Post Mortem

Summary

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RISK! Podcast – Episode: "Post Mortem"

Host: Kevin Allison
Guest Storyteller: Chelsea Dalcy
Date: September 9, 2025

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Episode Overview

This emotionally raw Conversstory episode centers on Chelsea Dalcy's true-life journey through addiction, recovery, devastating loss, and ultimately, self-forgiveness. Host Kevin Allison guides Chelsea through a reflective and unsparing conversation about her struggle with substance abuse, the codependent relationship at its core, the turning point that forced change, and how both storytelling and the supportive RISK! community played a role in her ongoing healing. The episode is punctuated by moments of self-realization, grief, and profound honesty—a demonstration of why RISK! continues to matter to so many listeners.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Chelsea's Early Life and Path to Addiction

• Background & Family Environment (08:14)

  • Grew up in a small, affluent town where consequences were rare, leading to experimental behavior.
  • Early health problems caused trauma and isolation.
  • Extremely intelligent with a photographic "recording" memory, which allowed academic success without studying.

• Party Culture & Early Substance Use (09:00)

  • Began drinking and using drugs young, framed as typical "partying" among outcast peers.
  • Maintained outward success (class president, NYU with honors) while “blasting through cocaine every weekend.”
  • Quote:

    “I wrote my 20-page honors thesis on a three-day cocaine bender. I would love to see it now. At the time I remember thinking it was brilliant, but who knows about that.” – Chelsea (09:00)

2. The Slippery Slope of Prescription and Opiates

• Medical School & Prescription Dependence (11:21)
  • Entered med school with autoimmune and health issues, leading to prescriptions of Vicodin, then OxyContin, and finally fentanyl patches at age 21.
  • “My pain just escalated as I went on more pain medication. ...It becomes a cycle.” – Chelsea (11:21)
  • The cycle of physical and psychological dependency deepens.

3. The Relationship with Alex: Love, Codependency, and Enabling

• The Partner in Crime (12:43–15:00)
  • Alex, an equally gifted and troubled childhood friend, became her closest partner and co-survivor; together they used drugs as a coping mechanism.
  • Rehab forced separation; Chelsea relates the imposed belief that being together would be fatal.
  • Reflects on how their enmeshment was both survival and downfall: “He was a drug to me, too...I couldn’t set him aside the same way I couldn’t set the drugs aside.” – Chelsea (23:18)

4. The Cycles of Recovery and Relapse

• Relapse and the Anatomy Lab (16:25–27:36)

  • First major relapse occurred on the symbolic day of her medical school “white coat” ceremony, after finding fentanyl patches.
  • Describes a sequence of shame, hollow victories, and repetitive attempts at sobriety—each time “taking a 24-hour coin” at AA, only to relapse again.

• The Low Point: Introduces Alex to IV Drug Use (22:15–29:33)

  • Chelsea teaches Alex how to use heroin intravenously—“the most horrible, dangerous, sinister thing that I had ever learned.”
  • This act becomes the pivot point for overwhelming guilt and subsequent loss.
  • Quote:

    “I had taught this person I loved the most horrible, dangerous, sinister thing that I had ever learned. And I taught it to him.” — Chelsea (30:55)

5. The Breaking Point & Tragic Consequence

• Discovery of Betrayal and Reality Check (29:33–32:24)

  • Discovers Alex has been stealing from her, draining her student loan account to fund drug use.
  • Realization that her actions directly contributed to Alex’s deepening addiction.
  • Quote:

    “It was the biggest reality check I’d ever gotten in my life, in the sense that it wasn’t a game… I didn’t think about the fact that there might be casualties other than me.” — Chelsea (32:07)

• Alex’s Death

  • Five months after this collapse, Alex dies from an overdose. At the same time, Chelsea is five months sober.
  • Wrenching guilt, loss of friendships, and a fortress of self-protection built to survive the pain.
  • Quote:

    “If I was going to live, I absolutely could not take on the depth and breadth of that reality that I had been responsible for teaching the person I love most, the thing that killed him.” – Chelsea (33:03)

6. Self-Forgiveness, Healing, and the Power of Storytelling

• Coming to Terms After 14 Years (34:52–37:28)

  • Realizes only recently—while preparing this story—that she’d never processed her true feelings of responsibility and grief.
  • Quote:

    “This cracked me open… This is another gift that he’s given me, is that I can thrive, even in a different way.” – Chelsea (36:09)

• Support Systems: AA, Therapy, and the Limits of Both (41:42–50:34)

  • Discusses how formal recovery and therapy frameworks often limit or sterilize self-expression.
  • Emphasizes that only through storytelling—particularly in supportive, compassionate communities like RISK!—has she been able to fully access and process her feelings.
  • Quote:

    “Not feeling feelings is not the same thing as not having them.” – Chelsea (44:49)

• Storytelling as a Unique Healing Platform

  • Kevin: “Somehow sharing it on the show that way helped me, like, feel some ownership of it all or like, get to deeper parts of it in a way that I didn’t know was gonna happen.” (46:35)
  • Chelsea:

