This week on Sober Stories, we had the opportunity to interview Tori Felder of @theretiredpartygirl.(S01/E006) Tori is the founder of The Retired Party Girl, an online community for sober-curious and sober women to connect and celebrate sobriety. They’re changing the way society views sobriety by making recovery and wellness spaces joyful, fun, social, and empowering. Tori is also in grad school for counseling, and will be entering the therapy world after graduation.

In our conversation with Tori, we talked getting sober in your 20’s, dating and finding love in sobriety, and the way relationships evolve when alcohol is removed from the conversation.

For our full conversation, head to the Sober Stories Podcast (Apple, Spotify) or view the episode on our Youtube Channel. 

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Tori, on sobriety in her 20’s

I was surrounding myself with women who were my age, and we wanted to do fun stuff, and we wanted to go out and do things that people who were drinking were doing. And we wanted to be spontaneous and get matching tattoos and we wanted to dance and we wanted to do the things that we did before, but we didn’t want to feel hung over. We didn’t want to feel anxiety. We didn’t want to feel like shit about ourselves, for sleeping with someone we didn’t actually want to sleep with.

We didn’t want to have regret, but we still wanted to feel free. We still wanted to feel young. We still wanted to kiss people and hook up and have all of our wits about us, during it.

Tori, on romanticizing sobriety

I will say, my best day sober is so much better than my best day drunk. That will always be true, but I do want to be careful because there are times when it isn’t fun and it’s really hard or I’m around the wrong people or I’m in the wrong environment. And I’m like, man, I really want to drink. And this sucks that this is coming to mind.

There’s there’s ups and there’s and there’s downs. And I love this idea of romanticizing sobriety, because it’s intentional. Not because it’s naturally romantic, but because I oftentimes have to sit down and think what was lush about my day, like, did I catch the sunset? Did I get to take a long bath? Did I get to snuggle with my dog extra long? These little things like taking a hot shower — it’s not that sobriety is naturally romantic, it’s that we have to be intentional about romanticizing it.

Tori, on the courage it takes to be sober

It goes from denial to actually looking at yourself in the mirror. And that is what sobriety is — you have to show up and look at yourself every single day. Even though when you stop drinking, some of your problems will definitely go away because drinking was the catalyst, all of these other things pop up and you’re like, God, now I have to face all of these things.

And so I think, in so many ways, sobriety is just facing yourself. It’s a really brave thing, an honorable thing to do. And a lot of people never do it.

Connect with Tori

On Instagram – @theretiredpartygirl, @therapywithtori
Online – retiredpartygirl.com

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Catch the whole conversation:

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