I've been sober a while now, and I sometimes forget just how good drugs and alcohol could make me feel. That's a problem, of course, because the moment I really forget how good those substances were is the exact same moment I risk going back to them.
This strange paradox – that to lose my real respect for drugs and alcohol is to invite a return to them – is connected, for me, to another paradox of sobriety: the fact that a topic so dull to other people is so singularly interesting to me.
The reason ordinary people are so amazed that sober people can spend so much time talking about such an apparently deathly dull topic is because they never experienced alcohol or drugs the way real users did. To a person who didn’t experience drugs or alcohol as THE answer to life and all its problems, talking about one’s using days is like… talking about summer camp. A little is okay, but to return to the subject day after day can start to seem only a little less pointless and circular than using itself.
If you ask me, drunks are boring. And sober people can be boring too. But what isn’t boring to me – ever – is the question of how to exist in the world. And in my life, that question was only really ever satisfactorily answered by drugs and alcohol. Sure, tons of other things were meaningful and valuable to me, but nothing else ever really and truly did the trick, ever made existence really BEARABLE – the way alcohol and drugs did. So if I want to figure out how to exist in the world today, then one way or another, my days of drugs and drinking are the great texts I must return to.
The other side of this – and the side that I’ve noticed many other sober people prefer to start with – is the fact that in the long run, drugs and alcohol didn’t work. Some people, in talking about their lives then and now, never go near the good things that alcohol and drugs did for them, but focus only on the bad. But with those people too, the really interesting thing ends up being the question of how to exist in the world today: The question of how to make life work. And for me, it’s only when I remember that using really WAS the answer to life and all its difficulties that the question of how I am to manage to exist in the world today can begin to get answered.
Not too long after I first got sober, I heard a recovering heroin addict tell his story. Toward the end of his using days, this guy ran into the classic intravenous junkie's problem of having no usable veins left to inject his dope into. One afternoon, he was holed up with a fresh supply of dope, a needle, and the problem of how to get it into his system. As an experienced junkie, he knew that there was a large vein in his left leg that would have worked perfectly. The only problem was that it was a hard vein to hit. Lying several inches beneath the skin, it required a certain amount of skill to find.
Not only that, this guy explained, but if he botched the job and hit the vein wrong, he could end up with what he called "serious problems."
What, someone in the room asked, constituted "serious problems?"
"You lose the leg."
I heard this story a long time while ago, and to tell the truth I can no longer remember whether this guy actually went for it and attempted to hit this vein or not. But for me, the important part of the story wasn’t whether or not he succeeded in finding that vein. It was that he was ready and willing to do so. Not only that, but it was perfectly understandable to me, sitting in that room listening to him tell his story, why he would be so. To me, this guy’s situation wasn’t crazy. To me, it made perfect sense. I understood that for this guy, as for me, drugs WORKED. I understood that they got him -- the real him – up and out of this world in which he so often felt at odds, where no one told the truth most of the time, where little or nothing made much, if any, sense. Sitting in whatever crappy room he was sitting in at the time, staring down at his pale, stupid, mundane leg, he was like a guy standing on the bank of a river staring at the far shore: a shore where, if he reached it, he could become himself again. Where all the petty problems that seemed so absolutely solid and impassable would drop away. That artery located somewhere in his leg was the bridge. The way across.
Who cares about something as tiresome, as mundane, as problematic as losing a leg when there's a chance of recovering, even for a moment, one's real self?
These days, when the topic of sobriety starts feeling gray and circular and tiresome; when I start wondering why it is that I should continue to think about a bunch of stuff that is so far in my past, I’ll think of that guy staring at his leg, and of how much I sympathized with him. And I’ll remember why all this dull recovery junk isn’t really dull, isn’t really beside the point, at all.