Turning Your Mess Into Your Message ft. Jaycee K. Clark

Host Sober Steve celebrates 1,164 days of sobriety and thanks listeners for their support, highlighting the new fan mail option before welcoming Jaycee K. Clark, a 34-year-old trans woman, to share her experience, strength, and hope, along with her inspiration for activism today.

Jaycee discusses her past struggles with addiction, her experiences in sex work, and her journey to sobriety. She emphasizes the importance of building connections, overcoming shame, and transforming past traumas into a source of hope and activism. Jaycee also talks about her experiences navigating healthcare and dental work as a recovering addict, offering valuable advice for newcomers on the impermanence of emotions.

- **Celebrating Sobriety:** Steve marks 1,164 days of sobriety and thanks listeners for their engagement.
- **Listener Impact:** Nick made history as my first text fan mail!
- **Jaycee's Story:** Her journey from addiction to recovery and activism.
- **Overcoming Shame:** Turning past traumas into hope and activism.
- **Navigating Healthcare:** Insights into managing healthcare as a recovering addict.
- **Advice for Newcomers:** The importance of understanding that emotions are temporary.

**Where to Find Us:**
- Jaycee on Instagram 🟢
- gAy A on IG 🟢
- gAy A everywhere else 🖇️

PHOTOGRAPHER CREDIT:

 Ismael Rodriguez www.ismaelphoto.com 

@el_ismaelrodriguez 

Stay sober, friends!

Transcript

0:00

Hey, there are super sober heroes. It's your host sober Steve, the podcast guy here today with 1,164 days sober. And I am so grateful for bus routes, new listener, fan mail option, and all of you for writing in and sending some things into the show. It's been amazing. Getting just another way that I can engage with all of you. I am. It absolutely made my morning on July 15th when I woke up to a message. Saying, hello, my name is Nick and I am two years and eight months clean and had been searching for recovery podcast to listen to at work and found yours. I think having an LGBT recovery podcast is a wonderful idea. I went to a gay recovery, sober house in Ohio and was a little hesitant at first, but this is where the flame lit my recovery just wanted to say hi, and to keep doing what you're doing. And I was just over the moon there were recently awesome episode with Drake, really inspiring and great episode with Holden banks, sober Steve, both from. A fan or fans from Memphis, Tennessee. So if you are listening to this podcast, wherever, most people listen to podcasts, whether it's apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever it is at the very top of the description of this episode, there's going to be a little link that says, text the show, and you can send in a text message and it comes in directly to the fan mail. So it's not like I have your cell phone or it's my direct number. It goes through Buzzsprout so that you can send these messages. I would love to get more people writing in thoughts on episodes, questions they have for me and for future guests or anything you want to say to engage. I would love to share it with my listeners. So make sure because it is a one-sided conversation that anything you want included in is in the message, including things like your name. If you want the personal shout out. It also means if you have an anonymous question that I'm not getting your phone number or any of that information, and it is completely anonymous. So however you're looking to send in information to the show or to get that shout out or to keep it quiet. I am here for you and can't wait to hear from you. Just look at the notes for this episode and click on. Texts the show. And I can't wait to see those messages rolling in, but I also can't wait to share with you my interview. That I had the other day with JC. She was amazing to get to know. I am so grateful for my affiliation with your career sober, introducing me to all these amazing people that are representing the true queer sober experience across the rainbow of different backgrounds that we all come from. So I am so excited to share her story and some of our conversation back and forth with all of you. So without further ado, enjoy in my interview.

Steve: 2:42

Hey there super sober heroes. It's Steve here with Jaycee Clark. Welcome to the show.

Jaycee: 2:48

Hi Steve.

Steve: 2:50

I am so grateful that you are another gift of my Hear Queer Sober affiliation and that I got to meet you through this program because I'm so excited to share your story with my listeners.

Jaycee: 3:01

All so my name is JCK Clark and I'm a 34 year old trans woman currently living in San Antonio, Texas. My sober date is May 24th, 2020. I am currently a college student at San Antonio college, getting ready to graduate my first associates degree. I'm a former adult film star. I was just named number three, best community activists here in San Antonio.

Steve: 3:32

You're on your way to change the world. for the better one day at a time.

Jaycee: 3:35

yes. One day at a time.

Steve: 3:37

Excellent. I love all the work that you're doing and that we're going to get to continue to do as we grow with your career and sober together too. But today we're here to talk and learn a little bit more about you. So starting in the here and now, what is your favorite part of being sober today?