    “Having a built-in witness with this storytelling thing, like whether it’s an audience or you or a class or whatever… there’s a consenting person on the other side that wants all of you, right? And I haven’t had that experience in many places in my life, truly. Alex was one of those places, ironically.” (49:49)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the insidiousness of addiction:

  “This is why addiction is so insidious and so scary... It divides your own mind. It divides you from the people that you love. It, like, allows you to sit next to your own denial and still behave in ways that hurt yourself and others.” – Chelsea (33:53)

• On self-forgiveness:

  “I have to forgive myself for taking away the most important thing in my own life.” – Chelsea (37:28)

• On the impact of the show:

  “Risk has always been... really, listening to Risk coincided with my sobriety. And hearing all these kinds of different stories and ways of being really opened up my eyes to being forthright and sharing.” – Chelsea (37:41)

• On finding support in the RISK! community:

  “It’s literally not even like being hyperbolic. You’re saving lives. You’re saving the quality of life for people just by hearing that other people are as expansive, as interesting, as different, as, you know, outside the cookie cutter thing.” – Chelsea (51:57)

• Kevin on the importance of the platform:

  “When a story is as told with as much heart and honesty and daring as yours today, people will have, like, breakthroughs or realizations, eureka moments, whatever, that might have, like, nothing to do with the actual details of your story, but because the emotional truth was there...” – Kevin (52:23)

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Important Timestamps

• 08:14 – Chelsea begins her story: early drug use, affluent but troubled childhood
• 11:21 – Prescribed opiates and descending into painkiller addiction
• 12:43 – Relationship with Alex; codependency and using together
• 16:25 – First major relapse; the white coat ceremony
• 22:15 – Chelsea teaches Alex how to inject heroin; recognizing the weight of this action
• 29:33 – Discovery of Alex’s betrayal and the stark reality check
• 32:24 – Alex’s overdose and death; Chelsea’s sobriety
• 34:52 – Processing responsibility and self-forgiveness, even 14 years later
• 41:42 – Reflections on workshopping the story and the importance of depth over detail
• 44:49 – The difference between not feeling and not having feelings
• 46:35/49:49 – Storytelling as unique, healing, and deeply communal

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Concluding Thoughts

In a riveting and heart-wrenching conversation, Chelsea Dalcy brings listeners face-to-face with the reality of addiction, showing how its impact ripples outward, entangles the lives of loved ones, and leaves scars that may take decades to fully see. Her courage in owning her story—supported by the RISK! community’s safe, accepting space—offers solace and inspiration to anyone struggling to process loss or guilt.

Kevin’s empathetic presence and Chelsea’s transparency underscore why RISK! persists as an essential platform for difficult but necessary truths. This episode’s emotional resonance reminds listeners of the power of storytelling—not just as entertainment, but as a profound force for healing, connection, and change.

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Chelsea Dalcy’s art can be found at Cherry Street Pier in Philadelphia and on Instagram @elsiedoesit.
Support RISK!: Patreon | Story Submissions

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Transcript

[A]

Hello, folks. This is Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. I'm Kevin Allison. This is Esther Garcia behind me now. And this is one of our Convers Story episodes where someone tells a story to me and we talk about it. Simple as that. Hey, guess what? You can now vote for which stories you think we should include in the best of risk. Number 33. If you go to risk-show.com thebestofrisk, you'll see how you can click on the story summaries of some of our favorite stories of the past six months. And you can click on about 10 that ring a bell for you, stories you remember that you liked. And if you have your votes in by noon on Wednesday, September 10th, that's Eastern Time, you will have had a say in what stories we feature on the 33rd of our best of Risk episodes. Now listen, I deliberately scheduled this episode to be appearing in your podcast feed once I am getting settled in Bangkok. I'm recording myself right now in my apartment in New York, which is currently being discon. What do you say? Deconstructed. But by the time you're hearing this, I will have moved. And the reason I wanted to feature this episode once I moved is that so many people have written to us saying, oh, no, Kevin's moving. Is Risk gonna end? And the answer is, come hell or high water, we are going to keep Risk running. And this story on this episode is the perfect example of why we feel it is so important to keep the show running. And considering how the world is doing today, it might be hell and high water that we slog through in in order to keep the show running. But listen, today's story comes from Chelsea Dalcy. Chelsea pitched us this story about her journey with addiction and recovery, and we started working on it with her. But then she dec to also take my online storytelling workshop and tackle it in that setting. You know, my workshops are filled with people who are Risk fans, and so they're compassionate, thoughtful, helpful groups where being supportive of each other is top priority. And Chelsea just started struggling with this story, especially in the workshop, because of some of the feedback she was getting that she just wasn't able to know what to do with. She was bumping up against walls. But I had a little outside of class meeting with her. I said, listen, I think it's going to come together by the time you and I record it for the podcast and by the day we do did record it. What you're about to hear something truly extraordinary came out of all of that workshopping. And you're about to hear when the Risk staff meets to discuss our business. We are constantly checking in about how overstretched we feel, how worried we are about keeping the business afloat, how concerned we are about having to look as individuals for other income streams that might require us to spend less time working on risk. And then a story like this comes down the pike. And the whole thing is such a powerful reminder of the importance of this show and how it changes lives. So even if my move to Bangkok makes things harder in some ways at first, I assume at least, and even if the economy gets worse, we're gonna do everything we can to keep the show running. And as always, our patreon [e-mail] risk and you can help us keep the show running right there. Now a warning. This story does mention a drug related death at one point just to let you know. So now let's take a quick break and then we'll hear Chelsea Dawsey's story post mortem.

