Using is easy, staying clean is difficult. I go to NA so I use their terms, but you get it. - Staying clean is also worth it.
Every day for a long time brought the same dilemma. - "Do i kill myself or go to a meeting?" I went to the meeting and didn't use.
Life happened. Just as it always had except now I didn't get loaded to ease the pain of life.... or of being myself. My marriage fell apart. My kids still didn't talk to me. My father died. Friends relapsed. The first guy i sponsored decided to use again and Overdosed and died that night. I made a couple of bad relationship choices. The only job I could get was one that paid me 1/3 of what I used to make. Often I wondered if it was all worth it. I didn't feel normal or human for a long time.
The man I asked to sponsor me told me one of the most profound truths I came across in recovery. Sometimes people in recovery lie to you without meaning to. They tell you that if you stay clean and follow the program that it will get better. My sponsor told me that he didn't know if "it" would get better, it could get worse. What he told me was that if I stayed clean and learned to apply the 12 steps of recovery that I could get better. - He didn't lie.
Life still happens and I still struggle with my emotions and with my warped perceptions of life and of myself. I still bounce off of the walls trying to find the center of the room, but the room has gotten smaller over time. I still have periods of emotional instability, but the frequency, intensity, and duration of those periods has gradually diminished. Recovery doesn't eliminate the pain of being human, it simply provides me a way to handle it.
Drugs (including alcohol) weren't my problem, they were my attempt at a solution to how I felt. Of course, my holy grail and refuge turned out to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, causing more pain and despair than I had initially sought to escape. Today with the help of a small group of individuals who love me unconditionally and who understand what it is like to be me, I have learned to not only stay clean each day, but to handle life and my emotions. Do i still feel like using sometimes? Sure. But today I can be honest about why, and about what that temporary escape would cost me. So, I tell my sponsor or another person in recovery about it, we talk, and I go to NA meetings. Is staying clean hard? Yes, But it's nowhere near as hard as it was when I started. Not even close. Statements like "this too shall pass" actually make sense to me, because I have actual experience.
So no. There will be no lollipops and unicorns - but recovery is real.