The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

by Leslie Jamison

any self is always plural.

There’s no objective metric for how much brilliance might be required to redeem a lifetime of damage—and no ratio that justifies the conversion. Whatever beauty comes from pain can’t usually be traded back for happiness.

When does ordinary craving become pathology? Now I think: When it becomes tyrannical enough to summon shame. When it stops constituting the self, and begins to construe it as lack.