From the Red Hand Files:
What I myself did not understand at that time was that true suffering, or rather, meaningful suffering, only begins when we stop taking drugs. It is then that we are forced to live life on life’s terms, without the insulating effects of alcohol or drugs. We learn, in sobriety, our true and complex relationship to the world, and the profound nature of suffering. We also find, to our surprise, that happiness is possible as life broadens into something intricate and nuanced and interesting and strange, and potentially deeply creative. Life in sobriety becomes, as the greatly missed comic genius, Barry Humphries, once said, ‘funny’. The cossetted, flattened, self-obsessed life of the alcoholic or drug addict knows little of these things.
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/exciting-art-after-rehab/
I mean maybe that’s what getting older is—you just accumulate regrets and those regrets manifest themselves also as kind of disappointments or losses. And maybe that’s what getting older is—is just an accumulation of loss that turns you into a different sort of person. It turns you into an actual person… I think.”
Mark Carrigan 