This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on IHeart Radio.

My guest today is Erica Anderson.

Erica is a writer who has written for Christianity Today, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and others.

Her book, Leaving Cloud 9, the true story of a

life resurrected from the ashes of poverty, trauma, and mental illness is available now,

and her upcoming book, Freely Sober, is available for pre-order before its January release,

anywhere you buy your books. Hi, Erica. So nice to have you on. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited. So I've known you online for a number of years and I remember when you first started

talking about your sobriety journey. What was that, was that difficult for you? And what made you start opening up about that?

Yeah, I think I probably originally started talking about it the first time I really tried to get

sober, which was, I would say early 2019, something like that. And the reason I sort of, you know,

dipped a toe where I wasn't like really going all out talking about it,

but I was kind of talking about how maybe I'm not as comfortable with alcohol as I thought I was.

But for me, it is just part of who I am to sort of share what I'm going through online.

That's not for everybody.

But as I became more immersed in,

you know, deciding that I wasn't going to be drinking anymore, I knew it had to, in part,

become a part of my identity, at least for a while, to say, I heard from others to say, to say,

I don't drink. Like, even if you still are drinking or you're still

struggling, to just even say, I don't drink or I'm sober. To just say that, it actually

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