Anne Marie, founder of Thirsty For Wonder, is a recovery coach and spiritual companion. She inspires joyful, authentic living through compassionate support and Celtic wisdom.
Horror movies celebrate the woman who makes it to morning. Senior Contributor Anne Marie Cribbin wants to know what she does on Tuesday. Through the final girl trope, this reflection explores long-term sobriety and the possibility of becoming someone whose most interesting quality isn’t what she survived.
We inherit more than recipes and somebody’s good china. In this Samhain reflection, Senior Contributor Anne-Marie Cribbin considers how recovery lets us honor the people who came before us while deciding which family patterns stop with us. Pull up a chair. There’s room for love and boundaries at this table.
Fall has never actually been beige. Senior Contributor Anne Marie Cribbin shares seven ways to give your home more personality, from unexpected colors and thrift-store oddities to a dinner guest named Margaret who happens to be a skeleton. A playful invitation to reclaim your creativity in recovery.
An unnecessary velvet pumpkin. A sweater worn against medical advice from the weather app. Halloween candy that never stood a chance. Senior Contributor Anne Marie Cribbin’s Sober October bingo card celebrates the cozy, slightly ridiculous pleasures of alcohol-free autumn. How many squares can you check off?
Think flea market energy, but we’re swapping the stuff currently making life better, weirder, tastier, louder, or more interesting. One hour. One theme. Bring your current favorite. Make your case for why the rest of us need to know about it. Then shamelessly steal everyone else’s recommendations.
Megan A. Schikora’s A Woman in Pink examines what happens when love, loyalty and the desire to save someone begin to look dangerously like self-abandonment.
Recovery taught Senior Contributor Anne Marie to ask for help. Medical trauma taught her that receiving care does not require surrendering her boundaries, her voice or her relationship with herself.
Before you surrender to pumpkin spice and sweater weather, late summer still has something to say. Senior Contributor Anne Marie Cribbin shares six Celtic-inspired practices for honoring the first harvest, staying present in sobriety and enjoying the season that’s actually here — peaches, cicadas, warm evenings and all.
Ever finish scrolling and somehow feel more exhausted than when you started? Anne Marie explores “infoxication” — the mental overload created by our nonstop diet of posts, headlines and notifications — and how familiar recovery tools can help us build healthier boundaries with the information we consume.
Getting sober can mean rebuilding your social life from the ground up. Anne Marie Cribbin explores the rise of “third places” — coffee shops, run clubs, bookstores, gardens and other community spaces — and why belonging, not alcohol, may be what we were searching for all along.
Hayden Panettiere spent much of her life in public, but some of her most meaningful moments came when she stopped performing and told the truth. Senior Sober Curator Contributor Anne Marie Cribbin reflects on Panettiere’s openness about postpartum depression, addiction and the personal cost of refusing to pretend everything was fine.
What if August wasn’t about becoming someone new, but noticing who you’ve already become? Inspired by the Celtic harvest tradition of Lughnasa, Anne Marie Cribbin shares a simple recovery ritual for gathering the small wins, ordinary joys and quiet evidence that your sober life is already growing.
Long before #NunTok made convent life an internet sensation, Anne Marie spent six months living with the Salesian Sisters. From mopping herself into a corner to discovering the healing power of silence, structure and community, she found lessons that would later feel remarkably familiar in recovery.
Senior Sober Curator contributor Anne Marie Cribbin uses the image of Celtic midsummer bonfires to reflect on sobriety, emotional growth, and the small recovery victories that do not show up on an app. More than a day count, this lyrical piece invites readers to notice the conversations, apologies, boundaries, and brave moments that prove how far their light has traveled.
Senior Sober Curator contributor Anne Marie Cribbin takes a smart, funny look at the internet’s summer obsession with cold drinks, from Watertok and flavored waters to zero-effort mocktails, iced coffee rituals, and craft non-alcoholic drink creators. More than a trend, these drinks offer a small daily ritual that feels refreshing, personal, and entirely hangover-free.
Senior Sober Curator contributor Anne Marie Cribbin reviews Lena Dunham’s Famesick, a memoir that explores addiction, chronic pain, rehab, fame, and the uneven process of telling the truth about your own life. Honest, complicated, and occasionally frustrating, the book offers a recovery-adjacent story for curious readers more than a traditional sobriety memoir.
Anne Marie invites readers to celebrate the summer solstice sober with five salty, soulful rituals inspired by Celtic seaweed traditions. From Irish moss baths and beachside presence practices to playful seaweed crowns and quiet moments by the water, this piece connects ancient coastal wisdom with modern recovery, reminding us that healing does not always have to be polished — sometimes it just needs salt, light, and a little willingness to get weird.
