Cloud Coverage

How to cope when the pink cloud vanishes. Lydia Davis. A cool poem about contentment. Slate stuff.

Also, all our Sundays are usually paywalled. If you can become a paid subscriber, you’d get access to these posts and our entire archive plus you’ll help us pay for our entire editorial operation.

If you’d like to become a paid subscriber but can’t afford it at this time, please email me at ajd@thesmallbow.com, and I’ll help you out.

Clear eyes, full hearts, etc. — AJD

*****

I’ve been preoccupied with a question a person sent to me for the Ask A.J. column on Slate for the past two weeks, and it has helped me approach my day-to-day mood in a different way. The individual, who I assume is an older man who finally stopped drinking after 30 long years of liver-damaging excess, had hit a wall in his sobriety. His first year was great—magical, even!—but now he was stuck in this Year-2 rut, convinced that he’d lost the ability to be happy ever again.

This is a fairly common predicament that newly sober people experience, where, after the initial rush of newfound excitement and clarity, when it feels like all your senses are sharper, your body is more powerful. Your heart is overflowing with a dizzy-making kind of love, and then it just…disappears. Next thing you know, you’re walking around mumbling Morrissey lyrics about how everyday is like Sunday, and everyday is silent and grey.

To be upfront, the first year of early sobriety wasn’t that incredible, but I definitely had a few moments when I felt like I had mainlined B-12 for a week straight. I definitely remember the flip side of that, though—when my day-to-day life seemed so edgeless. I found nothing invigorating; I craved suburbia. I found myself in the morning, wondering what I could do to make the rest of my life feel more interesting, and I’d always come up with the most inane things, like, “Maybe I could become a tea sommelier.”

It passed, obviously, and my new life, almost a decade later, is truly amazing. But I still wonder sometimes if I’ve swapped out late nights with drugs for early mornings with kids as my joy replacements. If that’s true, then am I ever truly happy with myself?

However, I recently discovered something that reframed what happiness means to me.