Lisa used to think of airports as "bars with hallways." Anna recently discovered that, after more than 25 years of sobriety, she was still terrified of navigating a foreign country by herself.

Welcome to sober travel, where the challenges apparently never stop evolving.

Lisa takes us back to her first solo business trip, roughly two months after getting sober, when she had to fly to San Francisco for a notoriously booze-soaked law firm retreat. Her survival strategy involved candy, pretzels, trashy magazines, hiding as far from the airport bars as possible and handing the hotel minibar key straight back to the front desk. She also called her sponsor constantly, which turned out to be considerably more helpful than the candy.

Anna's sober travel revelation came much later, during a recent trip to Italy. Despite having traveled extensively, she'd never fully appreciated how much she relied on other people to handle the logistics. Suddenly she was alone in Rome, trying to find the right train to Florence and discovering that being a successful adult doesn't necessarily mean knowing which Italian train car you're supposed to be in.

The payoff? Arriving in Florence, realizing she'd done it herself and experiencing the particular joy of waking up in a beautiful city with absolutely nobody else's agenda to follow.

We talk about how sobriety keeps offering new firsts, why facing a fear you didn't even know you had can be so satisfying and how travel changes when you're interested in the actual destination rather than where you can get drunk or high.

And in this week's petty resentment, we tackle an important modern etiquette question: If you're having a perfectly good text conversation with someone, what gives them the right to suddenly CALL you?

Seriously. Who agreed to that?

Lisa chatted with Gemma Hartley, a freelance journalist, writing coach, speaker and author of No One Loves an Angry Woman. Her previous book, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women and the Way Forward, sparked national conversations about the hidden, underappreciated and exhausting mental work that so many women experience. We talk about the lasting impact of the purity culture and patriarchy from her childhood. Drinking was socialized and it helped her to shut down feelings of overwhelm and anger, until it didn’t. Gemma learned to embrace her rage and see it not as a moral failing, but as a rational response to injustice—and a potential catalyst for change.

Actor, recovery coach and School of Rock Bottom podcast host Oliver Mason has been through it. He’s survived blackouts, seizures, terrifying withdrawals, an addiction to prescription medication and a hospital stay where he nearly walked out with a box of approximately 500 Librium tablets he'd found beside his bed.

Despite having a rock bottom story that could pretty much qualify as a horror movie, Mason doesn't believe people need a spectacular collapse to deserve recovery. He spent roughly a decade drinking primarily on weekends, looking reasonably functional from the outside while living with what he calls "hang terror," and he knows that the private misery can be every bit as devastating as the public consequences.

We get into his relapse after a year of sobriety, the woman whose story helped convince him that getting sober again was possible and why he waited nine years before publicly sharing his own recovery story. Lisa also remembers discovering that her hospital records described her as refusing to participate in bingo during detox (some things never change; you’ll have to listen to find out more about that).

We also talk about the shame that can make one drink feel like a life sentence, the irrational fears we lived with while drinking (say, an eviction notice, despite paying my rent) and why Mason believes there's no single right way to recover.

In this episode:

· How Mason went from weekend drinking to severe withdrawal, hospitalizations and eating shaving foam in search of alcohol

· Why alcohol initially seemed to solve his anxiety and self-esteem problems

· The relapse that followed a full year of sobriety—and the unexpected story that changed his mind about trying again

· Why rock bottom doesn't have to involve losing your job, your home or everything else

· How shame and fear kept all three of us trapped in our addictions

· Why Mason waited nine years to share his story publicly and how School of Rock Bottom grew from there