In sobriety, there’s this illusion that if you do things right—get a sponsor, work your steps, train hard, meditate, take the right supplements—you can somehow bypass the hardest parts. That you can build a clean, efficient route around the messiness and get to clarity without having to sit in the mud.

But here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud:

You don’t get out of it. You just go through it—or try to work around it—but either way, it is still happening.

“It,” in this case, being everything: grief, rage, regret, boredom, loneliness, old shame, new pain, the occasional existential spiral while you’re brushing your teeth. Sobriety doesn’t erase it—it simply strips away the buffer between you and whatever’s waiting beneath the surface.

Early on, I thought I could outmaneuver discomfort. Replace the chaos with routines. Trade the bar for the trailhead, the blackout for the 50-miler. And in some ways, that swap helped. Movement gave me rhythm. Endurance gave me space. But the pain? The thoughts I drank to dodge? They didn’t vanish. They just waited for me at mile 30.

And that’s the thing sobriety teaches you, slowly and relentlessly:

Even if you try to go around it, you’re still going through it.

The emotional processing still happens. The old narratives still surface. The body keeps the score. And at some point, you stop trying to shortcut the work and realize that the work is the point.

Sometimes that means sitting still when every cell in your body wants to run. Sometimes it means reaching out when the story in your head tells you not to bother. Sometimes it means accepting that you’re sad, anxious, angry—and that those feelings don’t need fixing, just witnessing.

And here’s the twist: once you stop resisting the it, once you let it unfold, it loses some of its power. Not all of it. Not right away. But enough that you start to feel space opening up where suffocation used to live.

I’ve had days in sobriety where I’ve white-knuckled through everything, pretending I was strong when I was just dissociating. I’ve had other days where I laid on the floor and cried for no clear reason and felt more grounded after. I’ve run 20 miles to process something I should’ve just written about. And I’ve written about things I should’ve probably screamed into a canyon.

But in all those moments—whether I went around the pain or charged straight into it—it still happened. Sobriety still asked me to be there for it. Still asked me to show up.

So if you’re in a stretch of recovery where you feel like you’re faking it, avoiding it, barely holding on—just know this:

You’re still in it.

It’s still working.

You’re still showing up.

Sometimes the best we can do is not run from ourselves completely. And some days, that’s enough. Maybe even everything.