🦞Start Here🦞

Sobriety is suddenly finding your boat stuck on a distant island shore, far off from the mainland of simplicity.

The gusting melee of socio-psycho-pharmo-support in your recovery sails spun your boat like a washing machine whirlpool, eventually coming to rest alone on a rocky island shore, shipwrecked in the gulf of despair.

This gulf is the space of the Jewish Lobster.

If you’re here, you probably already know something about that island. Maybe the Program got you to shore. The work likely saved your life and mine. But somewhere in the meetings, the steps, the language — a question surfaced that you weren’t supposed to ask. And instead of going away, it got louder.

That is not a defect. That’s your mind minding.

I’m the Jewish Lobster. 4+ years sober. Thousands of hours of meditation. A philosophy degree that made me constitutionally incapable of accepting “because the Program says so” as a final answer. I got sober through AA. I stayed sober by asking the questions AA told me to stop asking.

Where to begin depends on where you are.

If you need recovery support — I’m not anti-AA. The buoy worked.

If you have questions you can’t ask — Jewish tradition treats questioning as devotion, not betrayal.

If you’re ready to investigate — systems that make questioning itself pathological deserve examination.

If you love someone on the island — you belong here too.

The core thesis: You can’t stay stuck in the same trap once you understand how it works.

Recovery culture has become a trap for those trying to recover, a self-tightening mechanism of nonconsensual identity, colonized dogma, and state-sponsored sainthood. I write to free all the other lobsters trapped in a recovery identity they did not choose.

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