We Recover Loudly – Personal Recovery and Mental Health Stories · Shell Righini

S2 Episode 016 - ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY EPISODE - Rupert Davison (A Rule of Tum)

·1 hr·4 clips

Shell says burnout left her hearing and seeing things at night and “losing my mind.”

Shell opens by marking a full year of the podcast. She also clocks her own two years and eight months sober, and that milestone gives the episode a quiet charge right from the start. She sounds grateful. That gratitude matters, because the episode keeps circling back to the people who have trusted the show with their stories and to the odd truth that recovery can be built out of other people's honesty as much as your own. The guest fits the room. The two of them move easily into hospitality, where the rules can feel loose, the rewards can be immediate, and a young person can get pulled in by the speed of it before they understand why the job has got its hooks in them. It gets funny. The comedy comes from recognition, especially when Shell and the guest compare the kitchen to school without a teacher and land on the head chef as the nightmare substitute who somehow still runs the lesson. That lands hard. They do not linger in theory, and that is part of the point; the conversation keeps returning to the lived detail of shifts, money, and the way being paid at the end of the night can feel more real than waiting a year for a bit of paper to tell you what you are worth. School comes up again. Food technology homework, coursework, pictures on the page, and the odd injustice of a dish tasting dreadful while the written work gets the grade all turn into a good-natured complaint about how people are measured. Shell keeps it human. She lets the talk wander into helping teachers wash up on breaks, into the satisfaction of being useful, and into the small acts of care that sit underneath the bigger stories about work and belonging. Nothing feels slick. The episode is warm, blunt, and a little shaggy around the edges, which suits a show that has always preferred honesty and momentum over a tidy recovery-brand surface. The mood stays celebratory. Even when it drifts, the drift has purpose, because the conversation keeps showing how sobriety, gratitude, and memory can all sit beside each other without needing to be cleaned up. It closes softly. Shell wraps by thanking the guest, pointing listeners toward the usual links and socials, and leaving the first-year milestone with the same plainspoken care that has shaped the show from the start.

As heard by us

A one-year milestone episode that pairs recovery gratitude with kitchen memories and the pull of immediate reward.

Shell's one-year milestone lands as a sober-anniversary episode shaped by gratitude for the people who have shared their stories. The discussion stays rooted in recovery, yet it also moves through work in kitchens, school memories, and the pull of immediate reward, giving the…

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Why you'd press play

You get a one-year recovery chat that feels like a kitchen shift, not a polished panel.

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