Dec. 9, 2025 – I am a musician, content creator, author and certified reiki and sound healer. My new album is called “Calypso Rising” under @SunsetSea13 on IG & Tik Tok and my YouTube channel handle is @Sunset_sea13
The album will be on all major music platforms as well. This album is to inspire and awaken light in the darkest of nights.
Instagram.com/sunsetsea13/
Q. If you are in recovery, what was your drug(s) of choice and when is your sobriety date?
A: My DOC was IV heroin and fentanyl and I have been clean from it since October 5, 2018. I had a great 5 years in recovery from age 26 to 31.
Q. Is there anything special in your sobriety toolkit that helps keep you sober?
A: Being connected to my higher power who I referred to as Gus, which stands for a general universal spirit.
Also the 12 step fellowships has helped me establish and stay spiritually fit.
Q. Do you think addiction is an illness, disease, a choice, or a wicked twist of fate?
A: From a spiritual perspective I believe that before our souls incarnate on this planet that our souls sign up for the different challenges and life struggles that we all face. And that earth is like a school where we are here to learn. So I do believe it is a literal dis-ease of the soul. Where we are constantly looking outside ourselves to fill a god sized hole within.
Q. Where are you from and where do you reside now?
A: I was born in a small town called Marshfield, Massachusetts, which is 30 minutes outside of Boston. I now live in Southern California.
Q. What is one word you would use to describe yourself?
A: Resilient.
Q. Describe how you came to your “rock bottom” point.
A: I reached my rock-bottom without even realizing that rock-bottom had a basement.
I thought I had already endured the worst, that the darkness I was navigating was the final layer, but it wasn’t. I found myself spiraling into a place where my spirit felt fractured, where I was drained, isolated, and pushed to the edge of hopelessness. I was suicidal, not because I wanted to die, but because I couldn’t see a way to keep living inside the cycle of extreme abuse I was trapped in.
It was a world where every part of me was being violated my safety, my dignity, my autonomy, my voice. The coercion, manipulation, and violence didn’t just strip away my freedom; they twisted my perception of myself. The abuse was so relentless, so calculated, that I didn’t even realize how deep it had pulled me under until I was already drowning.
And in that moment in that basement beneath rock bottom spirit guides and HP stepped in. It was a thin thread of life that wouldn’t let go of me. That’s how I began to climb out.
My rock bottom wasn’t a failure, it was an initiation to completely change my life.
The moment I realized the abuse wasn’t my destiny, and that my soul deserved more than surviving in someone else’s darkness.
Q. If you ever retire, would you prefer to live by the ocean, lake, river, mountaintop, desert, or penthouse?
A: Ocean because I am extremely passionate about the ocean and it actually has a lot to do with my music.
The ocean is definitely my happy place.
Q. How do you measure success?
A: I don’t. I realize that trying to measure judge keep track or anything like that just kind of holds me back.
Things align much better when I just let go and let God as they say in the rooms or have blind faith that the universe is looking out for me as long as I stay connected with my HP.
Success is an individualized process for each person.
Q. If you could give advice to your younger self what would it be?
A: That there true predators exist in this world, not everyone has my best interests at heart so make sure to be wise with who I choose to be with. Also to love myself and that it’s going to be ok.
Q. Which living person do you most admire?
A: Definitely the musician and singer Paris Paloma. There’s something incredibly powerful about the way she turns pain, oppression, and the experience of emotional abuse into art that actually liberates people. Her music gives voice to women who’ve been manipulated, minimized, or trapped in toxic cycles women like me who had to fight their way back to themselves.
Q. What major event or realization shaped who you are?
A: There was a moment in my life when everything I thought I knew about the world, about love, safety, and what it meant to survive shattered in an instant. A lightning bolt straight through the center of my existence. The kind of grief that doesn’t just break your heart, but breaks reality wide open.
One day, life was recognizable. The next, it was unmade.
