Ask someone in early recovery what they do for fun and you'll often get a long pause. For years, fun and using were the same thing. Now the substance is gone and they find they don't really know what they enjoy anymore. Hobbies faded. Curiosity went dormant. Anything that wasn't the substance started to feel pale by comparison.
That pale feeling is partly neurological — a reward system recalibrating after years of heavy stimulation — and it tends to improve with time. But play also has to be practiced back into a life. It rarely returns on its own. You may have to try things that feel a little forced at first: a pottery class, pickup basketball, a jigsaw puzzle, learning an instrument badly. The enjoyment often comes after the doing, not before it.
This matters more than it seems. A recovery built only on avoiding the substance is a recovery built on subtraction, and subtraction is hard to sustain. People stay sober more easily when their sober life is worth protecting — when there are things they look forward to that have nothing to do with not using.
✦ Quote
"It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self."
— D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971)
◎ Prompt
Write down three things you loved doing before the substance took up so much room — as far back as childhood if you need to. Pick one and do some version of it this week, even badly.
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