[B]

We'll be right back.

[C]

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[D]

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[A]

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[D]

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[A]

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[D]

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[C]

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[B]

I'm going to take you back to 2011 in Philadelphia. I was a medical student returning from a year long absence. And in that time I was going to rehab to explain a little bit about how I got there. I need to take you back way further. I started using drugs and alcohol when I was very young. I grew up in a small town, very small and quite affluent. Although some of the people that lived there probably wouldn't say that. It was some 1 percenters and then a lot of 10 percenters, I like to say. And they kind of programmed us to think that we were middle class growing up, which is pretty strange, but right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

We grew up without consequences really. And in my case, I feel like I got kind of all of the negative outcomes of this kind of small town Pleasantville living. I had health problems when I was very young. That was traumatic. Kind of pulled me out of school the way that regular kids were going. I got bullied very badly. And from a very young age I was clearly very, very bright. And really what it was was a photographic memory. I have a recording memory. So literally everything that goes into my brain gets recorded in there in all dimensions. And I'm Able to recall that very easily. So I never had to study. But I got along pretty well. After some of these traumatic experiences as a kid started compounding, I turned to what some of the other outcasts and weirdos were doing at the time, which was drinking, experimenting with weed, experimenting with cocaine at a very young age. We called it partying. It was kind of just accepted. It's what we all did. And it worked for me because I could work hard and play hard. I was the president of the freshman class. But I only made it to 50 days of school my freshman year because I was getting bullied so badly. I got into nyu. I graduated NYU with honors again. Blasting through cocaine every weekend, just partying my face off. I wrote my 20 page honors thesis on a three day cocaine bender. I would love to see it now. At the time, remember thinking it was brilliant, but who knows about that. But I kind of continued to have random health problems, autoimmune diseases, some mental health issues, kind of after some of the traumas that happened. And by the time that I got to graduating from college, I was ready to go to medical school, which is what I had always dreamt of doing. It was the dream that my mom wanted me to be a doctor, so I wanted to be a doctor too. So I went into medical school having some autoimmune issues and Lyme disease. And I was prescribed Vicodin for those things. Then quickly after that, I was prescribed OxyContin for those things.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

And then soon after that, because my pain just escalated as I went on more pain medication. Cause that's what happens to your system is that pain serves you. So if you are numbing yourself to pain, you need more pain medication, you grow more pain receptors, you have more pain, you need more pain medication. It becomes a cycle. And ultimately they put me on fentanyl, they prescribed me fentanyl patches.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And I, yeah. At 21 years old and in medical school, and it kind of crashed and burned around me. And I took off a year to go get help. And in that year I got a lot of help, but didn't like immediately take to that help. I was very stubborn and thought that I knew what I was doing. I went to three rehabs. I was in nine months of sober living at the time. I just kind of took all those things for granted. And the privilege that I received was a life with not severe consequences. I always had somewhere to sleep when I wanted to go get help. It was there for me when I needed it, even if I didn't want to take it right away.

[A]

Were you starting to use things like fentanyl or oxycontin kind of things along with the cocaine, like mixing.

[B]

So really the thing that did me, and I was very judgmental of my friends who were using opiates as a person staying up three to four days on cocaine a week every week. I was highly judgmental of my friends who are now succumbing to the opiate crisis and just saying, oh, I can't. I don't understand how they could do that and throw their life away. And then I was prescribed it and what it did was we called it landing gear. Me and my partner at the time would call it landing gear. Cause after a three day cocaine bender, I have health problems. I would have migraines. I would be violently, violently ill. Oh my God. And taking the opiates kind of like took those consequences away, you know. And then eventually it became more manageable to just do the opiates as opposed to the kind of insanity of three days of partying and wild sex and not being present, not being able to get my work done. It made more sense in my addict mind to be high on opiates, but you can't study on opiates. For me, my brilliant photographic memory turned off and I couldn't recall things like I used to be able to do. And I found out in medical school I actually have what some people would consider a learning disability. But really I think it's just a divergence, like a neurodivergence, you know. But I never learned how to study. And with that and the opiates, I hit a wall. Also, as I'm coming back to medical school, I had been estranged from the single most important partner I had had in my entire life. I referred to him earlier, my partner in crime, Alex. And we had grown up in the same small town. We met in preschool, very similar. We were very, very brilliant, but struggled in school in different ways. Coped by using drugs, coped by partying and letting loose and being the mayors of the party always. And when I went to rehab, he didn't. And that year in rehab and sober living and all those things, they really conditioned me to believe that if we got back together, we would kill each other. That was a very hard reality for me to accept. We were enmeshed. We were later on, I realized codependent. But we were kind of clinging to one another to get through the world. We were surviving together and we had some wonderful times before all the wheels came off. I look back Now. And it was hard for me to remember the fond memories for a long time. And now I'm starting to let them in. So taking you back to me returning to medical school. I had done all this rehab. I was feeling on top of the world, like, oh, I'm getting this second chance. I'm really awesome because I was able to overcome this thing. And now I'm back, and this is gonna be my underdog story, and it's gonna be amazing. And I was not back very long before I was faced with my first real temptation. I was looking at a journal on the day of my white coat ceremony, which is in medical school. In the very beginning of your first year, everyone gets their short white coats to say that you're a student and not a doctor. And there's a big ceremony where all your friends and family come. And I had already done this one time the. A couple years before, and I was high at that, and I was very proud of myself and thinking, like, oh, I'm gonna show everybody. This is a big comeback. I opened this journal, and two little pieces of fentanyl patch fell out into my lap.

