Show notes
Episode summary
This week on Dopey’s Greatest Hits! Dopey legend Jessa Reed returns for one of the strangest, funniest and most honest conversations in the archive. Jessa talks about becoming uncomfortable with public attention, feeling trapped by other people’s versions of her and disappearing from podcasting after years of sharing her life.
She describes contracting Lyme disease at the beginning of the pandemic, losing much of her memory and vocabulary, contemplating suicide and eventually recovering through an unconventional treatment involving Antabuse. She and Dave explore nervous-system regulation, people-pleasing, boundaries and rebuilding an identity after your mind and body fundamentally change.
Then Jessa revisits her unbelievable meth years: growing up around addiction, discovering crank, doing stand-up while high, nearly dying, communicating with aliens, drinking meth pee and manufacturing her own fake teeth. She explains how a Christmas visit with her recovering father helped her recognize that meth had finally become “stale.”
The conversation eventually turns toward her complicated relationship with twelve-step recovery. Jessa explains why she stopped identifying as an addict, cautiously returned to psychedelics and feared that telling the truth about her experience could give someone else permission to relapse. Dave and Jessa discuss recovery dogma, California sobriety, acceptance, gratitude, consciousness, manifestation and whether dreams—or aliens—might be trying to tell us something.
Before the interview, Dave reads an anonymous listener’s powerful account of a one-night relapse and explains how sharing the truth can transform shame into connection.
Plus more.