Daisy Jones & the Six isn’t told like most novels. Taylor Jenkins Reid structures the story as an oral history, weaving together interviews, transcripts, and recollections of a fictional 1970s rock band. The result is ragged, fast-paced, and startlingly alive. It feels less like reading and more like being invited backstage, listening to people argue about what really happened, and realizing that memory is always fractured. That choice of form is modest and radical all at once. It undercuts the illusion of a single, authoritative narrator and instead offers a chorus of voices—contradictory, biased, and deeply human. The book’s structure…
Anne Marie Cribbin reflects on growing up inside a faith community where alcohol, ritual, family, grief, and celebration were deeply intertwined. In this powerful essay, she explores what happens when drinking culture becomes invisible in sacred spaces — and what faith communities can learn from recovery.
Recovery support has changed dramatically, with more options than ever before — from 12-step meetings and therapy to coaching apps, telehealth platforms, MAT programs, sober communities, and digital recovery tools. Anne Marie Cribbin offers a gentle field guide for finding sobriety support that fits your real life, honors your needs, and reminds you there is no single “right” way to recover.
In this recovery reflection, Anne Marie Cribbin explores Bealtaine, the Celtic fire festival, as a metaphor for sobriety, nervous system healing, community, and learning the difference between the fires that consume us and the warmth that sustains us.
A few summers ago, culture handed us Hot Girl Summer. Then came Brat Summer. Somewhere in between, we drifted into the era of Luxe Summer with its displays of wealth, ease, and effortlessness. Summer, at this point, has become its own kind of personality test. Hot Girl Summer sold liberation. The look mattered. The body mattered. The photo mattered. It was all bronzed skin, tiny sunglasses, rooftops, and the performance of being carefree enough to stay out until two in the morning on a Tuesday. Brat Summer arrived with a messier energy. Smudged eyeliner. Cigarettes outside bars. Chaotic group chats.…
I have been sober for eight years. I say that with real gratitude. Eight years is a long time, and it represents more grace and work and community than I can adequately describe. But I want to tell you something that took me a while to say out loud. Being sober did not fix my relationship with my body. It helped. It helped enormously. And my body and I are still, after all this time, figuring each other out. Nine months ago I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. And a lot of things started to make sense. What I Drank At…
Something happened to us over those ten days. And I don’t think we’re talking about it enough. Collective joy is necessary for recovery. Really necessary. And for ten days in April, the moon, four astronauts, NASA, and a floating jar of Nutella gave us exactly that. Let me explain. What Collective Joy Actually Does Our nervous systems have been through it. The weight of what’s happening in the world right now is real. The threats, the cruelty, the exhausting feeling that the floor might give way with our next breath. Our bodies were not built to hold this much for…
I did not expect to have opinions about water. And yet here I am, remembering the exact moment I realized I could taste the difference between something pulled from an ancient iceberg and something drawn up through mineral-rich earth. Not in theory. In my body. On my tongue. One sip made me sit up a little taller and another made my shoulders drop. I recently had the incredible privilege to stay at The Inn at Little Washington and met Cameron Smith, the water sommelier, who is also the Tea Master and Maitre du Fromage. Titles that could feel theatrical anywhere…
For the past seven months, I have been in a quiet, ongoing relationship with a crow. It perches on my neighbor’s air conditioning unit across the alley, not always in the same position and not always at the same hour, but often enough that I began to notice it. And then, as these things tend to go, noticing turned into curiosity. Curiosity turned into attention. And attention, over time, became a small relationship that I did not plan but found myself tending anyway. I learned early on that if I wanted to interact with the crow in a way that…
People often assume recovery coaching is something you seek in the earliest days of sobriety. The logic seems straightforward. The beginning is fragile. Support matters. What surprises many people is how often coaching enters the picture much later. Some of the most interesting conversations I have with clients happen years into sobriety, long after alcohol has stopped being the central issue. By that point the question is rarely about drinking. The question is about life and what it means to keep growing, creating, and evolving after sobriety has already changed everything. When people hear that I’m a recovery coach, they…
A Celtic offering for welcoming the returning light Twice a year the earth pauses in a moment of near balance. Day and night stand almost equal, light and dark sharing the sky for a brief stretch before the season tips forward again. We are nearing the spring equinox, the quiet hinge between winter and the growing season. In Ireland and across the Celtic lands, seasonal awareness shaped daily life. People watched the lengthening light, the thaw of the ground, the swelling of streams after winter rains. Spring was more than a date on the calendar. It was something you could…
At the risk of aging myself, my relationship with reality television began with MTV. The Real World was my first window into the strange intimacy of watching other people live under observation. Strangers in a house. Confessionals in soft lighting. Arguments that unfolded in real time and then replayed the next day at school or work. It felt raw and revealing and a little bit transgressive. We were being invited into private lives. We were being taught that pressure made good television. We were being trained, slowly, to look without looking away. By the time America’s Next Top Model arrived,…
I have a habit of turning my job into my identity. If I am employed, I am stable. If I am earning well, I am valuable. If I lose a job, I do not just lose income. I lose a sense of self. Unemployment has a way of exposing that flaw quickly. The paychecks stop, and so does the illusion that my worth can be measured in dollars per hour. The silence between job applications grows loud. Shame creeps in. I start to feel like I am failing not just financially, but morally. I equate productivity with virtue. I measure…