[A]

Oh.

[B]

And we used to chew on them to get the drugs out in a very concentrated way. And there was literally no thought. There was no logical thought that occurred. I just put them in my mouth, and I started chewing on them. And within 45 minutes, I was downstairs at my white coat ceremony, literally nodding out.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And I hadn't used opiates in a long time, so I was very affected. I was nodding out. I'm looking around at all these people with all their families. I'm sweating in this polyester white coat in summer, and I am mortified. You know, it was. That moment was one of the most shameful moments I had had in my life up until that point, because I was very aware that who I was in that moment was not who I believed myself to be. And I didn't really feel much control about that. And, you know, my family was all there. They're all rooting for me. They're so excited. They're thinking that, oh, my God, we have our child back. She's gonna make it. It's gonna be wonderful. And the truth is, like, I had to put a wall around whatever that feeling of responsibility was and just keep going. And I went upstairs to my dorm room. I passed out, took a little nap. I woke up and went to a frat party, which I had not been to in many, many years or it felt like many years. At the time, I was 25. I went to this frat party. I was still fucked up from the fentanyl I was drinking, which I also hadn't done in a year. And I was just like, screw it, let's go, let's do this. Off the wagon, the races off the wagon. Let's go. I picked up a much younger and very handsome frat boy at the frat party, and I took him back to my dorm room. And that was entirely disappointing. We were going up in the elevator, and we had been talking a bunch as we had walked from the frat house through the quad into my dorm room. And I realized, like, oh, my God, this guy sucks. This guy sucks terrible. He had, like, you know, like, big dick energy. He had big dumb dick energy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And just. He might have been smart enough to get into medical school, but he just could not see the world outside of him and his penis. And it was highly disappointing. And I had come off of this, you know, eight year relationship with Alex. We had grown up together, but we got together when I was 19 and I was missing him. He was nearby, you know, he was in the next town over, but we hadn't connected. This made me realize how much I was giving up by the choices we made to do drugs.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So the next morning we woke up. I was violently hungover from the opiates, the booze, all the things that I was trying to do. We ran across campus. We went into the anatomy lab where we were meeting our cadavers for the first time. And there was.

[A]

Oh, my God, yes.

[B]

So anatomy lab. Like, you know, you walk through the door and the. The smell hits you. It's like formaldehyde. And if you've smelled what rotting flesh smells like, it's that. It's really that. And I again. And the best part is we walked in, you know, we ran in, and it was in the middle of a moment of silence. It was just the worst moment to walk in. And there's a million bodies in the room all covered in white sheets, and all of these very solemn medical students looking down. And we come clattering in there and interrupt the moment of silence. Highly embarrassing. But again, it was this moment where I had to be like, this is not me. This is not my value system. This is not like, how am I ending up in this situation, which was my real problem. Like, not what did I do to get into this situation, but how did I end up in this situation and not really able to take responsibility for it. And after that, I was really, really disappointed in myself. And I was like, that's it. I'm not gonna do this anymore. That was just a one off. I had been saying that for a year and doing it repeatedly, but I was like, I really mean it this time. I started going to AA every night, which I had been doing while I was in treatment and stuff like that. And that was helpful for a little while. And then there was a hurricane that came through and everything shut down. My AA meetings were canceled, school was canceled. There was nothing going on. I was bored as hell. And I was like, I'm gonna call Alex. I'm gonna call Alex, my partner in crime and see what he's up to and just kind of dangle, you know, maybe we can hang out and see if he's still using and whatever. Cause when I'm bored, what I like to do is get high. I like to create something else to distract me from that silence that I have to sit in. So I called Alex. I took him in Philadelphia, there's a neighborhood called Kensington where people are. There's a lot of people that are living on the street. They describe it as an open air drug market, and that's very much what it is. And I showed him where to get heroin and I told him I needed to go stop somewhere to get needles. I had been up there in the very beginning of our year of estrangement after my first rehab. One of my first major fuck ups was meeting someone from rehab and going to go relapse with them. And that person showed me everything I needed to know about how to become an IV drug user.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

