My dear reader.

One of the absolute best things about sobriety (and something I think about at least once each week) is that I never have to be hungover ever again.

By this I mean both physically hungover (in that head pounding, sandpaper throat, stomach roiling, dizzy spins, eyes crusted shut kind of way), as well as spiritually hungover (the panic-dread-shame cycle of waking up and grabbing hold of both my phone and the tatters of my blacked-out memories to desperately try and figure out what and if and how badly I fucked up the night before).

The second best thing about sobriety (and also the thing I feared the most, before I quit drinking) is that getting sober meant meeting myself within my own body for what felt like the first real time. Without alcohol I was forced to be embodied, to really truly exist in my body in a way I had never experienced before, a way I had purposefully avoided through years and years and years of choosing the floaty dissociation of drinking instead.

I’ve talked about this many times over the past 14 years, but I’ll say it again: running was my way out of the alcohol hole, and my first day of running was also my first day of sobriety. Could I have gotten sober in a different way? I’ll never know. All I do know is that that’s how it happened for me, that’s what finally worked. My body brought me to sobriety and sobriety brought me to my body — or more accurately it brought me to my body in motion, first through running and then long-distance hiking — and I cannot overstate how irrevocably that has changed my life.