Back in my using days I would, on occasion, hear reports of people who had given up on drugs and drinking and supposedly gone on to live happy lives.
I didn’t have anything against such people – if, indeed, they actually existed. But I had my doubts about this supposed happiness of theirs. How robust, how real, could it possibly be?
My own happiness, I knew very well, was entirely dependent on substances. I didn’t necessarily need to be high to be happy (that is, I could experience moments of comparative well-being with no booze or drugs in my system at all). But I needed to know that the possibility of being high was there in the background.
Why? Because being high provided a larger, richer kind of happiness than could be found anywhere else in life. Happiness of various kinds could be experienced beyond the oasis of drugs and alcohol. But they were the equivalent of diet products. They tasted okay – at least on the first bite -- but there was a certain essential richness that was missing. In a word: the cream.
That cream would often come to mind in my first days of going to meetings. Listening to these people as they spoke – and to myself when my turn came – I’d feel like all of us were circling around a certain central place – that oasis of richness that drinking and drugs had provided – and struggling with how to fill it now that those substances were gone. Struggling and – I had to admit, at least on bad days – failing. Sure, sobriety allowed one to continue with life after leaving drugs and alcohol behind. But when you really got down to it, the sense of well-being that substances provided – that creamy core ingredient that made life taste good – was gone.
I still feel this way sometimes. But somewhere along the way, I remembered a certain evening from my using days that allows me to put this feeling of emptiness – this hankering after the cream – into a certain perspective.
Here’s what happened.
I was in my late days of alcohol abuse, when I was relying more and more on pills-plus-alcohol to give me the feeling that alcohol by itself had once given me. A relative had gone to the dentist a few months previously, and been given a prescription for Demerol which they’d since forgotten about. Ten glorious little white pills lay at the bottom of the orange prescription bottle that I'd just discovered in the medicine cabinet. If I ground and snorted the pills instead of swallowing them, that meant at least two days of total, undiluted happiness.
I ground two of the pills and snorted them. A painful business (ground up Demerol is nasty on the sinuses), but needless to say well worth it. In a few minutes my nervous system was being flooded with that curiously pure feeling of pleasure that – in my experience -- only pharmaceutical-grade opiates could provide.
Pleasure. That’s what it was, too. Pure, unalloyed pleasure.
And that, I discovered over the course of that evening, was just the problem.
Little in my life was going well at that time. I had very few reasons to feel happy about anything in it. And as the evening wore on and I continued to enjoy that flood of chemical-induced pleasure, I became aware of something. Something that I’d never noticed before when enjoying drugs of that high a quality.
Something was missing.
I was feeling good. Gloriously, ecstatically good.
But I wasn’t happy.
Pleasure and happiness suddenly revealed themselves, to me, as what they truly were: Two entirely different things. Pleasure feels creamy. There’s nothing diet-y about pleasure. It’s rich and it’s thick. Happiness, meanwhile, isn’t creamy. Happiness can go along with pleasure. But the two things aren’t the same at all.
Can one experience pleasure in sobriety? Sure. In fact, if you ask me, many people in recovery are all too concerned with doing so – with seeking out intense forms of cream that aren’t connected to drugs or alcohol. (I’ve even been guilty of this sort of thing myself.)
But none of that has to do with happiness. The real oasis – the real zone of abundance without which life really IS a desert – isn’t a pleasure zone, and never was.
That’s why, throughout human history, the happiest people have so often been those who wouldn’t seem, from the outside, to have any right being so. And why, at those anemic, cream-free AA meetings I found myself at after I entered recovery, I’d sometimes hear, amid all the whining and misery, a voice that sounded strangely at peace with the world.
Strangely calm. Strangely content.
Strangely happy.