Up until that point, I had only. I had snorted oxycontin, I had, you know, snorted cocaine. I had done a bunch of these things that felt more like partying. And I really got set off on a different path after that. We went on a nine day bender, me and this guy, back when I first got out of rehab. And I went right back into rehab after. So I was still hung up on the fact that the people that were helping me in treatment were telling me that if I got back together with Alex, we'd kill each other, right? So we went up there under the auspices that he was going to snort heroin and I was going to do whatever I needed to do. And it wasn't. We weren't going to talk about it. And it was going to be like a little secret. And of course, that wasn't what happened. We went back to my medical school dorm room and I went into the bathroom and at that point I was shooting heroin. And Cocaine, which is a trip, but that's what that rehab guy had taught me how to do. So I showed Alex how to do it. It was sort of an inevitability, and I didn't think too hard about it. It was, this is my partner in crime. This is what I'm up to. I'm going to show you what to do.

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[B]

And we did that. We kind of decided together that maybe the rehab people were right and that we might kill one another if we keep doing this. So we swore off each other, swore off the heroin. I would go back to school, and then he would go his separate ways. And, you know, I kept thinking, every time, this is it. I'm gonna be sober this time. I'm gonna do it. I would go to an AA meeting, take a 24 hour coin, which is the coin you take when you're swearing off the substance. And I would do that over and over again. I was feeling somewhat responsible for Alex, so I really distanced myself from him. And I would go find some other guy that I knew from rehab, pick him up, go up to Kensington, get drugs. It was this cycle while I'm still in medical school and trying to go to classes and trying to go to the anatomy lab and trying to participate in all these things, and at the same time sneaking off to my dorm room to do these three and four day benders. And I wasn't, like, using and then being a functional member of society. No, no. I was isolating for three or four days in my dorm room with usually a guy and with whatever drugs that we could get at the time, and then staying there until we had shot all the drugs. And I would wake up the first day after that, it was usually a Monday, and I would feel like absolute garbage, physical garbage. Pounding headache, sweating all over the place, and just saying, I will never do this again. I'm never gonna do this again. This is crazy. This is not me. I'm never gonna do this again. And then the next day, I would start beating myself up. I'd feel a little physically better. I would start saying, how can you do this? You're a piece of shit. This is like, this is what you do every time. You're terrible. And then Wednesday, I would go to class and I would feel like, hey, things aren't so bad. I would go to a meeting on Wednesday night. I would go report to my Young People's AA meeting, and I would say, hey, I'm doing this thing. I totally changed. I'm never gonna go back and there was a lot people in the room that knew that I was just gonna go back, because I kept doing it over and over. And then Thursday, I would feel kind of excellent. I'd feel pretty decent. And I would go to my classes. Thursday night, I'd get bored, and I would call another dude, and I would start it all over again. And I did it from August until early October. I just did it over and over again every couple weeks. It would be Alex. Alex would be the guy. But we were under this agreement that whatever we did was gonna stay in this little bubble. We couldn't get back together. That would certainly be the end of us. He was a drug. He was a drug to me, too. It was the same thing. It was like I couldn't set him aside the same way I couldn't set the drugs aside. And so I continued to do this over and over and over again. And late September, I had been in the anatomy lab once a week or twice a week for many weeks at that point. And I was really in a depraved state. I was going in. I was wearing turtlenecks under my scrubs. Because the thing about shooting cocaine is it blows out your veins. So you get these abscesses, and you get, like, giant bruises, and then you can't use those veins. So you have to move up. You have to move up your arm, move to another place. And I did that over and over again to the point where I couldn't be showing my neck because I was trying to shoot in my neck. So I'm in medical school, which is this insane opportunity for anybody, you know, and high stress. And high stress. I'm, like, desperately trying to pull this off. But me showing up with my lovely anatomy lab partners. I would work with three other people throughout the semester, and they were so kind to me. I was going into the body with my long sleeves tucked into my gloves because I couldn't roll my sleeves up.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

And just trying to play it off. And, like, the one person was so sweet, and he was like, you know, have you thought about just rolling up your sleeves and maybe you wouldn't make such a mess? And I'm like, oh, yeah, it was mortifying. But I really was just, like, on a train that wasn't stopping. I didn't know how to end this. And my grand plan of making medical school my big comeback was done. It was toast in front of my eyes unless I did something drastic. And then the first week in October, I had been with Alex over the weekend, and we had gotten to him Monday morning. And that's usually when whatever guy I had would leave cause the drugs would be gone. But Alex and I had this long term relationship where we cared for one another. And he was always really lovely about helping me through these hangovers I would get. Cause he wouldn't get those kinds of hangovers. He would, you know, get me a cold compress, get me water, take care of me. But this Monday I woke up and he wasn't in the bed. And that felt really weird. And then I went out to the coffee table and saw my ATM card sitting on the table. And I was like, this is also really weird. And so I went on online banking, which was somewhat new at that point, or I was new to it. And I saw that every time that Alex and I had gotten together, he had been taking out money from my account. So I would send him with the ATM card to go get the cash and then we'd go get the drugs. And then later on, at some point when I was unconscious, he would go down with the ATM card and get more money out that he would then take. So I looked and my balance was below zero. We had effectively drained my entire student loans for the entire semester.

