Road to Recovery: ‘I dare you to believe’

CAME TO BELIEVE –

Sept. 13, 2022 – We all have value; we all have worth; we all have something to contribute, and we don’t want to hang onto that,” Clemmer said. “…When I can give back, it just works.”

It works for those he’s helping and for his own sobriety, too, a journey pulling him up from the depths of alcohol and drug abuse that started in his teenage years after seeing his dad and uncle struggle with addiction.

When Clemmer came home high on marijuana as a teenager, his dad — who had eventually found religion and gotten clean — told him he must break the family chains of addiction. But Clemmer felt it was an attempt to curtail his fun as a kid and draw him toward a God he saw as oppressive.

“It seemed cheap; it seemed fake,” he said of the church.

He continued experimenting with marijuana as a teen and then took to sneaking into his grandma’s store of homemade wine.

“I didn’t really like it, but yet there was a part of me that did,” he said. “And then I started drinking a little bit, and then I think one of the first few times really getting drunk, I felt like I could be — so to speak — myself.”