How-To Travel Guide for the Newly Sober

DON’T FORGET YOUR GRAPEVINE –

April 18. 2022 – What felt like her unchangeable future proved not just changeable but also hopeful. That PBS moment sparked something within Hong. In 2013, two years after watching that segment on Thailand, Hong hit rock bottom.

“Alcohol and drugs will rob you of everything,” Hong says. “It’s an eventuality.” For Hong, it took the loss of her two children—her parents took them under their supervision—and a brutally honest conversation with her mother to see reality. Enough was enough.

“I detoxed alone,” she says. “That was really impactful for me because I found myself alone in a house with no friends, no family, and that’s where it had taken me. Nobody was calling to check on me. And when I got up, I went to an AA meeting.”

After that July 7 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting, Hong never looked back. Although Hong wanted to jump straight into traveling, she waited three years to take her first trip. First, she had to do the work to set her life in order. Her sponsor (someone in AA who was further along in her sobriety journey) reinforced the importance of laying the groundwork for responsible adulthood.

“She really taught me how to be a woman with integrity,” Hong says. “I had spent so long avoiding all my problems, hiding in a bottle, that I really had lost the ability to know how to deal with my life.”