Mishka Shubaly is the author of seven bestselling Kindle Singles and the memoir I Swear I’ll Make It Up to You. He has traveled the world as a songwriter, storyteller and comedian, sharing the stage with artists like Doug Stanhope, Richard Price, Ron White and Lydia Lunch. In 2001, he survived a shipwreck. In 2017, he was a clue on Jeopardy! When not writing, recording or touring, he teaches nonfiction at the Yale Writers’ Workshop. In the spring of 2019, he celebrated ten years sober.

In this episode we talk about:

• how he hated high school and ended up being able to test out and start college at 15 just to get out of his hometown

  all of the hardships that piled on top of him in his teenage years

• having a father who was a chemist and always feeling he had to follow his footsteps and then falling in love with drama classes and coming alive in writing
• how as a man he was programmed to believe he had a voice and could choose his own path and how women are programmed to not hurt anyone’s feelings or inconvenience anyone
• how possibility functions, it isn’t possible until it is
• releasing the pressures of money and expectations of others and asking yourself what you really want
• graduating college with top honors and also at the top of his alcohol addiction
• moving to New York City to pursue writing and feeling like he failed because no one handed him a book deal or opportunities 
• giving up on writing and choosing to go on tour as a musician for a year living out of his van, getting a record deal and choosing the musician’s life
• the ups and downs of his life as a musician 
• having an epiphany that no epiphany was coming
• being newly sober but only being employable in a bar
• being fed up with everything after a fight at a bar and running for the first time ever across the city to get his bike back and how that led to him becoming a runner 
• his transformation as a runner and how at first he was running out anger, then it became almost spiritual and feeling love through it
• an editor for a publication he had written for asked him to write for a new platform Amazon Kindle and feeling like he didn’t have any stories to tell now that he was sober
• becoming a best selling author publishing his stories of being shipwrecked and his honest real sobriety story and more on Kindle and finally stepping into the writer he wanted to be
• how human darkness is human darkness and how by being boldly honest in his books it resonated with people around all the world 
• feeling like he was out of the closet when he wrote his truth and led to more self acceptance 
• feeling like once he was sober he had to be a certain way and then slowly allowing himself to be himself while sober and embrace his past
• navigating profanity and children and beyond
• seeing sobriety on a spectrum and sharing tools and support beyond AA as different voices and methods will get through  
• how there is just as many if not more people who have gotten sober on their own as there are in AA 
• dealing with rejection
• skipping the middle man and just being happy now – the advice he got from his mom  

• Which keychain she chose from my line and why! 

His newest Audible Original  “COLD TURKEY: How To Quit Drinking By Not Drinking” is free during the month of May Get it here: http://adbl.co/ColdTurkey  

Check out his best-selling Kindle books here

Find all things at http://www.mishkashubaly.com and @mishkashubaly

LINKS to other things/people/music we mentioned! 

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 Adi Jaffe book on addiction, The Abstinence Myth and podcast episode

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