Coming KLEAN: Stories of Overcoming Addiction

Coming KLEAN follows individuals at different stages of addiction and recovery, showing how their experiences unfold over time. From the early onset of substance use to the challenges of dependency, each story reflects how addiction develops in real life—often gradually and shaped by personal circumstances that aren’t always visible on the surface.

As the film moves forward, it looks at what recovery actually involves, including the setbacks, the progress, and what life can look like afterward. By focusing on real people and their day-to-day realities, it offers a more grounded view of addiction—one that challenges stigma and encourages a more honest and compassionate understanding.

Individual recovery stories:

"A friend came over to my house … she said ‘let’s look in your mom’s medicine chest for sleeping pills’. I didn’t know why she wanted to do that … she convinced me to take one and the minute I took it I realized what she was talking about. Suddenly I had an escape form the world and all that tormented me about the world." CARA

"To compensate for the fact that I felt so alone, and I felt so alienated, I honed and developed some great social skills, and it was a big effort … I had to consciously work at it."

"I moved to California and I got sober in a 12-step program and my life really took off … 10 or so years later, I then relapsed. All the success I had was meaningless."

"Snorted the meth, didn’t really do anything, but the second time I did it, that’s when I found God. That’s that moment where I was like ‘this is it, this is fucking it’ and I was up for like three days … at that time I wanted to be like the embodiment of that darkness in a sense … I found the answer to all my problems, I feel amazing." DARREN

"I cleaned up before I joined the service … I never forgot it when I was in the military, I was like, I need to do this. I just didn’t do it until I got out, and when I got out, I just picked up right where I left off and I just did not stop using … I’m not there anymore, Darren’s completely gone."

"If I want to do something, I can go and do it. I have the freedom to go do it, when back then, and even in early recovery, I didn’t have that freedom … lay down at night and just be grateful that I’m still here, I’m still sober."

"My first experience was drinking, but I knew I was an alcohol from the get-go … I remember going from zero to a hundred and that’s how the rest of my using career went." ELYSSE

"Earlier on then I would like to admit, I sort of always had that notion of, this is probably not going to end well, but at that point it had definitely become, this feels good, this feels better. I get to escape my head, I get to escape my past traumas, I get to just sort of numb out."

"If you use drugs and alcohol long enough and live that life of deception long enough, you start to lose track of what’s real and what’s not."

"Every day that I’m sober today is another day where there’s hope, which is a chance to win and not lose and to find life, because all those years of using were stripping me slowly of life." JAMES

"I decided I was going to take my life, so I thought, before I do this, I need to write a goodbye letter. In the process of leaving the room, where I had everything sat ready to go ahead, my suit lined up so my mom would have something to bury me in, I had the needle, I just needed to write the note … The Los Angeles Police Department got a call – thank God the police got me because I never made it back to the room, I never wrote that letter. I ended up in jail for about three nights. I can’t believe they didn’t put me in a psych ward."

"From early on I knew I had a problem and I knew that I didn’t have control. If you put a drink in front of me, maybe once in a blue moon I could drink one or two drinks, but why would you just drink one or two drinks?" JOE

"My parents, I used to blame the, but it was really all me … it was not me allowing them to be part of my life because I think we could have probably done it 20 years earlier. I do want to have a relationship with my family; I do want them to know the man that I love and that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with."

"I had a lot of suicide thoughts and a lot of it has to do with being gay, but it was more these emotions that I didn’t understand what was going on internally with me … the connection through the ecstasy that I felt with everyone – I loved everyone, I could love myself … from that moment on I was wanting to try everything." TREVOR

"I had called a treatment center to get into treatment and their first opening was in January … I told the admissions people that I was done and I was going to die and that I needed to get in sooner."

"There was a part of me that felt so safe being in there [treatment] – sharing in group [produced] the same effect that drugs and alcohol gave me, oh my god, I can breathe."