[A]

Oh Jesus.

[B]

Which is about $6,000. And I was floored. I was devastated. At first it was betrayal. You know, we didn't do this to one another. If there was somebody getting something over on someone, it was us on them, it wasn't on. It just wouldn't happen. And then I think the second thing was like the reality check that I had taught this person. I loved the most horrible, dangerous, sinister thing that I had ever learned. And I taught it to him. And I had just come off of all of this treatment. He had not been to treatment one time and he didn't have the money to go get drugs. I gave him the card and he got the money out and he was able to. To kind of create a habit in that time that I wasn't even thinking about. I was so self centered. I was so in my own head that I was so concerned with trying to fit into medical school that I didn't think twice about introducing the person who loved me most in the world into something so terrible.

[A]

Oh God.

[B]

And it took me a very long time to understand that that was part of what changed in that moment. But that day I did what I usually did. I felt like garbage, had a giant headache. I went to an AA meeting, took a 24 hour coin. I came back to campus where I was like still trying to prove that I was somehow a normal medical student and everything was fine. So I went and auditioned for the acapella singing group, the Arrhythmias.

[A]

The what?

[B]

The arrhythmias.

[A]

Oh, it's cute.

[B]

It's cute. And, you know, and, like, without any. Like, I was sweating. I was probably green. You know what I mean? And unable to really sing. I think I tried to sing a Lady Gaga song, which is also bold. And then, you know, the next day, I didn't think about using drugs again. And the day after that, I didn't think about using drugs. I was just so disturbed. It was the biggest reality check I'd ever gotten in my life, in the sense that it wasn't a game. This wasn't the cute little town that we grew up in. This wasn't like the no consequences, Nothing's gonna go wrong. I trusted my path. I really believed that I was gonna get out of this. But I didn't think about the fact that there might be casualties other than me.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And there was. Alex died of an overdose five months after that.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

And I was five months sober. And I stayed sober. And I built this fortress around the idea that I could be responsible in any way. I had a lot of people ask me. There were people that assumed that I had some influence on him. I lost a lot of my friends after that. And I think now I'm looking back and I'm like, oh, that's why that makes sense. It makes sense because they thought I was responsible. And at a time when I didn't see it, but I couldn't. If I was going to live, I absolutely could not take on the depth and breadth of that reality that I had been responsible for teaching the person I love most, the thing that killed him.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And it took until trying to share this story to get there. I tried to write the story, and it had a bunch of different viewpoints that were not feeling real. And on the reflection, it's because this is probably the hardest truth that I've ever had to accept, is that this is what happens. Someone taught me how to do it, and the way that he was going, someone else might have taught him, and it's. The same thing might have happened. I don't know. I used to dwell a lot in that. Maybe someone else would have done it, or maybe you would have done it anyway, or I had to, you know, I had to let his story be how he got there on his own. But I think that this is the hard and real truth of It. And this is why addiction is so insidious and so scary. And so it just. It divides your own mind. It divides you from the people that you love. It, like, allows you to sit next to your own denial and still behave in ways that hurt yourself and others. So, yeah, I mean, I guess it's not the end of the story. It's just not. That was 14 years ago, and I came to this massive realization two weeks ago working on this story.

[A]

Incredible. Holy fucking shit. That is amazing, because I remember earlier drafts of the story, you and I talking to each other, and an issue came up, which was why? How were you finally able to stay off of it all? You know, how were you able to finally end that cycle? And at that time, when we were first going through, like, a first draft or whatever, you weren't so sure. You were, like, it didn't have that sort of typical AA kind of ending and no dismissal of aa. When I say typical, that there's often, like, this finding God or hitting rock bottom and then seeing the light, that kind of thing. But it's taken you all this time, I think, to realize, holy shit, my psyche couldn't have taken all that in at that time and needed to kind of keep me a little bit protected from the sheer gravity of the responsibility.

[B]

I buried it for survival.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I think that I buried it so deep and under so much that I forgot that there might even be something there. And this cracked me open. Like, it wasn't, like, a little thing. This is another gift that he's given me, is that I can thrive, even in a different way. Now I feel like maybe I really have been just trying to survive for these past 14 years. I just turned 40, and I realized I haven't planned a life. I'm doing all these things, and I have a life, but I really have a hard time planning my life forward. I don't picture what I'm gonna be when I'm 60. You know, I kind of stopped at 30 years old. And then every. Every time I hit a milestone, I'm like, maybe another five years I can picture. And I realized, you know, a month into 40, I'm like, I haven't pictured till 45. I haven't let myself do it because I think part of me is buried with him. Like, part of me is stuck there. And I think that I need to feel bad about this. Like, I feel like I need to feel every part of this, all this responsibility. Like, I don't need to bury me now, but I absolutely have to. Forgive myself for taking away the most important thing in my own life.