Jaycee: 3:51

My favorite part of being sober today is the fact that I have connections with not just myself and my higher power, but I have connections with people outside of myself. And the fact that I'm able to remember those connections. And not have so many burnt bridges today. I think for 15 years of my life, I was good at building connections, but it was a struggle to keep those connections because I was real quick to burn them to the ground. And I think that goes for a lot of us who are in recovery. And so I think that's probably been the best part. It's just like being able to build those bridges and keep them.

Steve: 4:28

love that. And you are so right because oftentimes I am always preaching about how great the connections we build are, but you're also correct that, as you were saying, that was like learning and sobriety that I can have a friendship or like a relationship with someone where we disagree and that it's not the end of that friendship or like that we can communicate and work it out and move past it is something that I didn't do. And I was drinking if you pissed me off, I was done with you. Like goodbye, but like now we can work through things and communicate. So that's another great. Gift. I love that.

Jaycee: 4:58

Yeah, for sure. And I love a good healthy debate, and it's I'm going to make connections with people every single day and we're not always going to see eye to eye. And that's okay. I don't have to kill you off.

Steve: 5:09

Excellent. And what is your favorite part of being a member of the queer community today?

Jaycee: 5:14

Oh gosh. So you know, being a member of the queer community, I think my favorite part is the fact that I get to be that for someone who is just starting their journey. And I get to show people that it is possible to live a purposeful life authentically without the drugs and alcohol. So I get to be the role model that I needed when I was younger.

Steve: 5:39

I love when we recover out loud because I'm sure people have been recovering out loud for years and decades. But I know I didn't see a lot of it when I was hurting. And so I love that now people who are hurting can see someone like you and see themselves in you and realize that it's possible. So thank you for that.

Jaycee: 5:55

Yeah, and just like letting go of the shame. There is no shame in being a recovering alcoholic. There's no shame being a former sex worker. There's no shame and having been homeless, like I wear those badges with honor and pride, because they don't determine who I am today, so that's honestly the best part is living out loud.

Steve: 6:16

Yeah you touched on a couple of those, but why don't you share a little bit about your journey from addiction to sobriety was like?

Jaycee: 6:24

All right. My journey through addiction started at 15 years old. I grew up an only child for most of my life. And then when I got into high school I came home one day and my mom, informs me that she was pregnant and I was 16 years old. And so, going from an only child to having a newborn in the house was a bit of a shift there. My parents had most of their attention on the baby, I was starting to grow up, become an adult, had a job was doing well in school. And so the attention wasn't so much on me anymore. And at 15 years old, I started drinking and I had a really great job to be 15. But I started hanging out with the manager at my job at her apartment, and it was drinking and then it progressed to Adderall. And then by the age of 19, I was addicted to Xanax, and shortly after graduating, I transitioned the first time from male to female. I relocated myself to Jacksonville, Florida with a friend of mine who is also now in recovery, but at the time was not. Through the connections that I have made with her and her circle I was introduced to a producer of an adult film company who is also trans in Florida, An opportunity landed in my lap that I never saw coming. But I wasn't gonna turn it down, because in my mind I was already a star because I had to moved away from home. Was living my best life, and so I filmed a few scenes and before I knew it, I was. flying all over the country. I was filming for multiple different studios. I made a few club appearances and I was making what I thought were great connections, and I always said, like I will never be the kind of addict that shoots up, I have control or so I thought, I can drink, I can film, I can, Do the cocaine. I can smoke weed. I can do all those things and still maintain the image that I had. But by the age of 23 gosh, it got real bad. It got real bad, real fast. And I burned my whole life to the ground. And at 23, I found myself homeless in a parking garage. Behind a Travelodge hotel in South Houston. And I felt like that was it, and I lived on and off the streets for shit, like seven years. And I tried to get sober in 2017 and I was doing it for all the wrong reasons. my family dynamic, wasn't that great. Cause I had done, as we all do, I've been proven to them that I was not trustable, weird. And so I checked myself into a men's Christian discipleship program. And East Texas just to get them off of my back, just to shut them up, cause they're all like, why don't you just quit? But for those of us who are addicts, no, it's just, it's a lot more than just quitting. I wish it were that easy. And in that program, I lasted 67 days. And it was not easy to be an immense Christian discipleship program like this. And in that program I was diagnosed with AIDS. And so I went back out. I wasn't ready to get sober. I wasn't doing it for myself. And I had just felt like these are the cards I've been dealt. So it is what it is, and I didn't know that there was something other than that until 2020 during covid after losing my partner to a heroin overdose, I realized that something had to change. fast forward to today, here I am.

