My life in recovery is more even-keeled than that. Even-keeled doesn’t quite feel like the right word. My happiness, while more mellow and low-key today, is more constant than the peaks and valleys of getting high, more unshakeable than relying on something outside of myself that has become unreliable.
It wasn’t that I had the delusions and hallucinations of the schizophrenic, or the manic episodes of the bipolar sufferer. I had a condition that would have me seek to put a pill bottle or a pipe in my hand like magnetism. I had a mentality that weighed incarceration and a lack of real employability as acceptable risks. The benefit of temporary sanity and calm that came from booze and dope had made all the pitfalls worth it.