[A]

Wow. Holy shit. That is incredible. That is really. I'm honored. I am so honored that you shared that.

[B]

I feel really risk has always been like, really listening to risk coincided with my sobriety. And hearing all these kinds of different stories and ways of being really opened up my eyes to being forthright and sharing. And so taking your storytelling workshop and workshopping this story, it's just added a new dimension to what I can do, I think, in my life by being realistic and being real with myself about what has happened.

[A]

Wow, that is phenomenal. Okay, I'll tell you what, we have to take a break, then let's come back and we'll keep unpacking this. Hey, folks, another quick break and then Chelsea and I will continue unpacking her story.

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[A]

That was extraordinary. I'm so touched that it came out so different this time. Let me remember. So Cindy Freeman handles the pitches for Risk stories, and when you first pitched, I think she said something like, this is an extraordinary story, but I think there's some blockage there, maybe some PTSD or, like, there's some aspect that's missing from it. Then you joined my workshop, one of my online workshops that I've been teaching this summer, and. And I knew that you were having frustration with the story there, too, because you were getting mixed notes. Some of the notes that you'd gotten from our coaches behind the Scene at Risk were clashing with some of the notes you were getting from students in the class, which is kind of occupational hazard. You know, like, that can be a confusing part of workshopping a story, no matter what. But it's fascinating. Like, of course, I didn't fully understand that aspect of the story, that there was still some. That there was blockage there, literally major, major, major.

[B]

And I think that frustration, it was with me, you know, it was easier to be frustrated, going, this is. You know, I don't understand this feedback. They're saying one thing, and then. And like, they told me to take Alex out, and they told me to focus on, you know, the reality was, like, I felt deeply that there was depth missing from my story. The real feelings there was missing. And originally, I was trying to tell this story based on the details of the depravity that occurred while in medical school. And I was really leaning, and like I said, I have this memory where I remember every single thing that's gone in. So when I try to look back on something, it's like Google Maps. I can just zoom and zoom and zoom. Sometimes it's great to have lots of details, but I. You know, instead of going deep, I was, like, going wide or something. You know, I was. But I really don't think that I had access to these feelings. And I didn't even think I was aware, but I didn't think I felt them. I really didn't. I would tell people, no, no. It's weird. I don't feel any. Anything like that. I really don't. And that's not the same thing as not having those feelings. Not feeling those feelings is not the same thing as not having those feelings. And when I took a little moment and I said, there's something missing, I have to go and try to figure out if there is something more that I'm trying to say I invited Alex in in a way that I don't think that I had up until this point. I felt like respectful distance from him in whatever afterlife situation. But even this morning, getting ready for this, I talked to him and felt him in a way that, you know, I haven't really been able to. I was trying to remember last night, like, what it was like to be around him. And I don't. I just. What I did was I shrunk him into these things, these wild stories from when we were in high school together. And like, the stories that he would tell about his life, I would retell. But that was a bit of a cop out or it was a way to cope.

[A]

Yeah. Wow, that is so incredible. And it's funny that that makes that one step about, like making amends makes sense to me now in a way maybe that I hadn't completely thought about before or completely processed. I totally appreciated what you just said about not feeling feelings is not the same thing as not having them. And there's a similar thing that happens where intellectually we can say something and know that it's ultimately true, but unless we have the experience of feeling it all the way through, we don't know exactly how true it is, you know, truly.

[B]

And where those feelings go is a lot. That's where some health. I have autoimmune diseases. I have stress related disorders. I have mental illnesses that are affected by stress. Like all those things when you just compound them and stick them places so that you don't have to be right with them. It's a way to get by. But it doesn't go away. It just becomes something you can't recognize.

[A]

Right? Yeah. Holy shit.

[B]

And this took digging. Like, I am so willing to go there. I have been through so much therapy. I graduated therapy after being in it for a lot of my life a year ago with the understanding that if something came up, I would go seek it again. But this is, I think, this extra dimension that I wasn't getting there, just telling the story over. I have to really do work to dig this out of the mire and muck inside of me. And the real survival part of me that's like, no, no, no. If you know this, you clearly won't make it. You know, like that sentiment that I had 14 years ago kind of didn't leave in some way, I think. And I think that it takes invitation and space. And doing those drafts of this story has been very uncomfortable. You know, I've experienced a lot of Doubt about a lot of things. I've really gotten down on myself about a lot of aspects of it. But at the end of the day, it's so worth it. And if I had stopped at any point, I don't know that I would have made this self discovery that, like, it's so new that there's only more space to take up with it. There's only more reality to give myself about this.

[A]

That's incredible. And I think a part of that is workshopping a story in order to bring it to this audience. You know what I mean? Like, there was a gal who. The first ever child molestation story that we had on the show, which was very early on, it was in the first year or two of the show. She said, oh, I've been talking about that in therapy for 10 years now. But somehow sharing it on the show that way helped me, like, feel some ownership of it all or like, get to deeper parts of it in a way that I didn't know was gonna happen.

