Our founder, Jay Shifman, lives by one mantra: Choose Your Struggle.

For much of his early life, he was told that he was living with a debilitating issue of Mental Health, a misdiagnosis of Bipolar disorder. As his condition worsened, he was prescribed more drugs at ever higher doses until, in his early 20s, he was daily taking more than the estimated lethal dosage of one drug and misusing many others while living with a full-blown issue of Substance Misuse and Addiction to prescription pills. At 23, after two suicide attempts, an overdose, and time spent in an inpatient hospital and a long-term care facility, he decided enough was enough and pledged himself to withdraw from all of his prescriptions. Over the next few years, many of his symptoms completely disappeared.

But his healing took time. It wasn’t until election night of 2015, over five years after entering recovery, that Jay felt he was ready to take the next steps in his journey and open up about his struggle. That night, he stood on stage in front of over a hundred friends and strangers alike, for a series called Cincy Stories, and admitted that he was in recovery. He told his story in all of its vulnerable details. And the response was tremendous; Jay has likened the swarm of love and support to what it must feel like to win the World Series. But it didn’t stop there. Not long after he was invited to tell his story at a TED Salon event (the first of his two TED speeches) and the ball kept rolling from there.

In January of 2019, Jay decided to leave his career behind and take Choose Your Struggle fulltime. Since then, he’s grown the one-man show to a team of three, focusing on the twin missions of the organization: ending the stigma and promoting honest and fact-based education on Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy. We do that through Jay’s public speaking and advocacy, through our network of podcasts, through storytelling, through consulting, and many other ways we’ve found to make a difference for those who use drugs and those who struggle with substance misuse or their mental health.

Want to work with us? Reach out today. We have a rule: if both sides are serious about making an engagement work, our fee will never be the reason we don’t make it happen. Because we’re motivated by making a difference. And that’s what matters. Reach out today!