Steve: 10:15

Thank you so much for sharing all of that and being so vulnerable. I'm so glad you're here today. And the difference from, that story to the person I see in front of me is just amazing. So I can't wait to hear about. What it's been like in recovery, but thank you for sharing all of that. I definitely can relate to how dangerous it is when near the end for me as well, like I, when I got the case of the fuck it's where I had all these rules that I always use to try and keep me safe from going to these extremes. And then just when something happened that I was like this is it. Fuck it. And then that's when it got like scared, but that's when it went from like difficult to scary. So thank you.

Jaycee: 10:52

And what's crazy is like each time I thought I hit rock bottom, I was, and I would got to that place to fuck it. It was almost like a game. Like, how much further can I go? After a few overdoses, you would think wake up, but that wasn't the case, and it just got awful.

Steve: 11:09

What would you say, especially like in those early days of recovery or some things that you did that were required to keep you sober and get you through those hard days?

Jaycee: 11:19

So very early on this time around getting sober, all I had to do was build a connection. And I had to make it so simple for myself because I grew up in somewhat of a religious family. I thought there was one God and that's all there was, and so I had to unlearn everything that I had learned my whole life, and so I had to put down the Bible. Let go of, like God is Jesus and all of that, and I had to just start building a connection with. nature and how to make it so simple for myself. The wind would blow and I would just tell myself, okay, this is God. The birds would chirp. This is God. The leaves would move. This is God. And I had to make it so easy for myself.

Steve: 12:09

What about the connections with people? How did you become this amazing activist?

Jaycee: 12:14

I had to really get real honest with myself. It was hard for me to trust people just because I always felt like early on, I felt like everybody had. I think that's from like living on the streets and, like I always felt like somebody wanted something from me.

Steve: 12:32

I remember the first like gay men's meeting that I went to and everyone at the end was trying to give me phone numbers. everyone's no, you look like sick and sad and we want to help you. Like you're like a little scared baby bird. That's not safe. But to me, I was so used to like, that being what men want from me, that to have them want to like, care about me and love me until I love myself was not something I was prepared for. So it felt weird.

Jaycee: 12:52

It was so foreign to have so many people in the program that I was in. Like I would be an asshole and people would love me and that was fucking so uncomfortable for me because that had not been my experience. I was an asshole to people, I'd kill them off and vice versa, or I would burn the bridge. And so letting people in to the point that I learned to trust them, and they wanted nothing in return other than for me to love myself.

Steve: 13:22

I love that. what was that journey like for you?

Jaycee: 13:25

I realized about two years in that my time in the industry was based out of wounds and trauma. I was sexually assaulted at a very early age of childhood. And so I associated sex as love, that attention. of, physical intimacy was how I was going to be loved in life. And so when I correlated the two that I was just trying to feel loved, and doing it through sex and sex work was really. Eye opening for me because I didn't put the two together for the first couple of years. I just thought I was a sexual being, and I just thought I enjoyed sex. That wasn't even the case. In my first relationship in recovery, I had to learn the difference between sex and love, because they are very different and they're not the same for sure, and so I've only been intimate with one person in recovery in four years.

Steve: 14:33

tell me a little bit about the activism that you're doing today for the sober community in the world.

Jaycee: 14:39

So I took parts of my life, from having HIV to being trans to being in recovery. Each of those are platforms for me, and being someone who has lived a life, in the public eye a little bit I wanted to do it different and I wanted to do it in purpose. Each of these things are a part of me authentically. And so it's, how do I turn this mess and what I deemed as my mess, how I turned this into my message, because someone out in the world is going to relate to my story one way or another, It's just living out loud.

Steve: 15:17

Yeah. I love that turning your mess into your message.

Jaycee: 15:21

It's real, because I spent so many years in shame early on, like I felt the shame that I felt like a woman I felt the shame that I had HIV definitely felt ashamed to be an addict and an alcoholic, so it was like, once I let go of the shame and just loved those parts of myself a little deeper. It all just happened organically and here I am.

Steve: 15:45

And what is something that you're looking forward to in your sobriety?

