 I was 19 years old and I walk in to my first real job ever, which happened to be at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House. If on day one when I walked into that building, someone would have turned around to me and said, hey, you know you're going to be homeless using, you know, heroin on the streets of Los Angeles in about a decade, I would have looked around and I said, there is no way. Like what are you talking about? That's impossible. But that's exactly what happened. In 2003, I went hiking with my roommate and slipped and fell. This doctor prescribed me a high-grade opioid painkiller and that was really the beginning of kind of a downward spiral from me into full-blown addiction within a few very short years. I got into long-term sustained recovery because I had recovery supports. I was able to get things like housing. I was able to get a job. I was able to get peers that would lift me up when I wasn't able to lift myself up. So late in 2015, I lost my friend Greg to an overdose when I was still living in a sober living home. And right after Greg died, it seemed like another friend would die every couple of weeks. And it got to a point with me where I had to do something. It was hard to get policymakers to listen to our community. I couldn't get newspapers to publish anything. I couldn't get town halls together, but I did have the power of my story. Being able to not have to lie about who I am anymore, it's an absolute feeling of freedom. I made a big decision about a year and a half ago to get public as, you know, not just a person in recovery, but an LGBT person in recovery and proud of it. And it was one of the best decisions ever because it allowed me to truly fall in love and to experience this incredible life with someone else. So we talk a lot about addiction. We don't necessarily talk a lot about recovery. 23 million Americans live in long-term recovery today, right now, here in the United States. But where are their stories? Because for me, had I not known that recovery was possible, had I not seen successful recovery stories out there, I would have given up hope. We want people to, like, know who we are. We want them to know what we're about. We want them to experience this recovery journey with us.