This event tore through me with a force I wasn’t prepared for — a grief so deep it felt ancient, a heartbreak so sharp it left cracks in my spirit where light and shadows both poured in. It was the moment innocence dissolved and truth arrived uninvited, a truth that demanded I see everything differently: myself, others, the world, the purpose of my own existence.
It stripped me of every illusion I once clung to.
It dismantled the life I thought I was building.
And in the ruins, I was left alone with the rawness of who I really was. Carl Jung talks about the shadow and I wasn’t just facing it….i was residing in it. And that destruction of my old self became initiation.
It was the death of an old version of me kind of like an ego death……the self that needed to be broken open so a new consciousness could rise. Through the grief, through the devastation, something awakened. Something ancient. Something divine. I learned how to rebuild not from what I lost, but from what was revealed.
Q. What do you love most about living sober?
A. Spiritual sovereignty, peace, freedom, and joy. I was able to get back into my true passion which is music and write an album “Calypso Rising”.
Q. Which part of your treatment and recovery do you feel was the most interesting or unexpected?
A: I thought I was good and set in recovery and life. And it was when I made a toxic relationship my higher power that I realized that looking outside myself for anything is not the answer.
Q. What’s your concept of a Higher Power?
A: Source, spirit, GUS (general universal spirit), LOVE and light, divine creative intelligence.
Q. What is your Astrological sign?
A: Pisces.
Q. Who is your favorite celebrity in recovery?
A: I’m going to shout out Brandon Novak because he is such an incredible and inspiring person.. His story, “Dreamseller”, of experience, strength, hope, resilience and transformation is truly admirable.
Q. What book(s) have you read more than once?
A: Tweak by Nic Sheff I read 3 times which is also a drug memoir. He even wrote a follow up book called “We All Fall Down” which was his relapse memoir. I love his authenticity and his writing style is truly captivating.
Q. What books are you reading now?
A: Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur by Jeff Perlman. I just finished the book Psychopath Free by Jackson McKenzie, which was truly so eye-opening and life-changing.
Q. If you were giving a dinner party for your 3 favorite authors, living or dead, who would they be?
A: Definitely Dr. Joe Dispenza, Carl Jung, Allen Watts, and Delores Cannon.
Q. Which film have you watched the most?
A: Blow with Johnny Depp, who plays George Jung. This film is based off a true story and it just so happens that I was born in the same town that George Jung grew up in.
Q. What book would you most like to see turned into a movie or TV show that hasn’t already been adapted?
A: Honestly my memoir. And I’d like a part in writing the soundtrack as well.
My life is a mix of the movies Blow, Methadone Mile, Thirteen, and the Phantom of the Opera LOL.
Q. Are you binge watching any TV series?
A: Stranger Things which was fun and before that it was a show called “Tell Me Lies” also based off a book, and it truly illustrates just how manipulative true narcissistic psychopaths can truly be in modern day society.
Q. What is your favorite App?
A: Insight Timer for meditation.
Q. Who is your favorite performer, living or dead?
A: Amy Lee from Evanescence and I also have to shout out the band Blue October. The lead singer is incredible live and very honest about his addiction and recovery journey.
Q. Who are your heroes in real life?
A: I would say my dad but he is no longer in human form. So My dog Marlo and a wonderful Greek woman who helped me escape from the toxic relationship I was stuck in. She, like my mother, never gave up on me. Also anyone who is healing from severe trauma grief and addiction.
Q. What are some of the most memorable songs in your life?
A: Bring Me To Life by Evanescence.
- My Immortal by Evanescence.
- Nutshell by Alice In Chains.
- Nothing Else Matters by Metallica.
- My Little Girl by Tim McGraw.
- Landslide by Stevie Nicks.
- Rihannon by Fleetwood Mac.
- Always With You from the Spirited Away soundtrack.
- Wind Beneath My Wings by Bette Midler.
- Finally Moving by Pretty Lights.
- Scars by Papa Roach.
- Californiacation by Red Hot Chili Peppers.
- Angel of Music and Think Of Me from Phantom of the Opera.
- Father Figure and Fate of Ophelia by Taylor Swift.
- My Heart Will Go On from Titanic.