Jaycee: 15:50

Each day I don't even know right now. My focus is just staying sober today. I'm getting ready to graduate college. I have no idea what I'm doing with this degree. But I'm excited to see what the future holds because the first four years of my journey have been so good to me. It's only going to get better from here, and I'm just, continuing to let God do for me what I can't do for myself. And I know that sounds so cliche, but it is so real. So real.

Steve: 16:22

It definitely is real. I've felt that myself. And knowing that on the whole, like over the past four years, it sounds like you've grown leaps and bounds and you've had these amazing moments. So tell me about probably one of the hardest moments in the past four years and how you got through it.

Jaycee: 16:40

That's a good question. I've had many hurdles to jump over. Let's see. Which of these hurdles was the hardest navigating my medical, coordinating doctors dental work just trying to become the healthiest version of myself physically and advocating for myself because they haven't always been like just doors wide open, The journey to get my teeth and the cosmetic dentistry that I've had done. That was a pain in my ass to say the least. Because I felt like every time I got two steps ahead, it was always three steps back. And so I felt like I was going nowhere for the first several months of this journey. But I was not going to give up, And I've proven to myself that I can fuck it real well. But I continue to hold on to my chair, even with all the nose and the doors that didn't open. And I just kept fighting for me,

Steve: 17:40

I love that. I know even like I'm going through dental work right now, just cause it's been a couple of years and again, it's like we get sober and. Even if we weren't on like the brink of a major health crisis, which I've spoken with many people who are when they get sober, cause we don't take care of ourselves. But even for me, that was like not doing great, but not doing horrible. I have to get my physicals done. And when I go to the doctors, I have to be honest with them now, instead of lying about how much I'm drinking and how much sex I'm having, and just being honest with my medical providers and getting the treatment and taking the recommendations that they have was just, it's a gift of sobriety that I didn't do before for sure.

Jaycee: 18:15

Oh, for sure. I walk into the doctor's office now and the fact that I can just be so honest about literally everything. I just go in there and just lay it all on the table. I have no shame and nothing to hide.

Steve: 18:26

Yeah. I was gonna say, if your doctor is someone you don't feel comfortable with at that point in your sobriety, you should find a doctor you do feel comfortable talking about with, because that's so important for taking care of our health.

Jaycee: 18:37

I have the best relationship with my entire medical team. I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Steve: 18:42

In addition to medical help, what are some ways that you help keep yourself sane and level headed and feeling good that fill your cup for self care?

Jaycee: 18:51

Obviously just keeping it down to the basics. I still journal almost every day. I still meditate every single day. I still hit my knees every morning and every night, and I thank God for the life that I have. And I asked God to show up for me in ways that I understand. I think the fact that I'm so present in my body and aware of not just myself, but like the things around me It has been the biggest gift. I'm able to remember what I do day to day rather than just waking up and can't find my wallet or my phone,

Steve: 19:28

Just in general, talking about your sobriety and lessons learned and biggest takeaways. Why don't we wrap it up with saying there's all these slogans and phrases we hear in our different recovery rooms, and then you have the lyrics that we love and sayings we make up on our own. But out of all of that, what's one bit of advice you would give a newcomer that you would hope that they hear?

Jaycee: 19:48

Oh, let's see. Emotions are like clouds. Some are big, some are scary, some are light. no matter what they're going to pass.

Steve: 19:59

Tell me more about that.

Jaycee: 20:01

So when I first got sober this time and I started to feel all these different emotions other than just anger it was a little intimidating, cause I had spent 15 years numbing everything. And so learning how to navigate through my emotions and not become those emotions. It's okay to feel anger, but you don't have to become an angry person. You can feel sadness but you're not a sad, depressed person. They're just like clouds. They're gonna pass, but it's allowing yourself the permission to feel those emotions and not make them wrong. Because very early on in this time around, I was very, I felt like I had to have this bad bitch persona, like nobody can see me cry, and that's all from like survival, but once I let go of that wall I had up gosh, the floodgates opened and it's so cleansing.

Steve: 20:56

How can listeners find and follow you so they can keep up with all the great stuff you do?

Jaycee: 21:01

So you can find me on Instagram at official JC cake and on Facebook at JC K. Clark.

Steve: 21:09

So click on over, give her a follow. She's fabulous and I'm sure she'll be back before too long. thank you so much for joining the gay family, JC.

Jaycee: 21:18

Thank you so much for having me.

Steve: 21:20

Yeah. And listeners, make sure you're following wherever you're listening right now. So you can get these new episodes every Thursday because you just like this amazing interview, you don't want to miss the next one either. So follow and I will see you then stay sober.