In my daily meditation reading, the author talks about how addicts avoid uncomfortable feelings through substance use. They reassure the reader that pain, like all things, will pass, and that all feelings must be experienced and not intellectualized.

I agree with most of what the author put forward; however, I never avoided feelings when I was drinking. Quite the contrary, I found myself emotionally inhibited when sober and used alcohol to loosen-up and feel.

All my life, I have sought out peak emotional experiences. When I loved, I loved with abandon. When I cried, I let it go and wept until collapsing. When I experienced joy, I felt on top of the world. I even embraced pain—I always said that were it not for pain, stepping on a shard of glass would cause a person to bleed out and die. Pain, for me, was a call to healing and love. Moderation was not something I thought desirable. Let it be so for others, but I am not like others.

I desired intense feelings, and I believed that drinking alcohol was a means to achieve that end. I was aware of my dependence on alcohol as an emotional lubricant, and I imagined that one day my luck would run out. “Just not today!”, I would tell myself.

What I failed to understand was that my insatiable desire for peak emotional experiences would come with a price. First of all, to get sober and stay sober I had to find sober ways to feel my feelings. I had to learn how to live in a state of non-peak emotions. To stay sober, I came to accept the gentle rolling plains as my new normal, leaving behind the peaks and valleys.

I had to resist my nature. I think this is the most challenging thing for an addict to do. First, they have to be completely self-honest about their nature. Second, the have to learn how to live in a way that runs against that nature. Third, they have to discover satisfaction and fulfillment in that ‘non-natural’ way of being.

For a while, I was able to transform myself, meet these challenges, and attain some level of fulfillment. My nature, however, kept trying to lure me back into my old ways. Eventually, my nature found a way to get its hooks back into me.

I missed that feeling of falling head over heels in love. My intellect rationalized such an experience as infatuation driven by chemical attraction, but I ached to feel that ephemeral fusion with another person, a connection so powerful that even identity breaks down and two becomes one.

Sounds like magical thinking because it is. But I knew it as real, as I had experienced it as real. And more than once.

I cast aside caution and then I met someone. My wish was granted.

It was the most wonderful and then painful short-term love affair of my life. It was pure emotional chaos. And when it ended, I left recovery and resumed drinking because I could not bear the heartbreak. I could not understand how something that felt so perfect could turn out so broken and unfixable. How could someone who felt so right for me not feel the same about me? I was sober! I was doing all the right things! It was a love that was meant to be! Just, why??

I lost all faith and hope.

I left behind all community and shut out the world. I drank and when it looked like I was losing control, I stopped on my own. A few years passed, then I ended up caring for my dying father. Then he passed, and I was even more alone. Another few years passed, my 15 year-old cat died, and that was that. I became uninterested in going on. Rather than end my life, I reached out for help. I’ve been back in recovery for over nine months now.

I remember a wonderful metaphor used by Laura Esquivel in the film adaptation of her novel Like Water for Chocolate. We’re all like a box of matches, and fire represents passion. We cannot light our own matches, but others can, and when they do so, we experience the passion which our hearts seek. But there are a couple of cautions. First, a passion too intense can burn all the matches in our box. This can lead us to lose ourselves, even get a glimpse of the divine. We can lose our minds. The second warning is if we do not seek to have our flame lit, our matches can become damp and unable to be ignited. We then become truly alone, wandering in a life without passion.

Since that fateful heartbreak I experienced, it’s been over ten years without passion and my box of matches is damp. Before even considering love again, I have much work to do in order to assemble some sort of a basic wellness for myself. It doesn’t matter if I’m lonely now—I have to put first things first. Not surprisingly, my box of matches got damp because I lost my mind trying to burn all my matches over and over and over through seeking peak emotional experiences. It feels like I’ve gone from one extreme to another. It’s the price I now pay for my nature being what it is.

I hope that I find some sort of middle-ground, a rolling plain instead of peaks and valleys. Can a person’s nature change? I don’t know. I hope that I find some deep fulfillment one day in the middle path, far from the extremes that cause me to lose my mind or be drawn too far into solitude.

I hope my heart will open again one day.