be healthy. It has to go somewhere.
Josh talked about ecstasy — what it had felt like, what it had given him, the way certain experiences shaped the habit. And then he said something that reframed the whole conversation for me. He said you can get high on life. Not as a slogan. As a practice. When you work on the connection between mind, body, spirit, and soul — when you let yourself feel things all the way through instead of pushing them down — the same openness becomes available. It just doesn’t come in a bottle or a pill.
(None of this is medical advice, and we are not clinicians. This is one person sharing what’s been true for him. And two people agreeing on the wonderful benefits you get when you decide to change your life.)
He painted a picture I haven’t been able to shake: a concert where everyone is sober. Everyone fully present. Everyone feeling the music and each other’s energy without anything in the way. Imagine what that room would feel like. Imagine being in it.
That’s the vision he’s chasing. That’s what’s on the other side.
Letting It Move Through You
We talked about emotions, and specifically what it means to let them move through your body instead of locking them in. Josh was direct about how hard this is, especially for men. The whole script we hand boys — don’t cry, don’t be soft, don’t show it — sets them up to spend decades trying to outrun feelings that were never going to stay buried.
I keep thinking about how much of this loops back to that little boy on his bike. He didn’t have the tools. Most of us didn’t. We weren’t taught how to regulate our emotions because the people raising us mostly weren’t taught either. So the cycle eats itself, generation after generation, until someone decides to do the work of breaking it.
Josh is doing that work. And he’s not doing it alone.
What He’s Building Now
Alongside the film work, Josh now runs a sober community — entirely virtual, which means it’s accessible to people anywhere who want in. He offers both group and one-on-one coaching. The group meets biweekly, and there’s a quarterly workshop for going deeper. It’s the kind of container that didn’t exist for him when he first got sober, and now he’s building it for other people.
There’s also an adventure piece. He’s about to climb Machu Picchu with Ryan Lee of Sober Adventure Travel — because part of what sobriety has given him is a body and a mind that can actually do things. The high of standing on a mountain you climbed with your own legs is not, it turns out, a metaphor.
The Bike Is Still There
The little boy on the bike didn’t get to win that day.
But here’s the thing nobody tells you about that little boy: he’s still in there. And one of the gifts of doing this work — the sober work, the heart-opening work, the feeling-your-feelings work — is that you get to go back and find him. You get to tell him you’ve got him now. You get to give him the tools he didn’t have.
If anything in here landed, please listen. And if you’re somewhere on this road yourself — whether you’re five years in or quietly wondering if maybe, possibly, it’s time — Josh’s door is open.
The days get longer when you get to remember them and be present in your body.
Spend them with your heart open.
A Piece of my Why
Come join Josh and I on The Sober Creative where I share my story as well on June 25, 2026 at 11am ET. You can add the chat to your calendar using the link below. Bring questions and maybe some tissues, too. I can’t promise we won’t well up.