[B]

Extra dimensions, for sure.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I just shared a story with Slate about this stupid prank that I pulled on a kid that I had a crush on in high school where I mailed him my poop. And I have told that story, you know, to risk audiences before at live shows, just as an in between stories thing, you know, like just as a little anecdote between this story or that. And I've always just ended it with, why did I do that? Who knows? You know?

[B]

Ha ha, ha ha ha.

[A]

And then this gal from Slate asked me, oh, I would like you to write that for the. For slate.com as a personal essay. So I started writing it and as I was turning in drafts, she was asking me, yeah, but why really did you do this? But wait, how were you feeling at that particular moment and how were you feeling the next day? And asking those kind of questions? I was like, oh, yeah, there's some fucking reasons I mailed someone my poop. Like, now I'm able to see what was going on with my psyche that week.

[B]

Absolutely. And a lot of the places where I've healed are not places where they want you to dilate and express, you know, like, AA has a very. There's a lot of customs and rituals about how you share in there. And I learned how to kind of like sterilize my stories to make them palatable in that certain aspect. For aa, same thing with therapy is like, I was in therapy for long enough that if I about something with too much emotion, it was like, oh, do we need to adjust your meds. Like, it was always like a, like some, like if I shared with friends, like there's no way to share some of this stuff without feeling a lot. And if that's too much for everyone and I can't hold it by myself, then you just put it back on the shelf. You know what I mean? You don't go there.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And I think that, like having a built in witness with this storytelling thing, like whether it's an audience or you or a class or whatever, the idea that this isn't just something that's going in my journal, this is something that I'm really trying to express and communicate to another person. And then there's a consenting person on the other side that wants all of you, right?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And I haven't had that experience in many places in my life, truly. Alex was one of those places, ironically. And, you know, you don't get those relationships a lot in your life. You know, your family wants you to be a certain type of way. Like sometimes they just can't know you in the ways that they don't want to know you.

[A]

Right, Exactly.

[B]

You know, maybe in AA there's not enough time. It might just be time. Right. Like, you might only have a minute to share, to let everybody get a turn or whatever. In group therapy, you don't want to dominate the whole session. And it's all these places where you can't show up fully. Well, like storytelling is like, here's your blank slate. Serve it, Serve it to us, you know, and we want to eat it.

[A]

Yeah. Oh my God, that is. I'm so touched that to think of, you know, like this particular platform risk, especially with all of our financial struggles and shit like that, you know, like going from month to month and year to year, ever since the pandemic of being like, holy, holy shit, how are we going to keep this going? And I have this newfound. This year, I'm just a fatalistic kind of guy. I totally got what you were saying about not planning a few years ahead. I have plenty of addictive tendencies in myself as well. In fact, I just quit drinking again for the many, many of time. And I'm like, no, no, you, you have to move to Thailand without that, you know, but hearing you talk about this and talk about how this particular platform is a place where you have that, where you have all these consenting adults who are thoughtful and compassionate and want the whole you, that's like. It took 16 years of cultivating to really make that all that. It can be. And now I'm like, oh, no. Come hell or fucking high water, you gotta keep this going, you know, for sure, for sure.

[B]

It's literally not even like being hyperbolic. You're saving lives. You're saving the quality of life for people just by hearing that there's other people out there that are as expansive and as interesting and as different and as, you know, outside the cookie cutter thing that, you know, that's, that's why podcasting is amazing, is it's, it's accessible and it's, it's right there, you know.

[A]

And I can't wait to hear from people who, you know, you can. You can also never predict what kind of reactions a story is gonna get, because when a story is as told with as much heart and honesty and daring as yours today, people will have, like, breakthroughs or realizations, eureka moments, whatever, that might have, like, nothing to do with the actual details of your story, but because the emotional truth was there, all of a sudden someone will be like, oh, my God, that's what happened to my relationship with my mom, or whatever it might be, you know? So I can't wait to see what we hear from people about this story. Well, thank you so much, Chelsea. This is incredible.

[B]

Thank you. Thank you for everything you're doing. You already said it. This is like God's work.

[A]

And that is that. This is another day behind me now. And thank you so much to Chelsea Dalce, whose art studio you can visit in person at the Cherry Street Pier in Philly. And you can find the art studio and Chelsea herself on Instagram elsiedoesit. And if you want to help support Risk, which helps make breakthroughs like what you heard today possible for storytellers, listeners, and for those of us who work on the show, please do consider joining our Patreon, which comes with tons of perks like bonus stories and ad free episodes. The one we're running this week, the bonus story we're running this week is from Eddie Brill. And it sounds a little bit loud like this to me. Every relationship has been, you know, almost like I always say, like South Carolina, uncomfortably hot with pockets of hate. And yeah, so that and so much more [e-mail] risk or you can send us a one time donation at PayPal me riskshow. And if you've got a story that you'd like to tell me, go to risk-show.com submissions and send me your pitch. Folks, today's the day. Take a risk.