STARTING OVERTHIS TIME SOBER

I'VE RUN ALL over New York City, but lacing up my Hokas in the community room of a rehab center in Midtown Manhattan was definitely a first.

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My body felt shaky and exposed, limbs heavy with the leftovers of tapering medications that help addicts get clean. My brain was a stormy sea. I was about to go for my first sober walk in Central Park. I felt terrified and sick, but I needed to learn how to put one foot in front of the other again.

I'd always been a social drinker, sharing a glass of wine with friends or playing games in a brewery on weekends. But at the beginning of 2025, when my body began to betray me, with failing muscles, limbs going numb, and a cascade of other frightening symptoms doctors couldn't explain, the drinking started to consume me. I drowned my fears in a box of wine in the evenings after work, when my brain was no longer occupied and coworkers weren't there to distract me. During the day, the medicine I was taking for nerve damage worked well enough for me to feel mostly okay. But at night, to be able to sleep and not feel every tingle, I chased the wine with Ambien, a sleeping medication I'd been taking for 11 years for insomnia. I knew I shouldn't mix them—yet I did anyway.

Before my body started acting stupid, I was planning to taper off the drug. But now I was terrified: that life as I knew it was over, that my career was doomed, and worse yet, that I was going to die and leave my kids. So I relied on that mix of wine and pills that kept me sedated but also trapped in a relentless loop. I couldn't function without alcohol: Whenever sobriety edged in, so did waves of anxiety so crushing I could barely move. By the time I started the evaluation process for multiple sclerosis (MS) and vitamin deficiencies, and doctors began piecing together my condition, the alcohol and medication had already woven themselves into my daily survival. By April, everything collided: my medications for nerve damage, my drinking, the Ambien. My body finally gave out—and stopped working.